Word: laredo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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LAREDO/NUEVO LAREDO Busiest commercial crossing--more than 3 million trucks last year...
...INTERNATIONAL BANK OF COMMERCE A bank open before breakfast? It's the surest sign of a boom. Laredo banks are open 7 to 7 daily, including Sundays. Walk into the main office of the IBC and listen: English rarely spoken here. Upstairs in the executive offices, executive vice president Gerald Schwebel explains that his mother is Mexican, his father Austrian; he went to school in Nuevo Laredo. Bilingual, binational, he is the whole global economy in a suit. Schwebel's bank, the biggest in town with assets of more than $6 billion, has a small fleet of jets...
...LAREDO WAL-MART Most of the 500 cars in the Wal-Mart parking lot have Mexican plates--about normal for a Friday night. Laredo boasts the highest-grossing Wal-Mart per square foot in the U.S., because this town of 200,000 is really a market for more than 1 million people. Right up the highway from the big downtown bridge, the store is often a first stop for visiting Mexicans. Inside, you can find Fabuloso detergent, table runners decorated with images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and CDs featuring popular Norteno and Tejano stars. The biggest selling items...
...DOWNTOWN BRIDGE A maintenance man takes advantage of the lull to mop the tile floor in the narrow walkway that funnels pedestrians from Mexico into downtown Laredo. Customs supervisor Greg Salinas expects the traffic to pick up in a few hours, when the borrachos come over, the drunks and Friday-night revelers who have been enjoying the Nuevo Laredo night life, some even venturing to Boystown, the red-light district, where prostitutes have held court for generations of Texas fraternity boys, roughnecks and cowboys. The revelers will buy tequila and six-packs of Corona at half the U.S. price...
...want to understand the gold rush, you've got to know the prospectors. The reason that Laredo and nearby McAllen, Texas, are two of the top 10 fastest-growing metro areas in the U.S. is mainly owing to NAFTA and its progeny: NAFTA...