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Local U.S. officials are forever pestering the feds for help: If you don't build another bridge and put more Customs people on the ones we have, how can we solve our pollution problem, with 15-year-old cars idling in lines that stretch for miles? How can you order us to educate any child who appears on our school doorstep but not give us the money to do it? Where are we going to find enough water? The congressional Hispanic caucus wants $1 billion in spending on roads and bridges and Customs officers; El Paso state senator Eliot Shapleigh and other Texas lawmakers have called for a Marshall Plan for the border; El Paso Congressman Sylvestre Reyes wants Bush to appoint a border czar who can cut through the red tape and make things happen.
For the first time in years, maybe ever, both the U.S. and Mexico have leaders who understand this region, know that in some ways their hemisphere's economic future may depend on whether they can fix what is broken here. Bush met with Fox three times in his first 100 days, blowing away the old once-a-year tradition. Fox dreams of a day when the border will open and his countrymen will no longer flee to survive. As Fox told Ernesto Ruffo, his top aide on the region, "Put holes in the border."
But that day won't come until Mexico goes straight, cleans up its justice and banking systems. Some American borderlanders who cheer integration in public go off the record to talk about what's wrong, admit that they rarely visit the other side or whisper quietly that they haven't felt the same about the place since a friend had his car hijacked a few years ago and they never saw him again. You can sense the same mysterious half silence wherever you go; Mexicans call it Article No. 20, as in Which of the $20 is for me? Police and Customs people pay for their government jobs so they can get in on the mordida, the payoff system. Midwives in Brownsville have sold thousands of birth certificates to be used as proof of U.S. citizenship. The Arellano Felix brothers, Tijuana drug kingpins known for torturing, carving up and roasting their rivals, are paying $4 million a month in bribes in Baja California alone, just as the cost of doing business. The $4 million reward for their capture is one of the highest the U.S. has ever offered--and something of a bad joke under the circumstances. There hasn't been a single nibble in four years. What good is the money if you're dead?
As lucrative as the drug-smuggling business is, the people-smuggling cartels are prospering as well. The more the U.S. cracks down on illegal immigration, the more expensive crossing becomes. The border patrol has a mission impossible. No matter how many surveillance cameras and motion detectors it installs, still the immigrants come. It's harder to cross and easier to die trying. In some ways it's the lucky ones, say the border agents, who get caught. "Everything out here will either bite you, burn you or arrest you," says the Rev. Robin Hoover of the First Christian Church in Tucson, Ariz.