Just Another Day In A Bridge Town

By Timothy Roche/Laredo With Reporting By Hilary Hylton/Laredo

6:30 a.m. OLD DOWNTOWN BRIDGE First come the schoolkids--dozens of them, over the old concrete bridge, some in the plaid-skirt, white-blouse uniforms of Roman Catholic schools, others dressed public school casual. Some were born in the U.S.; some have permanent residency status there, but their parents prefer to live on the Mexican side, where it's cheaper. So they use a relative's U.S. address to register for school and commute. The two local school districts (one larger than the state of Delaware) don't know how many students are from the other side; they are forbidden by law to ask. In any case, the town can't build elementary school space fast enough. Jesse Saldivar, chief inspector for U.S. Customs downtown, recognizes the faces as they pass through the gates. "I've seen them grow up," he says, making step motions with his hand.

7 a.m. INTERNATIONAL BANK OF COMMERCE A bank open before breakfast? It's the surest sign of a boom. Laredo banks are open 7 to 7 daily, including Sundays. Walk into the main office of the IBC and listen: English rarely spoken here. Upstairs in the executive offices, executive vice president Gerald Schwebel explains that his mother is Mexican, his father Austrian; he went to school in Nuevo Laredo. Bilingual, binational, he is the whole global economy in a suit. Schwebel's bank, the biggest in town with assets of more than $6 billion, has a small fleet of jets at the airport standing by to fly bankers to Europe, Asia and, of course, Mexico to finance deals. "If you are interested in trade," he says, "this is the living laboratory."

8 a.m. WORLD TRADE BRIDGE Toll collector Robert Fuentes unlocks the grimy padlock and unloops heavy chains at the gate to the bridge--one of five busy spans. The bridge is 13 months old and reveals just how open--and closed--the border is these days. It's sleek, wide, built for speed and highly efficient: regular semis have electronic passes that let them zip right through. But the bridge is also slung with concertina wire; 55 state and federal agencies--from the irs to the FDA--have offices in town. Here only Customs and the National Guard carry side arms. The feds lack the troops to check every truck, so they inspect randomly. On an average day, about 8,000 trucks will cross here, hauling copper wire and auto parts into Mexico and bringing clock radios and car chassis back. Customs collects $619,000 in federal taxes and duties daily.

This morning, truck No. 11 in line to the U.S. belongs to Martin Castano. His dented Chevy pickup, loaded with pinatas shaped like Betty Boop and Winnie the Pooh, is dwarfed next to a semi carrying 15 tons of yellow bulldozer claws. Castano usually makes the trip twice a day and can pocket $150 each time. But because it would be easy to stuff marijuana inside Betty or Winnie, he is always waved over for inspection. Castano says he trusts his 12 employees to stay away from the drug smugglers, but he pays his men only $50 a week, and that makes them easy marks for even small bribes. Customs officers take no chances. They direct Castano's Chevy to a large X-ray machine, big enough to scan two semis at once, that can sometimes detect what the sniffer dogs may miss.

10 a.m. THE HEB GROCERY STORE In the cool morning air, the shoppers come, older men and women from Nuevo Laredo, walking across the downtown bridge, passing through the Customs hall, waving their crossing cards. Americans rarely have to show a passport or visa; they are asked their citizenship and waved on through. Mexican nationals can use their old crossing cards or get a new "laser visa," good for 10 years, which lets them enter and leave at will, to see family or shop downtown. This morning they are going to the HEB, the big downtown grocery store. There is an HEB on the Mexican side too, but that doesn't stop people from crossing over for the fresh tortillas and sweet pastries. Cashiers accept both pesos and dollars.

1:45 p.m. MILE MARKER 15 ON U.S. INTERSTATE 35 A sniffer dog doesn't like the smell of an old gray 1987 Buick LeSabre with Mexican plates. Border-patrol agents order the young driver out of the car, handcuff him and send him inside a checkpoint trailer, followed by his pregnant companion, who carries one small child and holds the hand of another. "He's a smuggler," says patrol agent in charge Lauro Vidal. "They bring along their wife or girlfriend and kids so we don't suspect them." As the dog walks around the car again, officers check the undercarriage, tap on door panels and inspect the tires.

"It's in the wheels," one says. They jack up the car; an agent pulls out a large hunting knife and slices open a passenger-side tire. Inside are 41 lbs. of tightly packed marijuana, wrapped in plastic and smeared with red axle grease--an attempt to fool the dogs. Sometimes the smugglers use baby powder to mask the odor.

5 p.m. LAREDO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT People flying commercially in and out of Laredo have no choice but to take prop planes. Only the most important cargo flies on a jet. Each night, DC-8 cargo planes swoop in and out, carrying everything from auto parts to medical supplies, usually because someone needed them yesterday. Companies routinely ship entire planeloads of gear when an assembly line is shut down for want of some crucial piece that's made or imported here. "Sometimes I've seen an invoice for, say, hubcaps, where the value of $1,000 or so is less than the cost of shipping," says Lucy Santos Wright, a freight forwarder. Of course, that's not all that arrives. Later this night, 215 lbs. of marijuana are found in an Emery Worldwide package marked for Saturday-morning delivery to a Michigan town. By itself, Laredo is the nation's busiest land port; the Laredo airport is the seventh busiest Latin port of any kind.

6 p.m. UNITEC INDUSTRIAL PARK Father Francisco Munoz stands in front of two red, green and white tractor trailers and says a blessing. That's standard procedure for any new building, but this one is special. It's the grand opening of Consolidated Freightways' 20-acre compound and 51,000-sq.-ft. warehouse. The company loads an average of 60 trailers a day bound for Los Angeles; Detroit; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Memphis, Tenn. Concrete crews are pouring a million square feet of warehouse a month on Laredo's red-hot north side. The soft-spoken priest asks his audience to think about "who we are and how we are, as we move from one place to another." And then the guests drink margaritas and devour a cake decorated with a toy truck.

9 p.m. WORLD TRADE BRIDGE Rush hour has arrived. In the first five minutes, 27 trucks leave Mexico and pull into the Customs checkpoint. One by one, the drivers wait to be processed, reading Spanish newspapers and comic books or talking on their CB radios. Eleazar Camancho Luna, 21, listens instead to Latin disco music. He makes five crossings a day--$20 for full loads, $15 for empty trailers that need to be returned--and works six days a week. Not bad for a single guy, he says. The Mexican trucks are serviceable but spare: Luna's lacks the global-positioning systems found in some U.S. rigs, or even air conditioning. For years Mexican truckers were permitted to drive only 20 miles into the U.S. before transferring their loads to American haulers. But a NAFTA panel ruled last February that the U.S. must soon allow Mexican trucks access to the whole country. U.S. truckers say the Mexican rigs aren't safe--and the drivers aren't qualified.

Luna isn't going very far anyway. After a Customs inspector waves him through, he lets out a sigh of relief. He can drop off the 44 tons of iron towers and still get back home tonight.

10 p.m. LAREDO WAL-MART Most of the 500 cars in the Wal-Mart parking lot have Mexican plates--about normal for a Friday night. Laredo boasts the highest-grossing Wal-Mart per square foot in the U.S., because this town of 200,000 is really a market for more than 1 million people. Right up the highway from the big downtown bridge, the store is often a first stop for visiting Mexicans. Inside, you can find Fabuloso detergent, table runners decorated with images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and CDs featuring popular Norteno and Tejano stars. The biggest selling items are aluminum foil, toilet-bowl cleaner and three-packs of paper towels. Store manager Ed Garza says traffic in the store picks up as midnight approaches: "People like to shop when it's cooler."

11 p.m. OLD DOWNTOWN BRIDGE A maintenance man takes advantage of the lull to mop the tile floor in the narrow walkway that funnels pedestrians from Mexico into downtown Laredo. Customs supervisor Greg Salinas expects the traffic to pick up in a few hours, when the borrachos come over, the drunks and Friday-night revelers who have been enjoying the Nuevo Laredo night life, some even venturing to Boystown, the red-light district, where prostitutes have held court for generations of Texas fraternity boys, roughnecks and cowboys. The revelers will buy tequila and six-packs of Corona at half the U.S. price on the Mexican side and bring it back across.

11:51 p.m. WORLD TRADE BRIDGE The last semi, No. 3,902 for the day, reaches the checkpoint of the World Trade Bridge. Its load: 45 pieces of wrought-iron furniture, headed for the patios of the North.

--With reporting by Hilary Hylton/Laredo