A Line in the Sand

My Time Covering the Border War

“I am the target. Do you understand? It is very dangerous,” says the undercover Mexican drug agent in broken English as we race through the outskirts of Mexico City.

Our trip south of the border this time takes us to neighborhoods ripe with crime and killing. I’ve been to Latin America a bunch, and specifically Mexico. Covering immigration, I think I’ve done everything that can be done along the border. Snuck in from Mexico into the US? Yep…more on that shortly. Air team? Yep. Water team? Yep. Horse team? Yep. ATV’s? Yep. If there is a US strategy, I’ve covered it. Now we are looking at the other side.

So now we are here. It took a few months, a ton of calls, and a couple of in-person meetings, but we are here. Sitting in the bed of a pickup truck, masked Mexican Federales draped on both sides and armed to the teeth. In the past, I used my handheld mini-DV video camera on stories like these because we needed all the video we could get, and maybe some behind-the-scenes footage would help. In this case, we have no choice. The federales say the neighborhoods we now race through and eventually stop for raids are too dangerous to pull out a typical (and large) Betacam, so small handheld camera it is. In this timeframe, iPhones were newer, and the videos on the handhelds were HD and of better quality and small enough to be less conspicuous. How quickly this would improve and change as iPhones got better.