by Paul Theroux
Laredo then had been a modest-sized border town of small industries, known mainly for its college; and Nuevo Laredo—meretricious and vulgar, noted for whores and silliness—had been thick with tourists, thrill seekers, and drunks.
Back then, the sky glowed over Nuevo Laredo, the lights of saloons and restaurants, and standing near the riverbank I could hear cars honking and music playing from across the river, a beckoning fiesta. “Laredo had the airport and the churches,” I wrote, “Nuevo Laredo the brothels and basket factories. Each nationality had seemed to gravitate to its own area of competence.” I walked across into a city that seemed lawless, smoky, scented with chiles and cheap perfume, overcrowded, and noisy—“the urchins, the old ladies, the cripples, the sellers of lottery tickets, the frantic dirty youths, the men selling trays of switchblades, the tequila bars and incessant racketing music, the hotels reeking of bedbugs . . .”
Emphasizing the honky-tonk and the wickedness, I sounded disapproving, but I was happy. This was life to me, and I was joyous on those seedy streets, pretty women in doorways snatching at me. I was a thrill-seeking traveler, looking for something sensational to write about, but I did not look very deeply.
Under the influence of Graham Greene, I had found the contrasting sides of the border dramatic, as in the Greene story “Across the Bridge,” which takes place in those two frontier towns, American policemen pursuing an English criminal on the run, finding their quarry in Nuevo Laredo:
He said, “This is rather a dreadful place, don’t you think?”
“It is,” the policeman said.
“I can’t think what brings anybody across the bridge.”
“Duty,” the policeman said gloomily. “I suppose you are passing through.”
“Yes,” Mr. Calloway said.
“I’d have expected over here there’d have been—you know what I mean—life. You read things about Mexico.”
“Oh, life,” Mr. Calloway said. He spoke firmly and precisely, as if to a committee of shareholders. “That begins on the other side.”
Back then, I had made a little tour of Nuevo Laredo and finally boarded the train, named the Aztec Eagle, for San Luis Potosí and Mexico City.
The years had not been kind to Nuevo Laredo. Decades of petty crime and vandalism and cartel violence had left scars—actual marks of terror, bulldozed houses and broken windows and threats scribbled as graffiti on most walls. The usual factories in the usual places—guarded industrial areas—but the dominant note was anxiety. The town was as ruinous and unvisited as Juárez, and for the same reason: the cartels had left their stink of violence in the streets and battered neighborhoods.
The small border towns up to now had been pleasant enough because they were on back roads, many of the roads unsuitable for the big trucks that lumbered up from the depots of central Mexico or the nearer maquilas. Along with Juárez and Tijuana, Laredo was an important entry point, a trafficking corridor—thousands of trucks, allowing the smugglers of cocaine to find ways to sneak it across.
For the past decade, the Gulf cartel, the Sinaloa cartel (El Chapo in charge), and the Zetas had been in a three-way struggle for domination—the Mexican army and police fighting all three, and sometimes joining them. The cartels were known to recruit their toughest members from the ranks of the poorly paid but highly trained and better-armed killers in the Mexican army’s special forces. The bloody and prolonged cartel turf war had been chronicled in half a dozen books, among them Ed Vulliamy’s Amexica: War Along the Borderline; Bloodlines by Melissa del Bosque; Joe Tone’s Bones: Brothers, Horses, Cartels, and the Borderland Dream; and Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera’s Los Zetas Inc.: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico. One of the important things to know about Mexico is that—based on its literature and journalism—the country exists in a frenzy of self-analysis and often self-flagellation, in books and articles that are little known north of the border, but easy enough to find.
The mayhem that continued to disrupt Nuevo Laredo for the past ten years has been well documented—the stories of bodies strung from bridges or left on streets, the bombings, the massacres—enough to discourage anyone from crossing. And it continues to be written about, though the journalists who have done so have paid a heavy price, being targeted by the cartels. Eighteen journalists were killed in 2017, several of them in Nuevo Laredo.
An absence of gringos visiting the city meant that it was easy to find a taxi; they surrounded and implored me. But the driver I chose, who gave his name as Diego, found my inquisitiveness alarming. “Don’t write,” he said, seeing me scribbling into my notebook, taking me for a journalist.
“Periodista?” Diego asked.
“Pensionado,” I said. Retiree.
He said he would take me on a tour of the Zona de Tolerancia—he used the expression “Boys’ Town”—if I promised to put my notebook on the floor and my pen in my pocket. And he suggested that I sit back and not gape out the window. He grew increasingly nervous as he drove, becoming erratic in his turns, saying that he did not come here often, and that—whispering the word “mafia”—he was agreeing to my request because it happened to be three in the afternoon. Boys’ Town was not safe at night.
“It’s far,” Diego said, as though the distance might make me change my mind. When I said I didn’t mind, he added, “And dangerous.”
“In what way?”
“Drugs, crime,” he said, dropping his voice, and then the words no traveler likes to hear, “Gente mala”—Bad people.
“How bad? Very bad?”
“Mafia,” he whispered.
“I’m thinking,” I said. Estoy pensando.
“Okay. But don’t talk to anyone. No writing. No pictures. These people don’t want their faces shown.”
He drove, muttering “Dangerous,” from poor street to poor street, for about a mile and a half, around the marshaling yards of the railway where I had embarked all those years ago, when this city had been raucous and sleazy, a frat boy’s dream. I had only the dimmest memory of looking around then, and when I read what I wrote in my book, I see a young man breezing through the town, eager to take his trip, laughing when a man tells him that in Boys’ Town “there are one thousand whores!”
“What is this street?”
“Calle Monterrey.”
A red-light district, the Zona Rosa in the Zona de Tolerancia of Mexican social life, evokes an image of neon promises and dazzling lights, winking drabs and knaves, strip shows and skin flicks, of harlotry and whoredom, the Hispanic Mistress Overdone queening it over “sanctified and pious bawds, the better to beguile.” For the mindless, blameless fun of male fantasy and reckless roistering, Boys’ Town, in its wicked cuteness, is the perfect name.
Now Diego and I were passing an eight- or nine-foot wall that ran parallel to the street, the sort of solemn unmarked wall that might enclose a school. Diego (sighing, blowing out his cheeks in anxiety) was slowing the taxi at a gateway in the wall, which was more like the entrance to a degenerate cloister than a school, because it suggested discreet exclusion. An entry and an exit, each one so narrow only a single car could squeeze through at a time, with just inches to spare on either side. A sentry box of cement blocks and barred windows stood in the middle, two boys in ragged shirts and matted hair in the sentry box window, and one boy swung himself out, his dirty hands clinging to the rusty bars.
“Gringo,” he said, as a mocking greeting.
And as we slid through this slot in the wall, I thought how easy it would be to become trapped inside, because as we passed I saw an iron pipe uplifted in a twist of wire, the sort of iron pipe, a simple immovable obstacle, you see at roadblocks.
“Dónde?”
“Anywhere. Just keep driving,” I said, and looked back at the toughs manning the gate.
Now in the walled compound, it was as though we had entered a fortress—a small one, that had suffered a defeat, that was mostly empty: one or two parked cars, no lights, no signs except street markers. The enc
losed compound was the size of a city block; the inner road around its walls was a beltway, a circunvalación, named Casanova; and the roads crossing inside were signposted “Cleopatra” and “Lucrecia Borgia,” suggesting that someone in Nuevo Laredo’s department of urban planning had a sense of humor.
Low, one-story gray cement huts, ulcerated and stained, lined these roads, some of the huts with old painted signs, most of them stenciled with numbers, all of them dark and grim, windows broken. As we drove along the stony, potholed road called Cleopatra I looked for other cars, or other customers. But only young men, like the mockers at the sentry box at the gate (I took them to be halcones, lookouts), were prowling or lounging, and because ours was the single moving car, the youths took an exaggerated interest, yelling as we passed.
Amazingly, some of the huts were open for business. At two or three of them, women sat at the doorway, singly or in companionable groups. They were older women, and the ones I saw were heavy, not coquettes but like hawkers in a Mexican market, and with the same screech, beckoning to our slowly moving car from where they sat in folding chairs, the way an impatient mother might scold a child or hector him at dinnertime.
The clubs—Martha’s, and at the top end of the zone, La Zona de Antros (Zone of Caves, or Grottoes)—were shuttered. I was summing up its emptiness and squalor as dreary and woeful when I remembered that, bumping past the huts, we were the only moving thing in this walled compound, and that the way out was the narrowest of exits—so narrow, in fact, that it would be easy for the ragged youths to lock the iron pipe and trap us and rob us.
Diego must have had the same notion, because without my saying anything he headed toward the exit, the car rocking in the ruts, while the women still screeched at us, and two more women in black yelled from the doorway of a hovel called Disco Amazona.
The ragged youths at the gate hooted as Diego sped through, gasping. When he was safely back on Calle Monterrey he said, “Ten years ago it was okay. But this city changed with all the violence.”
As we came to a stoplight, a car drew alongside. Diego rolled up his window and looked alarmed again, and when I asked him if anything was wrong, and was he okay, and what was the name of this neighborhood, he would not answer.
Dropping me back at San Dario Avenue, which was the road to the international bridge, he said, “You should leave.”
“Thanks.”
But it was not easy. The entire walkway on the bridge was filled with people, all of them Mexican, obviously with visas or papers, headed toward the door with the sign US IMMIGRATION—not shuffling toward the door, not moving, but just waiting, and I was waiting with them. After an hour I was greeted, I showed my passport, and was waved through.
In Laredo, over lunch, I talked with two board members of the Holding Institute, the nonprofit offering help to the border towns of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo—GED classes, health care, humanitarian relief, tutoring, English classes, and much else. The institute had started in 1880 as the Holding Seminary of Laredo and had evolved into a community welfare service infused with a spiritual element, though the men I talked with, anything but pious, seemed secular and forthright.
I mentioned that I had just come from a tour in Boys’ Town.
“That’s very risky,” Jaime Arispe said. “You have no rights there, because it’s a Zona de Tolerancia. They have their own police.”
His colleague Mike Smith said, “If you get arrested, be prepared to buy your way out.”
Jaime had been born in Ciudad Acuña in 1953. His father, a civilian worker at Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, started his shift early, and at noon crossed to Acuña for lunch and a siesta, then crossed back to the base until it was time to clock out. Mike’s mother was Mexican, but he’d been born in Laredo and was roughly Jaime’s age.
“No one goes to Nuevo Laredo for pleasure,” Mike said. “It’s a factory town now. Sony has a plant there—they have one here, too. They make the same things—electronics, small appliances, components for products. It’s a huge plant over there—ten-hour shifts. They provide transport and food. The difference is that the Sony plant here pays fourteen dollars an hour and the one in Mexico pays a dollar.”
When I remarked on the prosperity of Laredo, Jaime said, “Laredo is the largest inland port in the US. There are three bridges—World Trade Bridge is just for trucks.”
“Good business here translates to good feeling,” Mike said. “All along the border, people are very prideful of their town. They hate being lumped with the others.”
“We’re not McAllen,” Jaime said. “Statistically, Reynosa is the most dangerous border town these days.”
I asked whether they’d seen Mexicans crossing the border illegally.
Jaime said, “Riverview Park—it’s right in town, facing the border. I’ve been there with my kids, and people have come up to me and asked, ‘Can you help me?’”
“They swim across,” Mike said. “If they make it, they can blend in. Most people I know in Nuevo Laredo—and I know a lot—want to live here, for economic reasons. They know that they’re underpaid at the factories.”
I mentioned that the amounts paid to coyotes and cartels seemed very high.
“It’s like this,” Jaime said, “a sliding scale. To just cross they pay the smallest fee. The next highest gets you across and to a safe house. Pay more money and you’re given new clothes and a haircut and the safe house. The most money—maybe five thousand dollars—gets you clothes, a haircut, the house, and English lessons. And what’s the risk for the cartel? Very small compared to drug trafficking.”
“You’ve probably heard this before, but it’s true,” Mike said. “The cartels own the border. Here it’s the Zetas—they ran the Gulf cartel out of town.”
Jaime suggested that on my drive east I detour at a town called Rio Bravo, take a side road at El Cenizo, and look at the river, where I would see a popular crossing for migrants. He drew me a map, naming the streets.
Driving out of Laredo, I followed his directions, turned south at Rio Bravo, parked at the tiny village of El Cenizo, and walked downhill to the river. There I found an idyllic spot—a grassy bank, thick drooping stands of riverside willows and bamboo canes, no houses or fences in sight, and what looked to be an easy swim from one side to the other, probably fifty yards of slow-moving water.
The loveliest sight that day on the near bank were yellow sulphur butterflies, fluttering over the mud like confetti, some poised with folded wings, others scattered, dipping and circling. But in contrast to the butterflies in the scoop of shore was the rubbish and litter of migrant swimmers who’d made it across: knotted clothes, cast-off shoes, water bottles, old socks, and a piteous touch, the discarded toothbrushes of the fleeing Mexicans.
Blue plastic sheeting, cracked and taped, and tied in the bamboo grove, completed what a border Mexican, seeing an improvised shelter, would euphemistically call an albergue—an inn—and in that small hiding place the mashed-down canes and culms identified it as a spot where people had recently sought refuge or had slept.
This was about two miles off the border road, Route 83, which is scenic, straight, and bucolic, with farms on either side. But here’s a correction: on such a rural road near the border there is always a reminder of the thwarting or hunting down of migrants. Driving along that road, I soon came to a checkpoint, as formidable as any international frontier, with armed Border Patrol agents and sniffer dogs and a fleet of vehicles. And overhead, at the town of Zapata, hundreds of feet in the air, a great white blimp tethered to a cornfield—a surveillance balloon.
Later that day, beyond the border bulge of Falcon Lake, I came to Roma, decaying but singular in its decay. Roma was a fossilized nineteenth-century trading town, still with some attractive but abandoned brick and stucco buildings. Like many once elegant US border towns (Del Rio, Eagle Pass, Douglas, and others), Roma—neglected, underfunded, and overlooked—barely existed.
But it was well built and venerable, originally Mexican, fo
unded as an adobe town in 1765 and made into a brick and mortar marvel 120 years later by a German trader, Heinrich Portscheller. A brief version of his story was given on a slab of bronze in the plaza—the deserted plaza. But the text on the slab left out the more colorful details: that as a twenty-something immigrant to Mexico from Germany, Portscheller had ended up fighting in the army of the soon-to-be-executed Emperor Maximilian; that he deserted and hid in Texas, then changed sides and fought for the Mexicans in several battles. Settling in Texas, he became a US citizen, a brickmaker, and an architect. He oversaw the construction, using hand-cast bricks in the 1880s, of the elegant buildings with ornate pilasters and cornices that surround the symmetrical plaza in Roma—and the church, the ornamental iron balconies, even the iron bridge that spans the river to Ciudad Miguel Alemán. This main plaza in Roma had a moment of renewed glory when in 1952 it was chosen by director Elia Kazan as the setting for a number of scenes in his film Viva Zapata!, with Marlon Brando as Zapata. Today, picnicking families, fishermen, and small children idled on the south bank, and waved to the gringo on the Roma bluff.
There was not a soul in the plaza or the church or in any of the shops in old Roma, though present-day Roma had a Dollar Tree store, a Dairy Queen, a gas station, and a school. I walked across Portscheller’s iron bridge—no more complicated than crossing a street (a smile, a greeting, no questions on either side)—and walked into Ciudad Alemán.
On the other bank, I fell into step with a man headed to Monterrey—three hours by bus, $13—and remarked that it seemed an easy swim across to the US.
