Shoot-Out on The Border

By John Borrell

The battle against drug smugglers sometimes turns into a shooting war, as Mexico City Bureau Chief John Borrell discovered last week while on assignment along the U.S.-Mexico border. His report:

In Starr County, Texas, the U.S. Border Patrol truck sits, engine idling, on a dirt track near the Rio Grande. Its headlights have been off since it left the highway half an hour earlier and bumped across rough farm roads to within a few hundred yards of Mexico, just visible in the moonlight on the far bank of the river.

A radio suddenly spews a stream of static into the blacked-out cab. An agent scouting ahead for a gang of suspected drug smugglers has spotted his quarry. "They are at the edge of the brush," a voice whispers excitedly. "They are moving. I can see the sacks they are carrying."

Leo Laurel and Juan Trevino, the two senior agents commanding the operation, scan the road ahead through binoculars. "Got them," says Trevino. "Looks like they are heading back into the scrub." Laurel quickly checks the position of another Border Patrol unit, which has been maneuvering to cut the gang off from the river. "We need to bust them now," Laurel radios. "We're coming in fast."

Gunning the engine, Laurel races down the rutted track. Even before the truck comes to a halt, Trevino is out and running. Suddenly shots are fired, and bullets buzz overhead. Muffled shouts and the sounds of breaking branches come from a thicket of mesquite. Then more shots, this time a short burst from an automatic weapon. A handgun replies purposefully. The shooting stops as abruptly as it started.

A paunchy, middle-aged Mexican is lying on the side of the track. His arm is bleeding, and he has been hit in the stomach. An agent radios for an ambulance. "He turned on us with this," says Trevino, a 9-mm semiautomatic Taurus pistol in his hand. "We were lucky, real lucky."

In the thick brush that borders the track another agent has pinned to the ground a second member of the gang, this one unarmed. Around the prisoner are nearly a dozen 30-lb. sacks of marijuana abandoned by his fellow "mules." The total load will weigh out at 317 lbs., worth about $250,000 in South Texas and much more elsewhere in the U.S. If they hadn't been busted, the mules, who earn $200 a trip, would have carried the marijuana up to the highway and loaded it into a waiting car.

For the Border Patrol's McAllen sector, 280 miles of the U.S.-Mexico boundary, this drug bust last week was the third in as many days, although the first for months involving a shoot-out on U.S. soil. South Texas is one of the most important points of entry into the U.S. for Mexican-grown marijuana, as well as cocaine from Colombia. Last year the Border Patrol in the McAllen sector captured drugs worth more than $182 million. Yet for all their success, the Border Patrol and other U.S. agencies estimate that they intercept just 10% of the drugs coming across the Mexican border.

An ambulance from nearby Rio Grande City arrives for the wounded man. The other captured smuggler is taken off in a truck. Laurel issues new orders to his men, then reflects on the night's events. "I don't like it when the shooting starts," he says. "Your luck has got to run out sometime."