| | |  Editorials | Issues | June 2009 
The Town of Lonely Dentists
 William Booth & Travis Fox - Washington Post
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June 16, 2009
Palomas, Mexico - This is the little border town that discount dentistry built. There are the usual liquor stores and curio venders, and even a cantina with a Statute of Liberty on the roof. But mostly the streets are lined with storefront clinics offering crowns, dentures, cleanings. Walk-ins welcome! As the sign promises: “American standards at Mexican prices,” where a porcelain filling and a shot of Novocain will set you back about $60.
We went looking for dentists to talk about the hard times created by the storms of violence along the border. In the video, you can meet Jesus Jasso Salazar, who came here a decade ago to make his living with a drill and learned to say “open wide” in English. Most of his patients were Americans, until they got scared away by sudden surge in kidnappings and killings. Jasso used to be busy all day long in his two-chair clinic. Now he sits reading books in his own waiting room.
That’s the thing about drug violence. It can hollow out a place. Dentists have been the bedrock of this community for years. Now they’re moving on.
Palomas is an historic site because right across the border, during the Mexican Revolution, Pancho Villa and a force of 1000 men raided a small town east of the boot heel of New Mexico called Columbus. They killed 18 people and burned the town before they rode out. It was the only foreign military invasion on U.S. soil in modern times.
A year ago, the chief of the Palomas police, Emilio Perez, ran over to the U.S. side, seeking the safety of political asylum after his deputies suddenly quit, fearful that they might soon become one of the corpses that were dumped on the edge of town.
While in Jasso’s waiting room, we spoke with Rosa Rodriguez. We asked her, casually, if she thought violence had changed the border much. “They killed my son,” she replied. Her boy, Marco Antonio Saenz, was 17 years old and a high school senior in Deming, N.M, about 30 miles north of here. “He went to a party and some gangsters picked a fight and hit him in the head with a bottle,” his mom said. He died a few hours after the attack. That was two years ago. “He was a good boy,” Rodriguez said. “He liked to babysit.” She had his picture in her wallet.
About this Project
The border between United States and Mexico is the land where straight lines blur, and where two national cultures collide and collude. The writer Alan Weisman, author of "La Frontera", called the borderlands "the most dramatic intersection of first and third world realities anywhere on the globe." There is a lot of good on the border, and these days, plenty of bad. The border is a militarized hot zone, where tens of thousands of Mexican soldiers are fighting a vicious drug war against well-armed, rich and powerful drug traffickers, who smuggle across these desert highways 90 percent of the cocaine so voraciously consumed in the United States. On the U.S. side, the federal government is pouring taxpayer money into border, promising to stem the flow of cash and guns heading south, while the border patrol continues its ceaseless cat-and-mouse search for Mexican migrants sneaking north.
We're setting out to drive the borderlands from Ciudad Juarez, across the river from El Paso, to San Diego's sister city Tijuana. Along the way, we're going to tell the stories of overwhelmed small town sheriffs, of drug smugglers and drug czars, of the Mexicans who struggle to survive in dusty villages and the Americans who fear that the drug war is getting way too close for comfort. We're going to talk to cops and mayors, some scientists and singers, and lots of regular folks, too. We've got a map, an ice chest, a video camera, and the laptops. We've got some stories planned but we also would like to hear from you. What do you think about the drug fight along the border, and what it is doing to the people What dots on the map should we make sure to hit Please let us know in the comments section below. You can also join the conversation on Twitter by using the #mexborder hashtag.
William Booth and Travis Fox |
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