Twilight on the Line: Underworlds and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border.

As a newspaper correspondent in Texas in the 1980s, I covered the US.-Mexico border -- mostly from Brownsville, the Rio Grande Valley and El Paso, but occasionally from as far west as the San Diego-Tijuana line. They were rich, newsy, and generally uplifting days on a once-sleepy but awakening 2,000-mile-long divide between the First and Third Words.

They were the years of the Sanctuary movement, when Americans opposed to the U.S. role in Central America's conflicts clandestinely helped Guatemalans and Salvadorans north and across the U.S. border to refuge. The immigration issue, always an up-and-down concern in the U.S., was on the up, but casual crossing outside federal government checkpoints (to shop, visit family, or earn dollars) was still widespread. The drug war was still focused on the Caribbean and not yet on the Colombian cartels' Mexican connections. (It was, of course, the U.S. government's squeeze on the Caribbean that rechanneled the drug flow through Mexico.) And toward the end of the decade, economic dreams rose on growing talk of a North American free-trade accord that would erase borders, weaken the push and pull of immigration, and bring everybody closer together.

A decade later, when I returned to reporting on the border, this time from a correspondent's desk in Mexico City, I was shocked and saddened by what I found. The border of promise had in many places become a border of peril. Most striking of all was the rise of the Mexican drug cartels and the violence that accompanied their growing power. Immigration, too, had turned ugly, especially in California. Solid metal fences had gone up where friendship and cooperation were supposed to bloom. Urban and industrial pollution had worsened, and the much-heralded free-trade agreement, which took effect in January 1994 as NAFTA, was under attack even by some of its erstwhile supporters for destroying jobs in the United States and dampening wages on both sides of the border.

In a sense, the world that for centuries had left the border pretty much alone roared in like an occupying army in the globalizing '90s, bringing with it international mafias, the transnational flow of the desperately poor, and booming global trade. It is this globalized border of the 1990s that Sebastian Rotella brings alive with sometimes chilling storytelling in Twilight on the Line: Underworlds and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border. Now the Los Angeles Times bureau chief for South America, Rotella was from 1991-96 the Times' correspondent covering the San Diego-Tijuana border. The years of his assignment to this region are significant, because they correspond to the advent of illegal immigration as a global issue -- with Chinese, and not just southern Mexicans and Central Americans, arriving in Tijuana to cross into America. They were also the years marked by the rise of the Arellano Felix brothers and their Tijuana-based drug-trafficking empire, considered the most treacherous in Mexico.

They were the years when Asian vessels, packed like slave ships with illegal Chinese immigrants, were found to be unloading their U.S.-bound cargo on the Pacific shore near Tijuana (1993); when the shocking assassination of a Catholic cardinal in Guadalajara was traced back to Tijuana and San Diego street gangs (1993); when the Mexican ruling party's presidential candidate was gunned down in a Tijuana slum (1994); when Mexican criminal justice officials in Tijuana, from the local police chief to state prosecutors and federal investigators, were murdered either because of the side they pledged their allegiance to in the drug lords' turf war, or because they were actually clean and were therefore everybody's enemy (1994,1995,1996 ...). They were the years of the rise of "narco-politics" in Mexico and in Baja California in particular.

Rotella tells the story of those years through a series of chapters, each focused on one of these defining events, with the storytelling ability and eye for detail of the award-winning reporter he is. It is stunning when he introduces us to Tijuana's reform-minded police chief, Federico Benitez, lays out the growing dangers the honest but inexperienced commander faced, then tells us how he was assassinated: "The federal police carried out the ambush with textbook precision."

Equally boggling is information, woven neatly into the story, such as: At one point in the early 1990s three brothers held the command posts of federal police units in three contiguous states in northwest Mexico, creating what one young state prosecutor (himself brutally murdered) called "a triangle of control" for drug trafficking. In similar stories full of telling descriptions and observations from a wide range of people, we enter the world of San Diego's Balboa Park boys, mostly homeless migrants from south of the border who sniff glue and sell their bodies to wealthy San Diegans; of San Diegos Logan Heights Chicano gang, some of whose members ended up hired guns for the Arellano Felix brothers; of politics and immigrant smuggling rings.

It's a compelling read -- as far as it goes. This is essentially a book about the rise of the Mexican drug cartels and their effect on Mexican politics -- especially in Baja California. It is not a book about the US.-Mexico border, as even the book's logo, which traces the distinctive "line" of the border from San Diego to Brownsville, would have the reader believe.

The border is a unique place in the world -- where else do the developed and developing worlds come together with such energy and confrontation? And it is much more than the corrosive mix of violence, drugs, and illegal immigration explored here. It is also the birthplace of Mexico's strengthening democracy, the national land of economic opportunity for a more backward southern Mexico, a bubbling soup pot simmering a hybrid culture, a Texas-Mexico border very different in history and experience from its California counterpart. It is a place where the United States is learning about its own future, like it or not.

There are hints of this in Twilight on the Line: the Tijuana graffiti artist who wonders, "What do I have to do with Mexico City or Sinaloa, if I spent my life shopping here in San Ysidro [California] at Ralph's and Safeway?"; or Baja California's (and Mexico's) first opposition governor, Ernesto Ruffo, saying, "Baja California is full of people who made a decision to search for better life.... We have everything here, the best and the worst." Yet the book shortchanges the "best" even as it offers the important and gripping story of the "worst."

Rotella calls the border a "magical place," but he just doesn't give the reader enough to know what he means. And that's too bad. By the time one finishes this book, the tableau of a violent, corrupt, frightening border is quite complete. It's the other painting, the one of a border that draws people -- especially on the Mexican side -- for the opportunity, the freshness, the freedoms and futuristic gaze it offers, that remains little more than a sketch.