The Rio Grande's Drug Corridor

By Richard Woodbury/ Starr County

On a chilly South Texas afternoon, 20 federal and state lawmen sporting flak jackets and semiautomatic rifles descended on a secluded bungalow near the Rio Grande in Starr County. They arrested three men who were darting out the back. Inside, the cops found giant trash bags of marijuana. Suddenly the ceiling gave way from the weight of other people hiding in the bungalow. All told, 14 Mexicans were charged with drug possession, and 2,000 lbs. of dope were confiscated.

The raid last February was one of a mounting number of armed encounters along the Texas border between lawmen and well-organized, well-financed narcotics rings. As authorities have cracked down on smuggling in Florida, the Rio Grande valley has emerged as the hot corridor for drug runners. One-third of all the cocaine, marijuana and heroin now entering the U.S. from Mexico is believed to come across the valley.

Nowhere is the traffic heavier than in Starr County, a remote, Rhode Island- size expanse of gentle hills that flanks the Rio Grande southeast of Laredo. From heavily armed safe houses in tiny riverfront hamlets, smugglers oversee the packaging and shipment of drugs by truck and plane into the U.S. interior.

By one federal estimate, 40% of all the drugs crossing South Texas move through Starr, sometimes amounting to 15 tons of marijuana and 1,000 lbs. of coke a week. Confiscations in the Rio Grande valley doubled last year; arrests this year by the Drug Enforcement Administration shot up from 230 to 570.

Starr County's 92 miles of riverbank affords myriad landing points for rubber rafts and the human "mules" who wade across with backpacks. Among some of the Hispanics who make up 96% of Starr's population, smuggling has been a tradition since the Civil War, when Confederate cotton was moved south.

In an area of close-knit families, strangers stand out, making police undercover work nearly impossible. Good informants are tough to recruit because, as DEA Agent Kenneth Miley explains, "families don't tell on families," although that has changed some now that the feds pay bigger money for solid tips. Nonetheless, the established smuggling networks ensure a continuity to operations. After the feds busted one cocaine runner last year, his brother took over. When he was arrested, another brother came to the fore.

The drug trade is controlled by perhaps a dozen Mexican "mafiosos," some of whom live south of the border. The mafiosos are assuming new muscle as Mexico's economy declines and illegal aliens pour into Texas. Drug gangs have enlisted wetbacks as couriers, paying them $150 or more to float sacks of pot across the Rio Grande. Many illegals stay on to become full-time drug runners.

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.