ZAPATA, Texas — Sgt. Jimmy Mendoza is so baby-faced he could pass for a high school student, but he has helped drag bodies from the Rio Grande, bullets in their heads.
He has sped to a San Ygnacio school after gunfire south of the border hit perilously close to the building, sending students ducking under their desks.
And he’s stood above the Rio Grande and looked across the water, watching members of a drug cartel walk nonchalantly along the Mexican side of the river, machine guns slung over their shoulders.
As a Zapata County sheriff’s deputy the past six years, Mendoza and his fellow state and federal law officers find themselves increasingly playing a deadly game of cat and mouse along the edge of Texas as drug violence grips Mexico’s border towns and spills into the U.S.
That violence has been news for months, but it took on new urgency north of the border after the apparent death Sept. 30 of Colorado native David Hartley, who investigators believe was shot and killed by pirates as he rode a WaveRunner alongside his wife in Mexican waters on Falcon Reservoir.
Now Zapata County, home to world-class fishing, is also the setting for a growing sense of unease among law officers.
Mendoza knows his .357-caliber Sig Sauer is no match for the .50-caliber machine guns some drug bandits are carrying on the other side of the river.
And yet he is optimistic, despite the almost daily discovery of marijuana being shipped north through Zapata County.
“I think we could put a big dent in it,” Mendoza says, staring across the river as a sunset paints the horizon the color of fire. “I think we could stop it with the help of Mexico.”
Life in Zapata County
U.S. 83 is four lanes wide through the town of Zapata, cutting past a McDonald’s, a Pizza Hut and a Dollar General store. The Holiday Inn on the south end of town is modern, its stucco walls crisp in earth tones. Palm trees jut up here and there, and banners for the local high school flutter — “Hawk Pride” and “Go Hawks” and, at the El Rincon de Los Angeles restaurant, “Hawk Nest.”
The Zapata County Courthouse stands prominently atop a hill, next to the squat, fortresslike structure that houses the Sheriff’s Office and the jail.
But there’s a hardscrabble feel to the town. Paint peels from empty storefronts; a farmer sells his fruit from the back of a battered pickup.
The county’s 1,058 square miles — 997 on land, 61 in the water — are home to roughly 13,000 people.
For years, natural gas fueled the economy — in 2006, gas production in Zapata County hit 300.1 billion cubic feet, according to the chamber of commerce, making it the state’s leader. But in recent years, as natural-gas production has moved east and north, it is Falcon Reservoir that has been the key economic engine for Zapata, attracting televised bass-fishing tournaments.
The 44-mile-long lake, which straddles the border, is home to black bass, alligator gar, tilapia and other species that grow to record size in its warm waters.
White U.S. Customs and Border Protection pickups, sport utility vehicles and sedans swarm the roads, an angled Kelly green stripe cutting down the side of each. Boats of the U.S. Coast Guard, Border Patrol and Texas Parks and Wildlife Department move across Falcon Reservoir, their officers armed with semiautomatic rifles.
“Total chaos” yards away
Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr. leans forward in the chair in his office, cups an imaginary balloon in his hands, and begins blowing.
He is making a point. The invisible balloon is the border. The air rushing into it is the drug violence terrorizing border towns from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean.
And the propensity of that balloon to bulge out between his splayed fingers and pop is the threat of that violence spilling into the United States.
Gonzalez’s nickname — Sigi — is monogrammed on his crisp white shirt, across from the badge stitched over his left breast. A small gold badge is affixed to his silver belt buckle. His charcoal hair is flecked with silver; he wears bifocals and a cream-colored Stetson, and the hand-tooled holster on his right hip carries the imprint “Sheriff Zapata Co.”
The world across the border, where whole towns are controlled by well- organized drug cartels, is “totally out of control,” he says.
“This year has made me realize we are yards away from total chaos — total disregard for law, total disregard for human life,” Gonzalez says.
The cartel members are brazen, like the kid busted in his county running drugs who calmly described how easy it was take a couple of Rohypnol, also known as the date-rape drug, wash them down with beer, and shoot someone in the head. And how it was a matter of honor to look the victim in the eye before pulling the trigger.
The cartels are also awash in drug money, making it easy to bribe Mexican law officers, to control things on the south side of the border.
Gonzalez, who took office in 1994, is paid $50,300 a year. A 17-year-old arrested in Zapata for drug running told a stunning story, how he came across three times a day with marijuana in his small fishing boat, dumping it on the American side of the lake on the south edge of town.
He was paid $5,000 a load.
“In three-and-a-half days, he makes what I make in one year,” Gonzalez said.
Incidents shake officials
The sign tacked up on the outside of the Holiday Restaurant on U.S. 83 features a photograph of a giant bass.
Welcome Anglers to
Zapata County
Home of Falcon Lake
Where the People are Friendly
And the Fish are Mean
Until recently, anglers would buy Mexican fishing licenses in Zapata and would think nothing of venturing past the concrete pillars that mark the border.
They would venture into Arroyo Salado, an arm of Falcon Reservoir that stretches to the flooded Mexican town of Old Guerrero, or Guerrero Viejo, with its distinctive Catholic church rising from the water.
But April and May brought three incidents that shook Gonzalez: American anglers accosted by young, armed men in small “Argo” boats, like those favored by Mexican fishermen.
On Aug. 31, armed men in a small boat were seen cutting across the water, the words “Game Wardin” on the side of the vessel in duct tape.
Then, on Sept. 30, David Hartley’s death was reported.
It’s a far cry from what Gonzalez describes as “the old days,” when the occasional theft of a boat motor was the biggest headache.
Now Gonzalez and other officials find themselves in a strange place, trying to warn people without scaring them away from towns like Zapata, which the sheriff insists is still “relatively safe.”
“We don’t know when that’s going to spill over, when that’s going to come here,” said Capt. Fernando Cervantes of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, which is the state’s law enforcement presence on Falcon Reservoir.
Violence galvanizes, scares
Jon Shook, who made the 1,000-mile drive from Durango to fish Falcon Reservoir again this year, unfurls a map of the lake. Just across from Old Guerrero and its iconic church, in ballpoint pen, is a circle about the size of a pea, marking a “hot spot” Shook fished last year.
This year? No way.
He set out a day after the story about David Hartley hit the news, determined to stay in open water well away from the Mexican shore.
“This is the best fishing lake in the country — probably in the world,” Shook says. “I felt comfortable. My wife was very nervous.”
His boat is powerful enough, he reckons, to outrun just about anything else on the water — except a bullet.
But while he embraces caution, others pronounce themselves unafraid.
“I’d tell ’em to come on,” says Justin Morton, who drove 10 hours to fish the reservoir. “The lake and the town need all the support they can get.”
Up the road, at Falcon Lake Tackle, James Bendele laments the loss of business.
Four major fishing tournaments — slated for September, October, January and March — have been canceled. And that was before David Hartley disappeared.
Business is way off at the shop, which he owns with his brother, Tom.
“It sucks because of that bad publicity,” he says. “It’s not just us. It’s hotels, motels, gas stations — every business in town. That lake is the only thing we’ve got going for us.”
Keeping up the fight
Sgt. Mendoza spins his Tahoe around, his headlights cutting across the thigh-high buffalo grass lining the road, and stomps the accelerator down.
In a couple of seconds, the speedometer ticks past 90 mph as he rips up U.S. 83, eager to catch up to a dented Ford pickup he suspects could be loaded with marijuana.
This episode began 15 minutes earlier, when he’d pulled into a gas station in San Ygnacio. A burgundy F-250 sat in the parking lot, a man standing by the air pump motorists use to fill their tires. A few minutes after that, Mendoza was parked a few miles away at a rest area when the same truck pulled past him, turned around and headed south. Mendoza suspected the truck’s driver was a “scout” — out looking for law officers, helping coordinate a drug run through this county that hugs the border. Mendoza was following that truck when he saw the black pickup headed the other way, turned around, and raced to catch it.
He suspects the first driver was trying to lure him south while bundles of pot were driven north in the pickup — the kind of nightly hide-and-seek game that state and federal law officers are increasingly playing along the Rio Grande.
Now Mendoza is behind the truck. The driver holds steady at 65 mph.
One mile goes by. Then another. Mendoza needs a reason to stop the man.
Finally, the truck weaves ever so slightly to the left, its tires just crossing the yellow line before the man straightens it out.
Mendoza flips on his overhead lights. The man pulls over.
Mendoza walks cautiously up to the driver’s side, waving his flashlight’s beam slowly across the truck’s bed and in the windows.
It’s a false alarm. The man, it turns out, had been stopped a little earlier by another officer, his truck searched.
Mendoza slips back behind the wheel. This stop may have yielded nothing, but he knows that soon — maybe not this night, but soon — he’ll come face to face with the drug war again.
Kevin Vaughan: kvaughan@denverpost.com or 303-954-5019
