New Tactics Slash Gridlock at the Border

TIJUANA — The last time it was this easy to drive legally through the world’s busiest land border crossing, San Diego was a parochial Navy port and Tijuana was half its size.

Little more than a year ago, the San Ysidro crossing was a fume-bathed, bumper-to-bumper bottleneck where motorists sat for hours in gridlock that frayed nerves, inspired fistfights and defied the close cross-border cooperation promised under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Rush-hour traffic, holiday shoppers and the occasional rude U.S. inspector still rile commuters, but today, most drive north through San Ysidro in 20 minutes or less, on the average, INS officials say.

For policymakers who see the border as the heartbeat of a vibrant binational economy, this represents a not-so-small victory in the struggle to fine-tune the inspection stations that sift the vast U.S.-bound stream of humanity. Their vision is a border as fine-tuned as a perfectly synchronized Swiss watch.

But in an age when smugglers have concealed cocaine in canned chili peppers, exotic baby snakes in bra cups and ozone-eroding Freon in contraband canisters, law enforcement guardians are still concerned about making the border too easy to cross. To them, the car crossings are a final sieve to trap northbound drugs, southbound stolen cars and U.S. guns that officials fear will end up in the hands of drug cartels and criminals.

The debate over how to best balance the two concerns is not likely to go away in an era in which drug abuse is among the most pressing U.S. problems. But increasingly, a new generation of border architects is arguing that the U.S. crossings can act as a bulwark against contraband without being a clumsy obstacle to an increasingly integrated region.

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“There has been a paradigm change in the way we see the border,” said San Diego U.S. Atty. Alan Bersin, President Clinton’s Southwest border czar. “The traditional view was that enforcement was adverse to traffic and commerce.

“The old antithesis has been rejected,” Bersin said.

“Now we have to unlock the treasures on this border at the macro level,” he said, alluding to a growing economic boon that already nets San Diego billions of dollars in revenue a year, according to studies.

It is on the macro level that most people experience the carnival-esque San Ysidro border, a 24-hour international conga line of 40 million U.S.-bound people and 15 million cars a year. The wait times exercise a subtle but profound effect on cross-border social and economic life.

Arturo Martin, 22, a senior at Point Loma Nazarene College in San Diego, only went to Tijuana when he absolutely had to in the days when it took him more than an hour to make the return crossing. On a recent Tuesday, he popped over to Tijuana to attend to his new business setting up U.S.-direct collect phone booths, and made the midday return crossing in seven minutes.

“Before, it would keep you on a real tight leash,” Martin said. “Before I would never, like, go down to Tijuana just for a drink or dinner, and if I did, I’d stay until midnight to avoid the line. Dating in Tijuana was not an option. How could you have a relationship across a border it took forever to cross? Now you can go down and spend time with her between school and work.

“Now I wish we could do something about the traffic in L.A. It’s crazy,” Martin said.

The strategy to speed up crossings employs a combination of law enforcement, technology and traffic management, and zeros in on the thousands of law-abiding commuters whose crossings are the rhythms of regional integration.

More than 40,000 people cross through the San Ysidro border every day to work in San Diego or Tijuana, returning to their home countries at supper time, studies say. Thousands of Tijuana parents drive their children to San Diego private schools or public schools, where they pay out-of-district tuition. There are more than a million Tijuana-to-San Diego family and social visits each month, according to studies.

To address the flow, INS staff has been doubled and the number of customs agents has been beefed up significantly. In July 1995, when border gridlock was severe, there were only 127 working immigration inspectors at San Ysidro, officials say. On a typical day, half the lanes were closed. Now there are 306 inspectors, allowing INS officials to open as many lanes as necessary during peak commuter hours. And there are more agents available to walk the car lines with dogs trained to sniff out the presence of hidden drugs and human cargo.

Sophisticated technologies are being tested as well.

More than 2,400 commuters have enrolled in an 18-month-old experimental commuter program that devotes an entire lane to drivers whose cars are equipped with a special electronic password, said Sally Carrillo, the INS supervisor of the lane program. Located in Otay Mesa, east of San Diego, the lane relieves San Ysidro of the burden of commuters who often cross several times a day.

Sixty percent of the enrollees are U.S. citizens who live in San Diego, Carillo said, and 22% are Mexicans. The rest are largely Asian investors who commute to Tijuana maquiladoras--foreign-owned plants, she said.

“We get letters from people saying, ‘I’m not getting a divorce now, my wife thanks you, my children thank you,’ ” Carrillo said. “They say, ‘Instead of spending time in the border line, I can be with my family. I would like to be able to kiss the agents at the gate.’ ”

All applicants must undergo fingerprinting and criminal background checks, providing information welcomed by U.S. law enforcement agencies.

There are random spot checks of those using the lane, and no one is exempt--not even people like San Diego Police Sgt. Manuel Rodriguez, the head of a special cross-border liaison team, who often goes to Tijuana and back a few times a day.

“For law enforcement, it’s safer, because if there’s an operation in Mexico, like an anti-drug raid, we can get out quickly,” Rodriguez said. “It’s made life a lot easier for us because basically, that’s where we work.”

Because of the success at Otay Mesa, INS has provided funding for seven other ports, Carrillo said. San Ysidro is under consideration, along with crossings in Texas and Arizona, she said. Even the program’s initial critics are more comfortable with it.

“We were suspicious of that at first,” said Susan Kennedy, of Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office. “Drugs are coming across the border in cars and trucks, so it’s important to take a long view when implementing programs to increase traffic.”

Enhancing border traffic and trade without appearing to sacrifice law enforcement goals is a delicate balancing act--particularly when the Tijuana drug cartel is just across the border. No agency wants to appear lax.

Even law enforcement officials who firmly back closer regional ties voice concern that traffic along the 2,000-mile border could be used by the Mexico-based smugglers believed to be responsible for shipping about 70% of the cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine that reaches U.S. consumers.

“You’ve got 82 million cars, three million-plus trucks and 230 million people crossing the border a year,” said White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey. “The entire cocaine and heroin shipment wouldn’t fill 30 containers, and that’s just a tiny fraction of the 9 million shipping containers sent each year.”

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Some officials in San Diego argue that the two goals can be complimentary, though measuring progress on the murky drug front is an imprecise science at best. They cite the steady increase in the number of drug seizures reported by U.S. Customs in the past two years, though the size of the cocaine and heroin hauls fluctuates.

The hellish traffic season of 1995, INS officials say, actually seemed to favor criminals.

Camouflaged by the sea of cars, vendors and enraged motorists, “banzai runners” stormed across the border on foot. Port runners roared through in cars. Agile border-jumpers sometimes climbed over the gates of unattended booths as if they were jungle gyms, officials said. Smugglers mingled with illegal immigrants or directed their loads through the port, said INS Commissioner Doris Meissner.

A few foreign businessmen searching a maquiladora site took one look at the disheveled tableau and based their operation in the Texas or Arizona border areas instead, U.S. officials said.

“We had literally lost control,” said San Diego INS chief Mark Reed. “We were not effective either from an enforcement perspective or a traffic management perspective.”

Not everyone saw it that way. Many customs inspectors believed longer waits at the border enhanced enforcement, making smugglers likely to get nervous and give themselves away, U.S. officials say.

INS officials argued that long wait times flustered all motorists, making drug smugglers indistinguishable from honest citizens.

Some are bemused that it is San Diego, a city with a conservative image nationwide, where pressures have emerged for a border management shift. Economic incentives abound. According to a study by San Diego Dialogue, a research group that promotes trans-border cooperation, about $2.8 billion is spent each year by those crossing from Tijuana, more than half of it in San Diego stores, a figure amounting to more than three-quarters of the $3.8 billion generated by the No. 2 industry, tourism. San Diego exports $2.5 billion worth of goods to Mexico, mostly televisions, computers and other electronics, the study said.

A byproduct of the drive to improve traffic has been the opening of cross-border communication lines to resolve problems that were once at the mercy of maddeningly triangular channels. In the old days, Bersin said, “San Diego would call Washington, which would call Mexico City, where officials would call Tijuana.”

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For the past year, a 31-member Binational Advisory Council has held regular meetings to hash out border issues. Its members are top Tijuana business leaders, U.S. law enforcement and immigration officials, San Diego elected leaders, the consuls of both countries--and even the CEO of the San Diego Padres.

The most optimistic have a shining dream of the border of the future, with an expanded new San Ysidro land port that acts as a gleaming citadel of cross-border commerce and a monument to binational culture. There are even architectural plans--but most observers think construction is a long way off.

The reinvention of the border, U.S. officials say, is a fragile, step-by-step process that could easily be derailed by an international incident, like the torture-killing of DEA Agent Enrique Camarena in 1985.

“The reality is, we’re not going to make further progress on economic and social integration without helping to resolve the law enforcement problem,” said Charles Nathanson, executive director of San Diego Dialogue. “Whatever we do to increase legal traffic must help to catch contraband. Otherwise, a big shipment will be found, and they will shut down everything we’ve accomplished.”