Word: border
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...clumps of sable palms stand out like the befeathered scouts from a Zulu impi. Matamoros, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, and Brownsville, in Texas, are the first of a score or more twin towns strung along the frontier. The poverty that prowls much of the country's southern border like a hungry coyote sits back on its haunches and howls in Brownsville. "This is the poorest part of the U.S.," says Tony Zavaleta, a Brownsville sociologist. "We have whole suburbs without electricity, sewerage or running water." Across the bridge in Matamoros, where not even the poorest of the poor...
...land remains flat on both sides of the river beyond Matamoros. The first small hills rise in Starr County, west of McAllen, Texas. The moon darts in and out of clouds driven by a strong wind as Border Patrol officers Leo Laurel and Juan Trevino sit in the blacked-out cab of their Chevrolet Suburban. "They choose their sheriffs and deputies by the pound around here," jokes Trevino when asked why the police do not make more drug busts in one of the most important marijuana and cocaine importation routes in the country. "If an officer doesn't grab...
...radio and its plaintive norteno corridos (a kind of Mexican country-and-western in which unrequited love, boozy camaraderie and unfaithful women are constant themes), I wonder about the growing clamor in the U.S. for more drug interdiction programs and even a military "sealing" of the border. Could a democracy manage such an operation in peacetime? And if the U.S. Government could not stop Americans from supplying guns to Colombia's drug cartel, what hope did it have of stopping non-Americans from catering to the U.S. addiction for drugs...
...sheriff is out to lunch, but his office, on a bluff overlooking the river, is unlocked and unminded. Two hundred yards upriver a trio of illegal immigrants from Mexico wade across and disappear, just three more of the estimated 1 million to 2 million people who slip across the border each year...
...afar. Roadrunners, heads down and tails up, sprint across the highway. River and road separate here as the Rio Grande, cutting through deep limestone canyons, makes a wide arc that has given this bulge of Texas the nickname Big Bend. Driving south through Alpine and Marfa, I see the border again at Presidio...