Dispatch, 10.15.08: Travel Alert, Mexico, border region. 

Yesterday the U.S. State Department renewed its travel alert for the Southwestern borderlands.  The drug cartels are at war with the Mexican government, with each other, with inevitability; the firefights are often street-level, glass-shatters falling on hunkered kids in Catholic school uniforms. 

The alert says:

Cuidad Juarez, Tijuana, and Nogales are among the cities which have recently experienced public shootouts during daylight hours in shopping centers and other public venues.  Criminals have followed and harassed U.S. citizens traveling in their vehicles in border areas including Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros, Tijuana, and along Route 15 between Nogales and Hermosillo. 

A few weeks ago I was talking to a group of teachers at a Catholic school in Nogales, Arizona, just a few steps from the line.  Most of their students come from Mexico and produce-industry families who want their kids to learn English.  The teachers all said that many of the kids lately have been on edge, tired, and distracted, symptoms the teachers attribute to the drug violence. There's not much outside of the tourist section in Nogales, Sonora that would interest the casual visitor, but if you have months and years to spare you will find a city as varied and stratified as any of the other NAFTA sprawlscapes along the line. 

When I worked as a reporter in Green Valley, south of Tucson and about 40 miles north of the border, people were always complaining about the trash left behind by the neverending stream of illegal migrants moving through their middle-class retirement haven, and every now and again there'd be a high-speed chase on Interstate 19; sometimes a packed and rickety, bald-tire truck would blow out and flip over, sending bodies flying and the Border Patrol in the other direction. 

More common though were the police reports I kept reading about bandits down near Arivaca and Sasabe, out in the scrub just north of the border, west of Nogales.  At least once a month the local sheriff's substation would take a complaint from an illegal migrant who'd been arrested by the border patrol.  It was always the same, or near about:  a group of migrants is walking north after crossing the border; suddenly, out of the darkness comes a squad of armed men, all in black clothes and frightful ski masks.  The men order everybody down on the ground, accost the women a bit, knock around anybody who resists.  Then they escape back across the border to divide up the spoils.  The litany of those spoils that ended each report always served to confirm, for me, the migrant's utter desperation.  The bandits typically got away with about $400 or a bit more, much of it in pesos, from the whole group, plus a few watches and rings and the like.

Here's the travel warning in full:

http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/pa/pa_3028.html

If you're headed to Nogales, Sonora, make sure to take the number of the consulate: