South of the Border

The subject is Mexico and the year is 2007.  A colleague and I were visiting a customer in El Paso who also had a manufacturing facility in Juarez, Mexico.  At the time, I had been visiting Mexico, but typically flying into Monterrey where there was a standard customs/passport routine associated with arriving in a foreign airport.

Since Juarez is a border city and we were staying in El Paso, I was looking forward to the simplicity of just driving across the border.  I had fond memories of visiting in Tijuana in the 70’s, when you simply walked across the border to shop or eat, no passport, no temporary visas, no drug wars, just a short walk to a semi-exotic and fun location.

I arrived in El Paso first and headed to the rental car counter.  The rental car agent was genuinely friendly and started handing me my paperwork.  The conversation went like this:

Agent:  “Congratulations Mr. Halbert, you’ve been upgraded to a Lincoln Town Car.”

Me:  “Wow, thanks that will really be nice!”

Agent:  “Will you be driving into Mexico?”

Me:  “Yes, I will be there for a few hours tomorrow.”

Agent:  “Congratulations Mr. Halbert, you’ve been downgraded to a Chevrolet Impala.”

Me:  “Wait a minute, what happened?”

Agent:  “Well, we can let you drive the Lincoln into Mexico, but we tend not to get them back.  At least not in one piece and on the same day.  They kind of come back in installments, and when that happens, we expect you to pay for the missing pieces and the reassembly.  I strongly suggest that you take the Impala, they usually come back intact and if they don’t, it will sure cost your insurance company a lot less than the Lincoln.”

Me:  “Okay”

That should have been my first sign of trouble.  But, as a sales guy, my company paid me to be an optimist.  Our customer was sending a young man, who was a native of Mexico, to drive us into Juarez (in my rental car).  This process was part of their policy to maintain consistency in vendor relationships, as they didn’t want to have me reassembled after our meeting in Mexico.

So off we went, south of the border.  Going into Mexico required a short stop at the border, showing our passports and the purchase of a work permit for a few pesos.   My colleague, Bob, had been doing this for many years and was able to simply show his birth certificate.  I, on the other hand, had to show my passport, which means that I would have to go through the same process to leave Mexico later in the day while Bob would not.  At the time, this didn’t seem like a big deal.

After we completed our meeting, we made our run for the border.  Leaving Juarez to go to El Paso is a little more difficult than coming into Mexico.  When we arrived at the border, we were in a 6 lane wide line of cars roughly a mile long.  Given the pace of the traffic, which was  a very slow ooze, I suggested that Bob and our driver stay in the car, in line, while I walked over to the border office and had my papers stamped. 

It’s hard to adequately describe the line of traffic leaving Mexico..  Six lanes of stopped traffic a mile long with men walking between the cars selling cold drinks, magazines, cigarettes and Lincoln Town Car parts.  The temperature was somewhere between 95 and 150 degrees.  About 100 yards from the border there is a “no-man’s land” where the Mexican government (no doubt with American financial aid) has erected a 10 foot high chain link fence on either side of the road with razor wire on top.  Nobody’s selling anything once you reach that final fenced gauntlet.

Bob and our driver insisted that I stay in the car until we were nearly parallel with the Mexican customs office and 10 yards from the entry to the chain link gauntlet.  I asked if I would need my passport, which was in the trunk, and they both insisted that it was completely unnecessary in order to leave the country. 

I exited the car, jogged across the 6 lanes of incoming traffic, and entered the customs office where I got in line behind 3 other folks.  I arrived at the desk where the same guy who had stamped my papers coming into Mexico was waiting to stamp them for my exit.  Except for one thing, I did not have my passport, which WAS required to exit Mexico.  I could see the car trunk that contained my passport slowly entering the no-man’s land and the border agent made it abundantly clear that I could not get my hall pass to America without my passport.  His position on the subject was punctuated by two border agents escorting another “alien” from the line and into a windowless room because he did not have the appropriate documentation.  Now the irony of being detained as an undocumented worker in Mexico wasn’t lost on me, but it didn’t seem an appropriate time to share the humor of the situation with my friendly border agent.

I simply stepped away from the counter, left the building, jogged across 6 lanes of incoming (and unregulated) traffic, jumped the wall and started pounding on the trunk of the Impala.  I think I heard some laughter from inside the car, but it was hard to determine the nature of the sound over the noise of 800 car air conditioners running at full blast.

I returned to the customs office, waited in line and got my papers approved and stamped.  Relieved, I headed out the door only to find the Impala was now well into the no-man’s land and just about to clear the last hurdle before the concrete barriers that keep speeding Lincolns from running the border into America.  As I started jogging through traffic to our car,I had a mental picture of Clint Eastwood in the closing scene from “The Gauntlet.”  Clint is attempting to deliver Sandra Locke to the Phoenix courthouse in a Greyhound bus through a hail of bullets being fired by the good guys.  I kept wondering what the boiling asphalt was going to feel like against my chest and left ear as two hundred Mexican Federales held me on the ground while arresting me for trying to jog across the border to America in the traffic lanes.

At the end of the day, we made it across the border without creating an international incident.  The bad news is that I ruined a perfectly good dress shirt due to sweat contamination jogging in and out of traffic at the border.  The good news is that I got a great deal on an alternator for a 2007 Town Car.