Out in the West Texas town of El Paso

Most of my visits to El Paso have been just passing through on my way somewhere else. There was a time, 30 years or so ago, that I covered a border meeting between then President Jimmy Carter and the then president of Mexico, but on that occasion I was shuttled around with the rest of the White House press corps and had absolutely no time ro explore El Paso on my own.

However, there was an occasion 20 years ago when I accompanied some Mexican tourist officials, called the Green Angels, on an extensive tour of Texas cities and one of our last stops was in El Paso, where we spent a couple of days. Now, it doesn't take a couple of days to see everything El Paso has to offer; hell, it doesn't even take a couple of hours. And one of the things we learned very quickly was that if we wanted a decent restaurant meal, we couldn't find it in El Paso. We had to cross the border to Ciudad Juárez.

At this time in history, El Paso was an anomaly among Texas border towns. It was dull, lifeless, backwater, stagnant, while its sister city on the other side of the Rio Grande was alive, vibrant and far more cosmopolitan. Obviously, according to this story in today's New York Times, this situation is no longer true. Juárez seems to be nothing more than the preferred turf for staging gangland drug wars. But what really made me sad was this paragraph:

"Across the river, the once-vibrant streets of Juárez are dark and gloomy, as residents scurry for home. The restaurants, bars and nightclubs that catered to American tourists, students and soldiers from Fort Bliss are shutting down for a lack of business."

There goes my only reason for ever wanting to spend time in El Paso.