Posted on 07/30/2006 7:31:52 AM PDT by SwinneySwitch
RIO BRAVO — Empty cocaine packages littered the tall grass like candy wrappers along the bank of the Rio Grande in El Cenizo, a small but growing city 15 miles southeast of Laredo.
On closer inspection, each of the 30 or so packages revealed layers — foil, plastic kitchen wrap and brown packing tape. Two large flour sacks were discarded nearby, each with a car seatbelt ingeniously tied diagonally across it for no-hassle transporting.
The drugs were long gone, their wrappings not just evidence of a successful crime but another artifact in an outdoor museum of discarded clothes, inner tubes and water jugs left behind by river crossers.
Narcotics trafficking in South Texas is nothing new, but the relative isolation and limited police resources of El Cenizo and neighboring Rio Bravo, officials say, have created opportunities for smugglers to exploit.
The same drug cartels that have waged a bloody turf war in Nuevo Laredo are using both places as staging areas into Texas, officials say.
This year, Rio Bravo's most prolific drug trafficker met a violent end. Some worry that the cartel foothold, left unchecked, could lead to more bloodshed in these two small Texas cities.
"Some of the information we have is that there are people who are housed in Rio Bravo and El Cenizo who are tied in to the cartels, and they pretty much have that place under control," Webb County Sheriff Rick Flores said.
"You have to remember that there's only one entrance and one exit and that apparently there are halcones at the gas station and they pretty much let people know when law enforcement are coming in and when they're leaving," he continued.
Halcones, or hawks, is cartelspeak for lookouts. In Rio Bravo, the cartel's human intelligence system is just as good as in Nuevo Laredo, law enforcement sources say.
The place appears unaffected by the drug trade. Children can be spotted jumping on trampolines, neighbors hold garage sales in their front yards, and the Word of God hangs in the air, blasted from speakers at an outdoor praise and worship service.
Residents say they don't live in fear. On the contrary, they've accepted the fact that traffickers operate in their streets. They live by an unwritten treaty with the narcos: Leave us alone, and we'll turn our heads.
Jesus María Resendez smuggled drugs through Rio Bravo for years. His luck ran out last April in a ferocious hail of automatic weapons fire at a red light on U.S. 83 and Sierra Vista Boulevard, just inside the Laredo city limits.
A 15-year-old nephew died with him.
His story is a cautionary tale of how drug activity in small border communities can spiral into the gangland style executions that have become common in parts of Mexico.
Police recovered more than 60 shell casings from AK-47 assault rifles and a 9 mm handgun in one of the brashest cartel hits ever to occur on the Texas side of the border.
Local and federal law enforcement officials say Resendez was a midlevel drug trafficker for the Sinaloa Cartel, led by drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, part of an alliance of cartels battling the Gulf Cartel for control of Laredo-area smuggling routes.
Resendez transported mostly marijuana — tons per month — through Rio Bravo, sometimes with the help of his extended family, officials familiar with him said.
"Resendez was the strong arm of the family," said Webb County sheriff's Cpl. Carlos Gomez, who regularly patrols the area. "He gave orders to his brothers and cousins."
It's unclear when Resendez started transporting drugs, but court documents show that by age 21 he was indicted in Bexar County on a cocaine possession charge that was subsequently dismissed.
It would be the first of several lucky breaks for him.
They started out as colonias, rural subdivisions lacking such basic services as sewage and water. Today, Rio Bravo and El Cenizo are towns whose leaders have succeeded in paving roads, building infrastructure and securing grants for public works.
The two are only a few miles apart and joined by a single road connecting them to U.S. 83.
Rio Bravo's population of about 5,550 is 97 percent Hispanic, and young. The median age is 20. Like El Cenizo, many who live here are in the country illegally.
Jobs are few, so most breadwinners make the daily commute to Laredo for low-paying work. In 2000, the median household income barely cleared $17,100 a year.
"People still call Rio Bravo a colonia, but we're slowly changing the face of it," said Juan G. Gonzalez, a south side Chicago native who grew up here and has been mayor for five years.
Gonzalez's office has been at the Rio Bravo fire station ever since the city filed for bankruptcy shortly after he took office. Under his leadership the city is pulling itself back up, but cost-cutting measures dissolved the Police Department in 2002.
That leaves, at most, a couple of Webb County deputies and Border Patrol agents as the keepers of order here.
These factors have made Rio Bravo vulnerable, deputies say. Both cartels operate here, but the Gulf Cartel, through its enforcement arm, known as Los Zetas, does most of the business, law enforcement officials agree.
Afraid of authorities because of their immigration status, or lured by the money the traffickers offer, residents co-exist and at times cooperate with the smugglers.
When alerted that law enforcement is in town, smugglers sometimes simply approach the closest home and offer hundred dollar bills in exchange for temporary haven, sheriff's Cpl. Gomez said.
"Whoever is willing to pay can have their stash (here), either from the Chapos or the Zetas," Gomez said. "It's very easy for (residents) to say 'yes.'"
The typical Zeta accomplices in Rio Bravo are young, usually between 20 and 26 years old, Gomez said.
They are often middlemen who connect dealers in San Antonio and Laredo with suppliers in Nuevo Laredo. The traffickers have their own local work force, as young as 14, who are hired as lookouts.
One federal investigator estimates Rio Bravo has about one smuggler per square block.
"It's a lot of river to cover, and very few people to actually enforce any type of law enforcement out there," the official said.
Using a laundry list of aliases, Resendez had built a network of stash houses in Rio Bravo, El Cenizo, Laredo and San Antonio by the early 2000s, Texas Department of Public Safety and county housing records show.
As his network grew, so did his family's reputation.
"These guys were notorious for ripping people off," said the federal investigator, who requested anonymity so as not to step on the toes of Laredo police, who are leading the Resendez homicide investigation.
Like most who participate in drug trafficking in Rio Bravo, Resendez first associated himself with the Gulf Cartel, which has long controlled the area's smuggling routes, the federal investigator said.
He was probably working for the Gulf Cartel when he was arrested and charged in April 2003 with felony possession of marijuana in Webb County.
Court records show that case was dismissed because of a defective search warrant.
At some point after his arrest, officials say, Resendez defected, aligning himself with the Sinaloa Cartel, which by then had ignited the turf war that was washing Nuevo Laredo in waves of violence.
In Mexico, the Zetas respond to such defections swiftly and fatally.
In contrast, Laredo officials, most notably former Mayor Betty Flores, insist that cartel violence has not spilled into their city. But it did, on Sept. 30, 2004.
On that day, as Resendez and a female companion exited a Wal-Mart in North Laredo, Zeta gunmen were waiting for him in the parking lot, officials said.
More than 15 shots from two weapons were fired at the pair, according to a report of the incident in the Laredo Morning Times.
Resendez was hit in the upper body, shoulder and chest, and was airlifted to a San Antonio hospital in critical condition, the newspaper reported.
He recovered, but he didn't return to Rio Bravo. From then on, he lived in San Antonio and ran his operation from there, the federal investigator said.
If Rio Bravo sounds like a city under siege, it isn't.
Its small size gives residents a sense of closeness. The toughest battle is with the heat, which on a recent day kept many families seeking shade on their porches.
"Everything has been calm," resident Aracely Reyes said. "It's always been like this."
Elida Zamarripa, 53, lives in a house as close as you can get to the Rio Grande. From her yard she sees half-clothed undocumented immigrants run by regularly, and she knows narcotics pass by her home, too.
None of this worries her.
"We've never suffered anything," she said.
At another home near the river, Angie Lopez retrieved her laundry from a clothesline.
"They can pass, they can do what they do, but they don't bother us," she said of the smugglers.
In general, folks here lead happy lives, firm in their belief that the traffic in humans and drugs will leave them alone.
"Unfortunately, because we don't have the resources to combat this, what can we do?" Mayor Gonzalez said. "People come in and out, and you just mind your own business."
After doing away with the department, Gonzalez hired a new police chief last year who is working to build a new force from the ground up.
But, Gonzalez admitted, local officers would likely do little to combat smugglers.
"As long as we don't mess with those groups, they don't mess with us," the mayor said.
Meanwhile, a small number of county deputies and federal agents try to keep the area from becoming infiltrated further.
"It's like a football game," said David Borges, a Border Patrol agent who watches the riverbank along Rio Bravo in an all-terrain vehicle. "It's a hundred yards to the houses. If they make it, touchdown for them."
No one knows what Resendez had planned for the night of April 2 this year.
In a rare visit, he stopped in Rio Bravo and picked up a nephew from his sister's home, a modest one-story white house hidden from public view by a wooden fence that encircled the entire front yard like a fortress.
A fishing rod and a plate of fajitas lay in the back seat as Resendez and his nephew drove down Paseo de Tiber Street, the only exit to the highway.
These details come from a source familiar with the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is still open.
That night, the halcones in Rio Bravo were watching Resendez, the source said. They likely watched as the white truck turned left past the gas station onto U.S. 83, toward Laredo.
What happened next was a textbook case of a trafficker whose business was halted not by authorities, but by a much crueler justice system.
Which side got tipped off by the halcones is unclear.
The increasingly efficient Resendez was by far the biggest trafficker in the area by this time, working for a Laredo-born lieutenant of "El Chapo" Guzman, investigators said.
The Zetas, his old allies, could not have forgotten their failed assassination attempt almost two years earlier, and they certainly didn't like him moving large amounts of drugs through an area they dominate.
But in his final days, Resendez's greed had grown out of control, the federal official said. One uncorroborated report was that Resendez ripped off $1.5 million worth of marijuana from his Sinaloan bosses.
In his 36 years, he had been in and out of the hands of the legal system, and had escaped the grasp of his enemies. It's easy to imagine he had no idea what was hidden in another nearby pickup, one he likely saw in his rearview mirror.
At 9:24 p.m., Resendez came to a stop at a red light on Sierra Vista Boulevard.
The other pickup pulled up alongside. As many as three men popped up from the truck's bed and aimed their AK-47s.
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mcastillo@express-news.net
El Cenizo just received a state grant to build a river park and boat ramp on the Rio Grande. Wonder if any drugs will be coming up that ramp? /sarc
Border War Ping!
About 20 years ago they highlighted Starr Co. with the same type of "expose", then did nothing.
Follow the money.
Rio Bravo's population of about 5,550 is 97 percent Hispanic, and young. The median age is 20. Like El Cenizo, many who live here are in the country illegally.
Calling Homeland Security, yo ICE, where are you?
hmmmmm nothing
Like El Cenizo, many who live here [Rio Bravo] are in the country illegally.
His story is a cautionary tale of how drug activity in small border communities can spiral into the gangland style executions that have become common in parts of Mexico.
With luck, maybe some of these upstanding ("I didn't see a thing!") citizens will find themselves dodging more than a few bullets from the cartels' employees.
ping
There is only one logical conclusion why Bush has done nothing to remedy the border problem.......He is not stupid, therefore his actions are rational toward some unstated purpose .....follow the money is a good starting point ...and should be applied to certain members of the senate as well. The financial resources of the Mexican cartels are unlimited and have purchased the Mexican establishment from top to bottom...
I've wondered about this too ...
Hey, ICE, surround these towns one day, bus all the illegals back to Mexico and save all of us a lot of pain.
That would be the most reasonable response, but I don't think anyone did anything. The main jist of it was dirt roads leading up to multimillion dollar houses in a county with massive unemployment. Hmm, wonder where the money came from???
Only question is how deep does the payroll go in the american government.. Obviously quite deep.. The american people appear to quite drugged themselves.. The american people are higher than kites..
A WALL across the border could be a good intervention process.. What drug are americans addicted to?.. There are many.. its not like just marijana and heroin anymore..
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