Daytrippers go down Mexico way to gauge border strife

AFTER listening to a fiery debate about the impact of illegal immigration and drug smuggling over the porous US-Mexico border, pensioner Edgar King figured he would make up his own mind about the issue.

"We had to go and see it for ourselves," said King, 82, riding on a new daytrip down to the Arizona-Mexico border with wife Suzette.

The couple are among visitors joining the Gray Line Tours' Border Crisis: Fact or Fiction excursion that takes them to the fabled international line. The desert state straddles the most furiously trafficked stretch of the south-west border for drug and human smugglers from Mexico. For $89 (55), visitors get to meet the people who live, work and do business on the border, as well as those whose job it is to police it, arresting several hundred illegal immigrants a day, and seizing over a ton of narcotics.

They get to walk over a bridge and look down on US inspectors as they work in revving lines of traffic at the port of entry, trying to distinguish cars carrying narcotics from legitimate travellers.

"It's very informative. It really opens your eyes," said Joe Pisconski, 69. Republicans in the US Congress complain the nearly 2,000-mile border is wide open to violence spilling from Mexico, where 15,000 people were murdered in drug-cartel violence last year.

But US president Barack Obama's Democratic administration says additional federal agents, National Guard troops and technology have made it more secure than ever before.

Helping visitors to make up their own minds, the tour linked up with a customs and border liaison officer, who painted a vivid picture of the life of an inspector, hunting for marijuana hidden in tins of jalapeno peppers or heroin in the block of a car engine, and sometimes facing death threats.

They also met a rancher whose land straddles ten miles of the Mexico border, and who is concerned about increasingly violent drug smugglers and bandits, accused of shooting dead a Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry, near the ranch last December.

The packed itinerary also takes in a visit to an association of produce importers, who need to get $2 billion in perishable Mexican watermelons, mangoes and tomatoes on to US supermarket shelves before they spoil.

Sitting on the bus headed back to Tucson, Rita Marco, 48, said the trip had succeeded in bringing life to issues stripped of nuance by the stark political debate. "I think that it's really easy to get caught up in the rhetoric in either side of the issue. What we heard today is so much richer than one point of view of another."