Word: rios
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Stretching some 58 miles along the Rio Grande lies Starr County, Texas, a barren land of sagebrush and mesquite trees. Most of its 20,000 inhabitants are Mexican-Americans who scrape together a living as stoop laborers during the melon-picking season. Yet in the past two or three years, brick houses worth as much as $75,000 have sprung up among the pink and green shanties that line Route 83 between Roma-Los Saenz and Rio Grande City. Outside some of them sit new refrigerators still in their shipping cartons...
...basic industry in Starr County-cotton during the Civil War, liquor during Prohibition, and in the last few years, Mexican narcotics. Ten to 20 tons of marijuana flow into the county each week, along with unknown amounts of heroin and cocaine. Almost daily, Mexican grass is trucked to the Rio Grande, loaded into sacks and placed on rafts or carried across the shallow river to Texas, only 40 yards away. Estimated value of the drug traffic: up to $5 million a week...
...federal agents-about 70 in all -swooped down on the houses of suspected narcotics traffickers in the biggest drug bust ever launched along the Tex-Mex border. In all, 62 people had been indicted. As the handcuffed prisoners were unloaded from official cars at the border patrol office in Rio Grande City (pop. 6,000), townspeople gathered to applaud and jeer, "You finally...
...Starr County drug trade has long been controlled by a few tightly-knit Mexican-American families who own land along the Rio Grande; in some cases, their relatives hold property on the Mexican side. For years they were virtually a law unto themselves. One of the indicted traffickers had even ordered auto license plates spelling out MAFIA. "They don't deal with anyone they don't trust," says Texas Antidrug Official Neal Duvall, "and they only trust family." According to a grand jury report, 10% to 35% of the population of Starr County have been involved...
...Evins, who filled in for 16 months after the impeachment. "I could sense the reluctance of witnesses to testify." And with good reason. Five years ago, a local grand jury started to look into the drug traffic; after two girls who had testified were found floating in the Rio Grande, the jury dropped its investigation...