Tiny border towns booming in Mexico

The main street trails off after eight blocks. The three-man police force has nap hours between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. The top attraction in town, locals say, nodding knowingly, is the steamed beef tacos over at Anabel's corner stand.

But look closely: the dusty border town of El Hongo - about halfway between Mexicali and Tijuana, and a difficult 10-hour hike through rattlesnake-infested mountain terrain from California's Interstate 8 - is changing.

A new motel - $7 a bed - and three new cheap hot dog stands have popped up, gallon jugs of water are selling out at Borrego's minimarket, and two pretty girls in tight skirts, leaning suggestively on the wall outside a photocopy shop, are arguably about to give Anabel's a run for its money.

With vigilance increasing at larger, more traditional crossings along the 2,000-mile US-Mexico border, a growing number of would-be US immigrants - and the human smugglers that are paid to guide them there - are choosing small towns like El Hongo as staging grounds. And they are creating boomtowns in their wake.

"Twenty years ago, Tijuana was small, too," says Salvador Zamora, spokesman for the Border Patrol in Washington, D.C. "We crack down in one place and smugglers find and sell the next pit stop. It's one pit stop after another."

This phenomenon of border boomtowns sprouting up is often traced back to 1994, when US authorities boosted enforcement around the San Diego-Tijuana area as part of Operation Gatekeeper. This pushed migrant traffic to smaller towns to the east.

But the pace quickened after 9/11 as the number of border-patrol agents grew, and extra lighting, high-tech sensors, and high steel fences were introduced at the traditional crossings.

Between October 2004 and October 2005, a total of 1.2 million people were arrested trying to cross the border illegally, according to border patrol statistics. But about the same number are estimated to have made it across, although there is no exact data.

Smugglers - or, as they are commonly known here, coyotes - are constantly on the lookout for the "weakest link," says Zamora. They identify towns with just enough infrastructure to sustain the migrants - but not yet so big as to merit too much attention from border patrol on the other side.

These towns are often far from access roads in the US. But word gets out that "this one" could be the "lucky" place to cross. Migrants show up, along with entrepreneurs. Buildings go up, services come in, and both opportunities and trouble grow.

"It's not my problem who they are or where they are going," says José Morales, who grew up in El Hongo and opened a now-thriving cellphone shop here two years ago. "I'm a salesman," he says.

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