Now Harder to Enter Mexico; Will We Learn to Wait? Charritos, Anyone?

In an effort to stop the illegal importing of weapons from the U.S., Mexico has launched a new program for heightened screening of incoming vehicles. New measures will weigh all incoming cars and scan their license plates through a database. The previous system checked only 10% of the 230,000 vehicles that cross the border daily.

These procedures have long been standard U.S. policy and contribute to long lines at official ports of entry. In El Paso, it is not unusual to wait 90 minutes to reenter the US from Juarez, Mexico; sometimes the wait can take hours. During exceptionally busy periods the line awaiting the U.S. entrance inspection extends across the entire length of the international bridge and backs up into Mexico for several city blocks. Border residents express concern that the lines awaiting entrance to Mexico will now be similar.

This wait, however, is but an inconvenient byproduct in a crucial measure. Of the weaponry drug cartels leave behind at Mexican crime scenes, 95% was purchased from U.S. sources and imported illegally. Mexico initiated the new border technology to thwart this influx last week at Matamoros, across from Brownsville TX. By the end of 2009 it plans to implement the new strategy plans across their southern border as well.

In a related story this week, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet NapolitanoJanet Napolitano announced that the U.S. will also step up inspections of vehicles leaving the country for Mexico in a $400 million project to improve security on the border and augment Mexico's efforts. U.S. measures will add trained canine teams, an additional 100 Border Patrol agents across the Mexico border inspecting vehicles entering Mexico and the screening of rail cars entering into Mexico. Napolitano indicated that the technology utilized would mitigate waiting in line.

These revised Mexican border policies will bring an unexpected boom in business to the vendors who roam the traffic lanes of the international bridges, selling food, crafts, cheap junk from China and washing windshields of motorists who are stuck in lines. Charritos, anyone? The images section contains the sights seen the International Bridge-although due to the lines of vehicles awaiting inspection, the bridge looks rather like a parking lot.