Twilight on the Line: Underworlds and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border.

• Author: LaFranchi, Howard

As a newspaper correspondent in Texas in the 1980s, I covered the US.-Mexico border -- mostly from Brownsville, the Rio Grande Valley and El Paso, but occasionally from as far west as the San Diego-Tijuana line. They were rich, newsy, and generally uplifting days on a once-sleepy but awakening 2,000-mile-long divide between the First and Third Words.

They were the years of the Sanctuary movement, when Americans opposed to the U.S. role in Central America's conflicts clandestinely helped Guatemalans and Salvadorans north and across the U.S. border to refuge. The immigration issue, always an up-and-down concern in the U.S., was on the up, but casual crossing outside federal government checkpoints (to shop, visit family, or earn dollars) was still widespread. The drug war was still focused on the Caribbean and not yet on the Colombian cartels' Mexican connections. (It was, of course, the U.S. government's squeeze on the Caribbean that rechanneled the drug flow through Mexico.) And toward the end of the decade, economic dreams rose on growing talk of a North American free-trade accord that would erase borders, weaken the push and pull of immigration, and bring everybody closer together.

A decade later, when I returned to reporting on the border, this time from a correspondent's desk in Mexico City, I was shocked and saddened by what I found. The border of promise had in many places become a border of peril. Most striking of all was the rise of the Mexican drug cartels and the violence that accompanied their growing power. Immigration, too, had turned ugly, especially in California. Solid metal fences had gone up where friendship and cooperation were supposed to bloom. Urban and industrial pollution had worsened, and the much-heralded free-trade agreement, which took effect in January 1994 as NAFTA, was under attack even by some of its erstwhile supporters for destroying jobs in the United States and dampening wages on both sides of the border.

In a sense, the world that for centuries had left the border pretty much alone roared in like an occupying army in the globalizing '90s, bringing with it international mafias, the transnational flow of the desperately poor, and booming global trade. It is this globalized border of the 1990s that Sebastian Rotella brings alive with sometimes chilling storytelling in Twilight on the Line: Underworlds and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border. Now the Los Angeles Times bureau chief for South America, Rotella...