Cross-border travel (and ecological cooperation) in the Big Bend.
The cave-related excuse for this post is the desire to explore caves along the border near Big Bend. Experience has shown that the best ones are on the Mexican side. Well, Gill, times have changed. When I lived in Big Bend (1967-1984), I crossed the border in both directions many, many times: La Linda bridge, Boquillas and Lajitas fords, and a number of other places. In those days a US Citizen could legally enter the USA at any time at any place in any way, the only requirement being that they "report on a timely basis" that they had done so. That usually meant that after I got home to Alpine I'd call the BP in Marfa and let them know what I had done. I was supposed to call Customs, but quickly learned that the local officers did not like me to do so as it was a nuisance. The BP had a dispatcher who would answer the telephone. They probably felt the same way, but were more polite. Most of them knew who I was. A bit more historic info: That was also the time they were just starting to get Viet Nam surplus sensing devices, and I set off a lot traversing the canyons and trails near the Rio Grande. I was in everybody's data base. Both my trucks, Tortuga I and later, Tortuga II (which I got from Ken Laidlaw) were painted Forrest Service Green, which was close enough to Choate Green to confuse a lot of people. The fact that I monitored BP and other agency radios was also informative and occasionally entertaining. (You could legally do that, too, as long as you did not tell anyone else what you had heard while monitoring their frequencies). We also had a Sheriff's Department radio in the truck so when Rescue Squad business was about I could communicate with the dispatcher in Alpine. The little Cessna I flew was similarly equipped, so I was pretty aware of what was going on along the border. The La Linda bridge was easy coming north, but was a hassle going south due to the Mexican officers. The only reason the bridge existed was to truck fluorspar out of Mexico to the broker on the railroad at Marathon, and the Mexicans collected fees. They could not issue papers for Americans headed south. I once got the Mexican papers at Del Rio (you could not get them at Ojinaga - a different jurisdiction) and crossed legally into Mexico at La Linda, but that was so difficult and fraught with so many problems that I never tried it again. It was a lot more practical to cross at Del Rio or Presidio and travel in Mexico, but getting to the southwest side of the Sierra del Carmen (south of Boquillas) was not easy nor fast. And, oh yes, driving from Boquillas to the La Linda bridge was (is?) an adventure in itself! There is a significant limestone mountain range in the way. I did find some small caves there, but there has been no serious search for Big Ones that I know of. Ron Ralph can tell you a great story about the time we drove north from Monterrey and crossed into the US at La Linda after having been run down by Operation Intercept funded heavily-armed Mexicans (supposedly Army) at a corral in the middle of nowhere, about 40 km south of La Linda. Fortunately we had a couple cases of Mexican beer, Mexican population planning posters from Salvadore Contreras, and Ron's glib tong. He played the Spanish-speaking student to my being the English-only innocent professor. But back to the Big Bend border today. It's totally different. And it seriously effects cross-border caving. Visibly armed, young, well-paid (and usually very macho feeling) federal officers are all over the place. A LOT of them. A very large operations center has been built in Alpine and check stations are on the roads. If they focused on traffic north out of the border zone, it would not be so bad. The occasional commercial bad-guy smuggler should be stopped. I consider myself reestablished and accepted again as a "local" in the Terlingua area, and we all know who is who. The tourists are obvious. Even more obvious are the Mexican nationals who are not local. The stand out like a sore thumb. The local families who have worked and lived for generations in the mutual economic zone along the river have been torn apart - some are "legal" and some are not. Economically, they are still badly needed, but most outside law does not have a clue as to who is who. And they don't care. Federal officers have completely disrupted centuries of culture in Big Bend and hassled tourists to the point of making them fearful of even stepping on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande in the middle of a canyon float trip. Truth is, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo guaranteed free traffic across the Rio Grande by citizens of both nations, and that treaty trumps any US laws and Federal regulations. However, if you try to explain this to the (mostly young) gun-carrying officers you are likely to find yourself with a heap of problems. The Big Bend is clearly rather different from the border in California and Arizona. It is also certainly true that administrators in Washington are fueled by electoral paranoia and the desire to apply their rules uniformly. But it sure has screwed up the river communities in the Big Bend of Texas without any obvious effect on terrorism or smuggling. I began this post to elaborate on some local details, but after I started writing Herman Miller tossed in his two cents. Thank you, Herman. The "Los Diablos" - the crack fire-fighting team of Mexican nationals has indeed always had a pass across the border but not always under very clear authority. They are badly needed in the (both federal and state) parks to control the wildfires. There is nothing close to equivalent, skilled, manpower in the Big Bend north of the river. You are not going to see in the near future tourists wading back and forth as they used to, enjoying Mexican food and beer in Boquillas, and willing workers coming north to help build in Terlingua. A truck full of Austin cavers, stuck in a deep spot in the middle of Rio Grande at Boquillas, is into a lot more trouble than in the past. That said, there has been (and continues to be) serious talk about a new bridge and a formal crossing at Lajitas (probably from the bluffs just west of "town"). Cooperation for management of the parks, wildlife, and ecology on both sides of the river, mostly by non-governmental agencies, is rather significant and portends a lot for those of us interested in the natural recourses, including caves. For most of the last decade, the World Wildlife Fund, Big Bend National Park, Comission Nacional de Areas Naturales Protegidas, Big Bend Ranch State Park, and more than twenty other agencies, institutions, and organizations from both sides of the border have been conducting a variety of activities. There are many remarkable efforts that have gone forward without any State Department involvement. Binational cooperation, the participation of divergent disciplines, and the involvement of riverside human communities are key ingredients to move forward and address conservation issues. People tend to forget that man is the most important part of the ecology. For those of you who might be interested, these efforts are summarized in a recent, rather academic, book: Conservation of Shared Environments: Learning from the United States and Mexico , Edited by Laura Lopez-Hoffman, Emily D. McGovern, Robert G. Varady, and Karl W. Flessa, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2009. Included in this book is a discussion of the 2005 REAL ID Act which gave the U.S. Department of Homeland Security authority to wave laws as necessary to hasten border wall and road construction, which have voided long-established environmental regulations and agreements, and the 2006 enactment of the Secure Fence Act. In combination, these laws have resulted in ecological degradation and the creation of new conflicts in the border region. I wrote a fairly lengthy review of this book last year: http://www.cenizojournal.com/cenizo-2010-03.pdf Cenizo is a free, quality quarterly publication focused on the Big Bend. My review starts on page 22. DirtDoc
