Anxiety spreads across U.S.-Mexico border

COLUMBUS, N.M. — The day began gently in Columbus, on the U.S.-Mexico border. The cold, starry sky gave way to the orange smile of a sunrise.

At the Pancho Villa Cafe, short-order cook Maria Gutierrez whipped up her egg and chopped-tortilla special. Down the street, Martha Skinner brewed coffee for guests at her bed-and-breakfast. Her husband, the local judge, walked to his courtroom to hear the week's entire caseload: one pet owner cited for keeping her dog chained up, another for allowing her dog off-leash.

Columbus, a settlement of 1,800 people clinging to a wind-swept patch of high desert in southern New Mexico, was a picture of tranquillity.

But less than 3 miles south, in the once-quaint Mexican town of Palomas, a war is being waged. In the past year, a drug feud that has killed more than 1,350 in sprawling Ciudad Juárez has spread to tiny Palomas, 70 miles west, where more than 40 people have been gunned down, a dozen within a baseball toss of the border.

More — no one knows how many — have been kidnapped, and the Palomas police chief fled across the border last year and has asked for political asylum.

Columbus is on edge. A haven for baby-boomer retirees seeking cheap living, small-town values and blissful, if unpolished, solitude, Columbus can't quite believe that a bloody brawl has broken out on its doorstep.

The anxiety spiked recently when Columbus disbanded its five-member police force after a local political squabble, putting its safety in the hands of the county sheriff based a half-hour's drive away. Many are ruing the decision. Angry and fretful residents packed a recent village trustees meeting to argue the case.

"What is going on across the border is going to go on for a while, folks," said Joseph Rivera, a regal figure with a bushy, silver mustache who works for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency. "People are leaving Palomas like jack rabbits and coming here."

Robert Odom, a former town trustee, warned that the town was pushing its luck. "So far, knock on wood, it's been narco-traffickers attacking their own people," he said. "But it's only a matter of time before it spills over here."

The last time an internal war in Mexico spilled over into Columbus, as every local schoolchild knows, was in 1916, when Mexican revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa led a raid that killed 18 Americans and touched off a major international incident. A yearlong U.S. military expedition in Mexico failed to capture him.

Time healed those wounds, though. A state park and a handful of businesses in Columbus bear Villa's name. And the town celebrates his assault each March by inviting Mexicans on horseback over to re-enact the raid.

Cross-border ties

Like many towns hugging the 2,000-mile frontier between the United States and Mexico, Columbus and Palomas are inextricably linked.

Several hundred children, mostly U.S. citizens born to Mexican parents, cross from Mexico daily to attend public school, while some Columbus residents commute daily to work in Palomas or to see the less expensive dentists, pharmacists and auto mechanics there. Another, newer brand of cross-border activity has fed the town's paranoia. Several residents of Palomas have bought property in Columbus recently, paying cash.

Martha Skinner, the B&B owner who is also the town's lone real-estate agent, had her best sales year in 2008, even with the market nationwide in a nose dive. New Cadillac Escalades, and cars with thousand-dollar chrome rims, have appeared suddenly in a town without a traffic light.

Columbus residents think they know what those trends mean: The men who traffic drugs in Mexico are moving their families to Columbus for sanctuary. And where drug lords go, residents assume, violence is sure to follow.

"Everybody knows this is happening. It's a small town, and everyone knows everybody else," said Eugene Sierra, 57, a former Columbus police chief. "Our concern is that they'll be followed by people who want to do away with them, and innocent people in the line of fire will be hurt. Without any law enforcement here, it's wide-open."

Violence is rare

Columbus would appear to be about as well-protected as any U.S. border city.

The border crossing is flanked by six miles of 15- to 18-foot-tall fencing and an additional 35 miles of waist-high vehicle barriers. Motion sensors and cameras sprout among fields of onions and jalapeños, and a beefed-up Border Patrol force of 350 has helped drive arrests of illegal crossers to one-tenth of what they were two years ago.

Luna County Sheriff Raymond Cobos said drug seizures are down sharply, and violence linked to Mexican drug cartels remains rare, though the shooting death of a 15-year-old high-school student in Deming late last year appears to have been drug-related.

"There are definitely drug connections here, but it's hard for them to carry on their trade openly," Cobos said. "So they have to go way, way underground."

The assurances of the sheriff and the Border Patrol haven't calmed fears. Some of those kidnapped in Mexico have relatives in Columbus.

Columbus residents who cross into Palomas said they are unnerved by the eerie calm of what once was a bustling, growing community of 7,000. The population has fallen by one-third, and tourist crossings have slowed to a trickle. The streets were empty on a recent weekday, save for a lone mariachi band serenading a local man on his birthday.

Police station closed

Columbus has had trouble keeping a police department. The latest crisis began three months ago, when the town closed its dilapidated police station because of a faulty lock on the evidence room. Not long afterward, an officer was injured while trying to break up a bar fight, and two off-duty officers were suspended. The police chief then resigned.

With no police station and only one officer, the town dissolved the department and asked Sheriff Cobos to take over.

But the sheriff's 30 deputies, based in Deming, cover an area larger than the state of Rhode Island, and the county was asking for $26,000 a month to provide policing in Columbus. Residents felt exposed, and they directed their fury at the mayor, Eddie Espinoza.

One of the mayor's main critics is Robert Odom, 58, a writer who moved from Santa Fe three years ago. Odom, author of "Autobiography of a Redneck Hindu," about his spiritual journey, was elected a village trustee last year but resigned a few months ago in a dispute with Espinoza.

"We need our own police department, no matter what," Odom said, preparing a pot of French-press coffee at the home he shares with his partner. "It's impossible to live next door to someone — and we live literally next door to Palomas — without being affected by what's happening in their yard."

Odom and 70 other residents signed a petition last month urging the mayor to "save our Columbus police." Espinoza seemed to get the message: Within days, he appointed a committee to search for a new chief.

Espinoza agreed with his opponents that the city can't count on the county or federal authorities for protection. "The problem is that we're like a stepchild to everybody," he said. "We're just a small municipality."

Small-town appeal

It was, in fact, the drowsy remoteness of this community that attracted people such as Martha Skinner, who turns 72 today. She came from Glendale, Calif., 20 years ago and built Martha's Place Inn. She preceded Espinoza as mayor, and the population tripled, driven mostly by retirees who fell in love with the mild weather, rustic beauty and low cost of living.

Farming has been the economic backbone, supplemented by tourists who came to see Pancho Villa State Park and other Villa attractions.

But most tourists came to take advantage of inexpensive medical care and pharmaceuticals across the border. With the drug violence, that trade mostly has evaporated.

Martha's Place has been kept afloat for the past year by temporary workers building the border fence. "The tourism business has been awful," Skinner said. "But that fence has kept us in business."

The inn's guests one recent week included a customs officer, a fence welder, a contractor working on lighting at the border fence and a writer researching his next novel. The welder checked out early, though. Four state police officers showed up and arrested him at gunpoint, leading him away in handcuffs to face an auto-theft charge.

"There's nothing like a small town," Skinner said the next morning. "It's like living in a comic book most days."

But that small-town charm is showing signs of fatigue.

"I wake up every morning and thank God my wife and I found this little place," local developer Gene McCall recently told the village trustees. Then, pointing his cane at the mayor, he added: "Let's keep it that way."