The Law: Taming a Tough County

Stretching some 58 miles along the Rio Grande lies Starr County, Texas, a barren land of sagebrush and mesquite trees. Most of its 20,000 inhabitants are Mexican-Americans who scrape together a living as stoop laborers during the melon-picking season. Yet in the past two or three years, brick houses worth as much as $75,000 have sprung up among the pink and green shanties that line Route 83 between Roma-Los Saenz and Rio Grande City. Outside some of them sit new refrigerators still in their shipping cartons.

Smuggling has long been a basic industry in Starr County—cotton during the Civil War, liquor during Prohibition, and in the last few years, Mexican narcotics. Ten to 20 tons of marijuana flow into the county each week, along with unknown amounts of heroin and cocaine. Almost daily, Mexican grass is trucked to the Rio Grande, loaded into sacks and placed on rafts or carried across the shallow river to Texas, only 40 yards away. Estimated value of the drug traffic: up to $5 million a week.

Getting It. At exactly 6 a.m. one morning last week, this bustling commerce was thrown into turmoil. Fifteen teams of federal agents—about 70 in all —swooped down on the houses of suspected narcotics traffickers in the biggest drug bust ever launched along the Tex-Mex border. In all, 62 people had been indicted. As the handcuffed prisoners were unloaded from official cars at the border patrol office in Rio Grande City (pop. 6,000), townspeople gathered to applaud and jeer, “You finally got it!”

The Starr County drug trade has long been controlled by a few tightly-knit Mexican-American families who own land along the Rio Grande; in some cases, their relatives hold property on the Mexican side. For years they were virtually a law unto themselves. One of the indicted traffickers had even ordered auto license plates spelling out MAFIA. “They don’t deal with anyone they don’t trust,” says Texas Antidrug Official Neal Duvall, “and they only trust family.” According to a grand jury report, 10% to 35% of the population of Starr County have been involved in the drug trade.

County law enforcement has been lenient, with no major drug arrests for several years. Sheriff Reymundo Alvarez has only ten full-time deputies, five part-timers and one patrol car, which usually needs jumper cables to get it started, to cover 1,211 square miles. Four of the deputies cannot read or write English. “We can’t do everything here,” says Alvarez. “We have to escort funerals and settle family arguments and investigate accidents all over the county.”

The court system has not been much better. The last district judge responsible for the county was impeached by the state legislature and forced out of office in 1975 for using county property for personal purposes. “It has been rare to have a criminal case tried with a jury in Starr County,” says Judge Joe Evins, who filled in for 16 months after the impeachment. “I could sense the reluctance of witnesses to testify.” And with good reason. Five years ago, a local grand jury started to look into the drug traffic; after two girls who had testified were found floating in the Rio Grande, the jury dropped its investigation.

Last April, finally, things started to change. Judge Evins lined up a new grand jury and chose as its head Herman Railey, a border patrol official with a reputation for honesty. In August, the pressure on the grand jury increased when three drug peddlers were found in a car parked along Route 83—their heads blown off by shotgun blasts. Railey consulted Judge Evins and was advised to use an obscure statute that permits a grand jury to request help from the state when local law enforcement has broken down. At the prompting of Texas Attorney General John Hill, 40 new investigators, including Texas Rangers, state police and federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents, were dispatched to the area.

Federal Takeover. The grand jury called 100 people to testify secretly, often at night in their own homes, before its mandate expired in January. In the meantime, federal investigators had picked up the case and begun to plan the mass bust carried out last week. The arrests heartened the embattled law-abiding citizens of Starr. Said Don Smith, head of the local Drug Enforcement Administration office: “This let them know that there was still law around.”

Many more arrests will be required to dry up smuggling in the Starr County area. Even if the cross-river flood of drugs is checked, the traffickers can still fly the stuff over the border. Says Attorney General Hill: “The most important tool to stop the flow is an intensive eradication program in Mexico.” The Mexican government is cooperating, partly because the northbound traffic in drugs has helped finance a southbound flow of arms. In one case, police in Pharr, Texas, confiscated three machine guns and one rocket launcher probably pilfered from south Texas Army bases. The weapons were to be exchanged for 600 pounds of Mexican marijuana.