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The lure of fast cash is powerful in a county battered by 34% unemployment. Like other border areas, Starr depends on commerce with northern Mexico, and the peso's plummet has forced some stores to close. Yet overall retail sales are up 10%, and bank deposits have leaped 198% in five years -- a cash transfusion that Customs officials attribute to the dope flow. The new money, concedes Mayor Jose Saenz of Roma-Los Saenz, a border town of 3,700, "indirectly benefits us all." That touch of prosperity, according to Customs Agent D'Wayne Jernigan, has "created a wall of reluctance to cooperate." Agrees local Chemist Benito Trevino: "There's no outcry because people see the potential for making money."
Cocaine has given Starr's brown landscape a dash of affluence. Ornate brick homes protected by iron fences and snarling Rottweilers are popping up along U.S. 83. Investigators say that Colombian operators are paying the mafiosos huge sums to fly drug loads north from makeshift strips. The border patrol has arrested 1,437 Colombian illegals in the valley this year.
The corrupting influence of drug money frequently leads to tensions between lawmen on opposite sides of the border. U.S. officials say rogue Mexican cops sometimes provide armed escorts for truckloads of dope moving north to the States. Mexican police have accused Starr's sheriff, Eugenio Falcon Jr., of invading a hospital south of the border in Reynosa and murdering a drug runner who was a suspect in a Starr County multiple killing. "The charges are ridiculous," insists Falcon.
As the drug traffic increases, author- ities are counting on "Operation Alliance," the Reagan Administration's recently announced antidrug program, for more agents and equipment. But local lawmen fear that the expensive new enforcement program, which extends along the entire length of the Mexican border, will not succeed unless Starr's citizenry can be enlisted in the war against drugs. At present many residents regard the narcotraficantes as local heroes, and their exploits are celebrated in ballads called corridos, which play on radio stations. In the river hamlet of Fronton, a monument was erected to mark a smuggler's death in a shoot-out with Customs agents.
This adulation bothers Father Roy Snipes, a local priest who has buried many of the gunfight victims. Yet Snipes and others sense a small but rising concern now that drugs, which once only passed through the county, are finding their way into local schools. At a Mass last month, the outraged priest played one of the smuggler ballads and then asked his congregation, "There's a war going on. It's good against evil; what do you want?" As worshipers applauded and gathered around him afterward, the answer was obvious.