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
