Grandstand For Border Fights

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6902, 7 May 1929, Page 4

Grandstand For Border Fights

BHE insurrectos and the rurales have been at it . again at El Paso (writes Montagu Grover), and this time they have killed someone, spurring the United States Government to action. Previous little disputes \pf the sort have merely provided interest for the El Pasans, who took the afternoon off, gathered at the windows of the high buildings, and experienced all the thrills that a test match or a football final brings to the citizen of Australia or New Zealand.

I thought, before I visited El Paso, that it was a sort of the Wild West centre made familiar to us by Messrs. Mix and Gibson. I expected to find streets of weatherboard shanties, before which swaggered Hard-boiled Herman and his mates, in all the glory of their “chaps” and six-shooters. I found a city somewhat larger in population that Geelong, but infinitely larger in the magnificence of its buildings. Like most American cities, it possesses something that is the world’s greatest—“the world’s greatest auto camp”—and it probably is. Not even California, whose pride is its auto camps, can approach that of El Paso in perfection of equipment and magnificence. Personally, I would throw a bouquet at El Paso by asserting that it possesses also the world's greatest hotel. The Conquiestadores is not as large as many of the Ritzes and Biltmores of two continents, but in interior decoration it is the last word in Spanish beauty. It is like something produced by Oscar Asche. It is the State Theatre —and then some. Altogether, it is a charming town, El Paso. The bad men have long gone by the effluxion of time and the activities of the vigilantes; the Rotarians are flourishing; and it is fitted with branches of the Mystic Shriners, the Sciotes, the Elks, the Iviwanis, the Lions, and all the rest of the appurtenances of the world’s greatest civilisation.

But there is a catch in El Paso,

If you take the elevator to my room on the third floor of the Del Norte Hotel —which is perfectly respectable, despite its name—you will see lying on the plain to the south a straggling, frowsy suburb, cut off from the main city by a creek. That creek is the Rio Grande River; that suburb is really the town of Juarez —pronounced Warez —and it is foreign territory, controlled (generally) by the great republic of Mexico, 500 miles away. By reason of its distance and inaccessibility from the capital, Juarez —like all the towns along the border —is one of the first points aimed at by the insurrectos —who are always

Free Show for El Paso Citizens

insurrecting more or less in Mexico.

The town is supposed to be protected against raids by a handful of rurales, or government military police, but when the insurrecto gets busy, he speedily cuts the throats of the halfdozen rurales, and proceeds to shoot up that part of the civilian population which is slow in opening up its negotiable securities. When Pancho Villa was at thi? apex of his glory, he burst into Juarez and killed nearly everybody who was not quick enough to dash across into the United States, while El Paso gathered at its windows and hooted his tactics vigorously. Less sensitive than an English cricketer. Villa went on with his throat-cutting without worrying about the barracking.

Hitherto the rebels and the Government troops have contrived to keep their bullets out of the streets of El Paso, and nobody has bothered about the fighting, except as an interference to industry. Workmen, for instance, cease from laying bricks to view the hostilities, without even the formality of a stop-work meeting. But it is soon over, and next day the Juarezos creep back, reopen their curio shops and saloons, and the tourist and the El Pasan is free to cross the border and have one at eleven, sure in the fact that he can be back at his prohibitionist city by 11.15. “Send a postal card while you are still sober,” runs the device above one curio shop in'Juarez, and in truth it must be admitted that the staple industry of Juarez is alcohol.. If Mexico became dry, all these border towns would go out of existence to-morrow. It is the Eighteenth Amendment which keeps them alive.

I took a trip of an hour and a-half’s duration in an airplane along the Mexican border, but until I went up I failed to understand why American friends were so anxious that I should go. From the upper air the secret was out. On the United States side, right up to the dividing wire fence, were green squares of maize, cantaloupes, marrows, and other agricultural produce. Two feet away, on the Mexican side, began the desert, and it extended to the far horizon.

The people of Juarez are Mexican; those of El Paso are American; but between the two the most excellent relations exist. The Juareso of the better class does his shopping in U 1 Paso, and the El Pasan is so to Juarez that it was once seriou ly mooted that a club “of the old sort” be established across the border, where Volstead is but a name. Half the Mexican children cross the Rio Grande to attend the United States schools, at United States expense, and many of their fathers work in El Paso during the day.