Drug Lord: A True Story by Terrence Poppa Charles Bowden

Author:Terrence Poppa, Charles Bowden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus
Published: 2011-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

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SEARCH AND RESCUE

Marco and Becky knew the Lomas de Arena river crossing like the back of their hands. A relatively safe route some fifty miles upstream from Ojinaga, it was one of many crossings Pablo had used over the years. It took three to four hours of rough driving to get there along a narrow dirt road that wound around low, barren mountains. On the American side, there were more dirt roads leading north. A rancher had erected a fence with a gate to give livestock access to the river. Pablo’s people had a key, as well as keys to some of the other gates that gave them access to the roads through the remote ranches between the Rio Grande and Interstate 10, some twenty miles north of the border. Once they reached the busy freeway, Pablo’s smugglers became invisible—a part of the ceaseless flow of trucks, cars, vans, recreational vehicles, campers, trailers, and motorcycles—and drove on easily to their destination.

The river crossing took its name from the nearby village of Lomas de Arena, a sun-baked agricultural hamlet consisting of a scattering of adobe shacks without running water or electricity. Perched on a low sandy hill less than a mile from the river, the village had taken on a strategic importance to the traffickers because of its remoteness and the fact that it was at the extreme end of both Mexican and American police jurisdictions. One of the villagers made good money storing fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline for the Acosta organization in a shed next to his adobe. When the fuel cache ran low, Pablo had fresh drums trucked in and the empty barrels brought back to Ojinaga for refilling.

The crossing had always been important for smuggling drugs north into the United States, but in 1985 Pablo also began using it as a safe route for bringing weapons into Mexico. For several years, gunrunners had simply driven weapons and ammunition into Mexico across the international bridge between Presidio and Ojinaga. The Americans never searched vehicles leaving the United States, and Mexican customs authorities on the Acosta payroll simply looked the other way when weapons and ammunition destined for the drug lord came across.

Two unrelated events, however, brought the brazen gunrunning at the international bridge to an end. One was a shootout between one of Becky’s runners and a Mexican customs inspector. “Jimmy” was supposed to bring a load of weapons across and the right amount of money had already flowed into the right number of hands. What nobody had foreseen was Jimmy getting soused on tequila before driving to Mexico. When at the bridge, the inebriated runner got surly with a young Mexican Customs inspector who had insisted on taking a pro forma peek under the tarpaulin covering the weapons cache. The officer put up with the sass until the runner told him to go screw his mother. The men drew on each other and began blasting away. The bridge was crowded with afternoon traffic and there was a lot of shrieking and diving for cover.

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