Word: starrs
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...federal estimate, 40% of all the drugs crossing South Texas move through Starr, sometimes amounting to 15 tons of marijuana and 1,000 lbs. of coke a week. Confiscations in the Rio Grande valley doubled last year; arrests this year by the Drug Enforcement Administration shot up from...
...Starr County's 92 miles of riverbank affords myriad landing points for rubber rafts and the human "mules" who wade across with backpacks. Among some of the Hispanics who make up 96% of Starr's population, smuggling has been a tradition since the Civil War, when Confederate cotton was moved south...
...lure of fast cash is powerful in a county battered by 34% unemployment. Like other border areas, Starr depends on commerce with northern Mexico, and the peso's plummet has forced some stores to close. Yet overall retail sales are up 10%, and bank deposits have leaped 198% in five years -- a cash transfusion that Customs officials attribute to the dope flow. The new money, concedes Mayor Jose Saenz of Roma-Los Saenz, a border town of 3,700, "indirectly benefits us all." That touch of prosperity, according to Customs Agent D'Wayne Jernigan, has "created a wall of reluctance...
Cocaine has given Starr's brown landscape a dash of affluence. Ornate brick homes protected by iron fences and snarling Rottweilers are popping up along U.S. 83. Investigators say that Colombian operators are paying the mafiosos huge sums to fly drug loads north from makeshift strips. The border patrol has arrested 1,437 Colombian illegals in the valley this year...
...corrupting influence of drug money frequently leads to tensions between lawmen on opposite sides of the border. U.S. officials say rogue Mexican cops sometimes provide armed escorts for truckloads of dope moving north to the States. Mexican police have accused Starr's sheriff, Eugenio Falcon Jr., of invading a hospital south of the border in Reynosa and murdering a drug runner who was a suspect in a Starr County multiple killing. "The charges are ridiculous," insists Falcon...