Given the large Mexican population working and living in the Pines, this topic is germane to the blog. I had accrued some airline points from workshops and conferences, so took the wife and daughter out to El Paso last spring for an extended weekend vacation before my daughter started college. One stop was the Santa Teresa Border Crossing in neighboring New Mexico. Sternly forewarned, we had no intention of crossing into Mexico. It was simply difficult to believe the stories we’d been hearing, and the family was curious to see what a check point looked like.
During our brief stay a single US citizen passed us on return from Mexico. He shook a newspaper above his head, and exclaimed that over twenty had been brutally executed that weekend alone in Ciudad Juárez. The border guard grabbed the paper and scolded the man that such graphic news was not for broadcast. She then ordered that the tabloid be hidden from public view. The poverty and violence is woefully under-reported by the American press, and is truly heartbreaking.
Figure 1. The Santa Teresa NM crossing traffic is mostly commercial trucking, established to alleviate crowding at the nearby El Paso TX crossing.
Figure 2. A view across the Rio Grande at Ciudad Juárez form Texas Route 85. It’s bizarre to see a city of 1.5-million inhabitants tucked into the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert. El Paso is closer to San Diego (636 miles) than Houston (667 mile). Miles airport-to-airport.
Figure 3. The border fence as seen from a quiet El Paso neighborhood. The city itself is a safe and exciting destination. English is a second language here.
Spung-Man
