UK’S DAILY MAIL SLAMS MCALLEN
Tue, 2015-10-13 22:17
News Staff
EXPRESSWAY SHOOTOUT DOESN’T HELP VALLEY’S PR MESSAGE
ALLEGED PERP DEPORTED 6 TIMES?
By G. Romero Wendorf
McALLEN -- Despite the fact that crime in McAllen dropped by more than 10 percent last year, you wouldn’t know it from a story published last week by The Daily Mail, one of the UK’s leading newspapers with an average daily circulation of 1.5 million and a website that boasts more than 100 million unique visitors per month.
With that sort of readership, if you happen to land a story in The Daily Mail, you want it to be good news, not bad.
The Daily Mail headline from last Friday that has some McAllen city leaders and area economic development people fuming reads:
“Revealed, America’s most fearful city where Texans live next to a War Zone: McAllen had two murders last year. A mile away over the Mexican border in Reynosa, 15,000 have been cut down in five years in a vortex of cartel murders, extortion and torture.”
For those who know Reynosa, the story wasn’t that far off the mark in this writer’s opinion – it can be compared to a war zone. Which is why almost all of the people I know personally never step foot there. The few who do go there typically have family there, but they dread the trip, and typically don’t drive there in a car with Texas plates. Nor do they travel at night. And the old glory days of eating out at La Cucaracha and La Fogata are long gone, sad to say.
La Fogata robbery
Speaking of La Fogata, one of Reynosa’s old famed restaurants, I have a good friend who went to eat there to celebrate a family occasion in February 2008. His family members didn’t want to go – they said travel to Reynosa was too dangerous -- but he convinced them no problem, everything is safe, we’ll be fine. Trust me. Don’t worry. All this Reynosa violence stuff, we’re not going to run into it.
While they were sitting there inside La Fogata, however, early Saturday evening, four men burst through the front door wearing ski masks, carrying what appeared to be automatic weapons, and proceeded to rob everyone there, including all the diners and the relatively poor workers alike, waiters, dishwashers. They caught an elderly member of my buddy’s party trying to hide some cash and hit him on the back with one of the guns. He was later treated at a local hospital after they made it back home.
Asked how long the robbery took, my friend says approximately four minutes.
“But it felt like four hours.”
Thankfully, the robbers left them their truck keys, but then they had the problem of getting across the border with no ID because the armed thugs had taken that too – all the purses and wallets containing everyone’s personal ID, including home addresses, phone numbers, personal photos, cell phones, everyone’s jewelry.
“I had $10 left in my pocket,” my buddy said, “which I was going to use as a tip for the musicians. So we used that for the bridge toll, and then when we got back across, the Customs guys listened to our stories, compared the different versions, and then let us go. The next day, Sunday afternoon, my brother and I had to go back for one of the cars we had to leave behind, and we saw people walking into La Fogata, like nothing had happened, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘If you only knew.’”
That was 7.5 years ago. The scene in Reynosa has only grown worse since.
PR for Reynosa
Despite the ongoing violence south of the border, the economic development and chamber people on this side of the border, especially those with ties to the McAllen MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes all of Hidalgo County), do their best to market this border area as safe. Which it is. But on this side of the other. Not the other.
The reason some try to brand Reynosa as still being relatively safe is because it’s maquila industry is tied to local trade zones and industrial parks – located all across Hidalgo County – and if Reynosa is branded as un-safe, it’s going to be harder to entice outside businesses to build maquila plants in Reynosa and ship their finished products to free trade zones on this side of the border. Instead, these outside investors may choose to open a manufacturing plant in China or India or Viet Nam instead, or in another Mexican city – one that’s inland, considered safer than Reynosa and the rest of the border area as well.
Of course, the U.S. manufacturers could build their plants on this side of the border, providing jobs to Valley residents in need of work, but they’d have to start workers off at $7.25 an hour (current U.S. minimum wage) vs. Mexico’s minimum wage of 62 cents per hour or a little less than $5 per day.
You got that, right? In the U.S., minimum-wage workers earn $7.25 PER HOUR vs Mexico, where they earn less than $5 PER DAY.
So when huge American corporations choose to manufacture goods in Reynosa vs. McAllen or other areas of Hidalgo County, the reason is obvious – money
That being said, local economic boosters do their best to make it seem that Reynosa’s reputation for drug-cartel related violence is overblown. The national media is sensationalizing it. But most people I know, they never cross the border. This includes white-collar professionals as well as bluecollar people.
The exceptions who do still cross the river, besides those with family living on the other side, also include those in need of medical and dental care but lack the money to pay for it here. But most of them choose Nuevo Progreso over Reynosa, despite NP having had a few shootouts of its own. Most notably, the one that took place there in December 2009 during a Welcome Back Winter Texan Fiesta.
Talk about bad timing.
Expressway shootouts
Getting back to The Daily Mail story from last week mentioned at the top of this story, it portrayed Reynosa in a relatively realistic light. The story includes these three paragraphs:
“The city in the state of Tamaulipas has been caught in the bloody vortex of a cartel war since 2010, that has cost the lives of more than 15,000 people, many of whom are innocent civilians cut down in the crossfire.
“The local police force was disbanded in 2013 because half of the police officers were killed in the tit-for-tat slaughter. Federal Police and the Mexican military now patrol the city with assault vehicles in armored trucks.
“The grip of gang violence is so bad on Reynosa, which has a population of 600,000, that 950 murders were committed in 2013 - a rate of 150 killings per 100,000. In comparison, across Iraq in 2012, the homicide rate was eight per 100,000.”
So far into the story, it doesn’t seem as if The Daily Mail is mis-representing the facts. But then the story moves its focus to this side of the border, and when I was reading it, I was thinking, is The Daily Mail writing about the same place in which I hang my hat – Hidalgo County? In the context of the Mail’s story, in particular, McAllen.
For example, consider this paragraph from the same story:
“Less than a 10-minute drive away, there were only two murders in McAllen, Hidalgo County, in 2013. But frequently, the Texan residents can hear gunshots at all hours of the day and even spot heavily-armed drug smugglers in their streets after dark.”
Maybe if you live in a small house down on the river’s edge?
The Daily Mail interviews another woman who’s quotedin the same story:
“I regularly hear gunshots being fired from my bedroom,” said Hidalgo County resident Suehay, who has lived on the US-Mexico border all her life. “They can go off at any time, but it’s far more common to hear them on weekends and public holidays.”
The Daily Mail story then publishes a photo of an upperscale McAllen neighborhood. The houses look as if they’re in the $100,00+ range. The photo’s caption: “McAllen: A 10-minute drive from Reynosa, Texan residents can hear gunshots all hours of the day and spot drug smugglers in their streets.”
Holy moly. If I was a fledgling physician, for example, living in Boston, looking to re-locate to McAllen, I might look at this and say, thanks, but no thanks. Too dangerous. Even though, statistically speaking, Boston is only two points safer than McAllen when it comes to violent crime (FBI crime stats).
This has been the Valley’s public-relations problem – reminding out-of-towners that this side of the border isn’t Mexico, and that cities across Hidalgo County – whether it’s McAllen, Pharr, Mission, Edinburg, Weslaco, San Juan, Alamo, Donna (pick a city) – are not the same as Reynosa.
Expressway shootout
Then, as if to prove me a liar, two groups of drug traffickers get into a major league gun shootout along Expressway 83 last Friday afternoon. Broad daylight. San Juan Police Chief Juan Gonzalez describes the motive as a “drug rip-off.”
The driver of a blue Expedition was driving westbound along Expressway 83, minding his own business last Friday, with 540 pounds of pot stored safely in the back of his SUV, an assault rifle by his side, when a beige Tahoe pulled up behind him with four men inside who proceeded to shoot him off the road.
“The 911 calls (from passers-by) started coming in pretty quick,” said Chief Gonzalez. “Some of the 911 calls thought the Tahoe was law enforcement. The guys inside were wearing tactical gear and there was a red-andblue light on the visor, so some of the callers said it looked like a police vehicle was chasing the Expedition.”
(Are Jonathan Treviño and his Panama Unit crew still locked up in the federal pen?)
Two tires on the blue Expedition were shot to (expletive), forcing it off the expressway onto the side of the road. The driver jumped from behind the wheel and ran across the expressway, said Gonzalez.
Meanwhile, one of the four guys in the beige Tahoe jumped from it, climbed behind the disabled Expedition and drove it into the parking lot of a business lining the frontage road. His three co-horts jumped from the beige Tahoe and all four started off-loading the bundles of dope into the Tahoe. By the time San Juan cops arrived on the scene, the beige SUV was trying to make its great escape.
It led police officers on a wild chase that went north of Alamo and north of Donna.
“They were driving fast,” said Gonzalez.
Meanwhile, several of the men inside the Tahoe started pitching bundles of marijuana out of the windows, trying to somehow obstruct the police giving chase.
“They were throwing bundles of marijuana, their tactical gear, masks, beer cans at us,” said Gonzalez.
The chase finally ended near the intersection of Val Verde and Owassa roads. All four of the Tahoe occupants disappeared into a nearby sugarcane field.
“Then the rains really started to fall,” said Gonzalez, “hampering our ability to track them.”
The good news is, no one was hurt. The bad news is, only one of the five men involved in the two-vehicle drug ripoff shake-down is in custody. Gonzalez said officers are still searching for the remaining four – the driver of the disabled blue Expedition, which ended its run with approximately 12 high-powered rounds marring its exterior, and three of the four pseudo cops who were inside the Tahoe.
“All told,” said Chief Juan Gonzalez, “we recovered 540 pounds of marijuana, one SKS assault rifle, two vehicles, and one suspect is in custody facing federal charges by DEA and ATF.”
The suspect in custody has been previously arrested and deported at least six times, said Gonzalez.
“From what we can tell, all five men are Mexican nationals, and they all have criminal records,” said Gonzalez.
(“Do we have violence? Yes, we do. But is that violence directly linked to Mexico? No, it’s not.” Former Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño; Nov. 17, 2011; The Monitor; prior to his conviction of accepting bribes from a drug smuggler.)
Two weapons were recovered after last Friday’s expressway shootout, but the missing suspects are believed to still be armed.
San Juan Police Chief Juan Gonzalez said that a vehicle was caught in the crossfire Friday while the Tahoe was chasing the Expedition westbound, shooting at it, trying to bring it to a stop. Thankfully, the driver wasn’t physically injured even though his vehicle was hit with several rounds.
“Our officers did a good job pursuing the Tahoe,” said Gonzalez. “It was important to us that this chase didn’t endanger the public or harm any of our officers. And in the end, that’s exactly the way it went down.”
If not for the rain and the heavy sugar cane brush, the search dogs might have been able to track down three of the four men still at large.