| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico | June 2009 
A Drug Smuggler's Story
 William Booth & Travis Fox - Washington Post
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| | Hernandez says that he crossed the border daily. He would drive with dope right through U.S. immigration and customs. Agents often searched his car, looking for drugs in hidden cavities, but never found anything. | |
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico - Along the Mexican border, people generally try to avoid drug traffickers. We went looking for one.
With the help of a veteran journalist in Juarez, we meet Jose Lucio Hernandez, a former smuggler. Hernandez says he snuck drugs into Texas about 400 times by driving across the international port of entry between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.
It is impossible to verify everything he says, but his rap sheet confirms he was in the business. Hernandez was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison after being busted on July 22, 2005 with 185 pounds of marijuana in El Paso. He boasts that he was good at what he did. Hernandez says he always made it across the border undetected. It was only when he lived in the United States that he got caught.
We meet Hernandez at a drug treatment center, where he was working as a volunteer. In his ballcap, polo shirt and blue jeans, Hernandez, 25, doesnt look like the classic narco, the guy with a gold tooth and dark shades.
In the video, Hernandez says that he crossed the border daily. He would drive with dope right through U.S. immigration and customs. Agents often searched his car, looking for drugs in hidden cavities, but never found anything.
Hernandez laughs when asked if the government could ever stop drugs from entering the United States.
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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