Last Act of Defiance

 

Stock-in-Trade

Last Act of Defiance

the River

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

 

 

            El Paso is the final Wild, Wild, West City.

                                                                        ~   Shawn Crahan

              There is a best place to start trying to describe America’s most unique wild, wild west city.

            It would be a location, and that would be where the Rio Grande River flows between the Franklin Mountains on the north and the Sierra de Juarez on the south. It’s recorded in history. In a ceremony there on April 30, 1598, a representative of Spain, Juan de Onate, showed his brass and had his priest bless a ceremony where he took ceremonial possession of the entire territory drained by the river and brought Spanish civilization to El Paso del Norte, the Pass of the North.

            With several thousand head of livestock and a fair representation of a community of people, he crossed the river and continued north to what is now Santa Fe. Before his life was done, he introduced the Spanish language to del Norte, he established Catholicism to a great swath of the upper reaches of the drainage, he introduced farming and mining equipment to an endemic population, he brought rudimentary health care (as the world knew at that time), he established Santa Fe with its a major trade route from Mexico City, and, most importantly, he brought the horse to del Norte.

            Now, he isn’t popular among the progressives, the critical race theorists, and reinventors of history, but he had to be one tough little son-of-a-gun. In fact, he ought to be nominated as El Paso’s first written history, tough son-of-a-gun. He, of course, wasn’t the last.

            El Paso became a crossroads.

            A second clue is populated with headstones. Concordia Cemetery on the north side of the river became a permanent resting place of citizenry that included town fathers, business and professional people, and a litany of tough folks including a boxcar of gun slingers, a number of lawmen and a plethora of practiced red-light blossoms. Graves started to be dug there in 1856 and it is purported a good number of the 65,000 or so deceased who reside there continue to vote a straight democratic ticket to this very day.

            El Paso remains eclectic.

The next feature in this profile must be that grand Trost designed structure, the hotel El Camino Real, or as it is now known, El Paso del Norte. It was the place where a lively crowd gathered on the 10^th floor deck to drink and watch the battle of Juarez rage just across the river. It proved to be too revealing and troops from both sides of the conflict took pot shots at the revelers. Several were hit! Remodeling notwithstanding the grand old place is a sophisticated walk back in time. Stroll into the Tiffany domed bar and you enter the once inner sanctum of some the most intense cow buying in American history. The emphasis, of course, was crossing Mexican cattle. Today, cattle are crossed elsewhere so only the ghosts of the El Paso buyers haunt the place.

It is a reminder El Paso was once a hat town.

            It remains a boot town at least if manufactured boots are fair game to claim such. It could once claim to be the world capital of cowboy boots. In its heyday, the immensity of the output of Tony Lama, Lucchese, and scores of privately owned custom shops made the town ground zero for boot arbitrage.

The Sole of El Paso was leather bound, but it remains a best place to seek the creation of world class handmade boots.

The final feature of this abbreviated search for old El Paso is the Star on the Mountain located on the south side of the Franklins. First lit in 1940, the star is lighted throughout the year for special occasions. Thousands of visitors flying into El Paso after dark will remember being greeted out the left side of the plane by that star on the toe of that ridgeline. What a proper greeting upon entering Texas. What can be more Texas than that lone star, and, yet many will argue, El Paso doesn’t fit Texas. The relationship is incongruous.

After all, the River runs through it, and its geographic relationship with lands northward and southward transcends everything.

Stock-in-Trade

            Whereas the Silk Road was a series of trade routes, the juncture of north, south, east, and west trade routes at del Norte collided at El Paso.

            It was one of the most natural land-based trade intersections in the world, and its remote location defied much oversite and regulatory interference. Trade goods, Stock-in-Trade, became as numerous and wide ranging as the characters leading the burros or driving the Jeeps. Illicit goods were a major portion of those offerings.

            If the metrics are reviewed, illegal goods and services always had impact on the local population. There is extensive data that suggests fully one third of the city’s residents were involved in illegal trade in the ‘70s. Where that is today is not so much defined. What we do know is that El Paso was a major point of genesis in the modern drug trade.

Obviously, it remains a problem with the whole world now being aware, but beyond everything else, the River was centrally complicit.

Last Act of Defiance

Before the Nixon administration, the drug business across the entirety of the international border was largely unofficiated, and comprised of gaggles of crooks and thugs. Anchoring the western end of the (then) trade routes was El Paso with its natural location and historic personality.

Lots of folks were involved including rich high school kids who would drive their Jeeps across the Rio Grande and night to hook up with their suppliers. It was a universe of small-time operators, but Nixon changed that.

Needing a political boost, he made a big deal out of bringing the arm of the federal government into the skirmish. He was going to be the great fixer. Before long, however, the competing federal agencies assigned to the push were mired in the Washington politics of attention, funding battles, and ensconced bureaucracies. The competing agency fights were epic. There was the Bureau of Narcotics, the United States Customs and Border Protection, the Office of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the Office of Drug Abuse and Law Enforcement, and ultimately the Department of Drug Enforcement (headquartered in El Paso).

A theorem is in order.

The arrival of the strong arm of Washington was largely successful in shutting down the small-time gaggles, but the absence of real commitment of shutting down the greater trade was witnessed by the emergence of much larger and more sophisticated operations to move the product across the River into the insatiable and cultured American demand for drugs.

The immensity of the federal government was matched with the emergence of the Mexican cartels.

The book, Dirty Dealing, is an interesting synopsis of this story. The El Paso Chagra family is the subject, but the impact and growth of general and perhaps expected agency tactics and stretch explains a great deal about current day events. Throughout the early drug wars, the development of political posturing with personal vendettas was widespread.

The Chagra brothers, particularly Lee and Joe, decried foul the prosecutorial (and investigatory) misconduct of federal agents who became obsessed in destroying the family. Agent provocateurs and the weaponization of the justice system were terms applied by them 50 years ago in the same context being manifested today.

The fact emerges that the agencies themselves became expert in multiplying conspiracies.

Not for a moment suggesting the brothers were innocent victims, a poignant fact emerges that was touched upon but not expanded in the book. There was an epiphany when Lee (at one time considered perhaps among the four best defense attorneys in the nation) decided he was not going to sit tight and allow agency gross misconduct to destroy him. There becomes that point when principle must be held inviolate. An interesting graphic emerged to explain his defiance toward the tyrannical actions of the federal agencies.

Soon, there was an outcome, but which character was the citizen and which character was the force of government was revealed to be …  reversed.

 

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher in southern New Mexico. “Add up all the money spent by this government on drugs and border control since this time, and consider the implications of Washington politics.”