28 THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Late Summer 2018 TheCoastalBend.com O ur beloved Coastal Bend is to many the affordable, semi- tropical paradise discovered conveniently at the southern centerpoint of the United States. As the first major metro- politan area located past the border hot zone known as the Rio Grande Valley, the Coastal Bend has for decades served as a relay point for drug and human smugglers headed to points north, and for money and gun runners headed south, back into Mexico. The cultural underbelly that lives and thrives in the Coastal Bend—an underground economy built around the distribution of narcotics, the acquisition of firearms, and the cleansing of millions of dollars in cash—is not unlike those that exist in almost every metropolis on earth. From the street level, to the distributors, and on to the cartels in Mexico, the smuggling and drug trades are populated by fam- ily businesses—La Familia—that gives regulation and boundaries to a world where society’s rules do not apply. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. The overland corridor now known as Interstate 69 (U.S. Highways 77 and 59), connecting Greater Houston, the fourth largest metropolitan area in the U.S., with Corpus Christi, the Valley and finally Mexico, is arguably the most heavily patrolled stretch of highway in North America. The full assortment of law enforcement juris- dictions located along the 230-mile route from Victoria to Brownsville wage a con- stant and endless war on smuggling, that enlists federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Border Patrol and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Each and every of those 230 miles is also aggressively patrolled by each sheriff’s office and city police department located along the route, plus hundreds of Texas Dept. of Public Safety (DPS) state troopers, and even by a special narcotics task force that operates in stealthy, black-on-black patrol vehicles and answers directly to the Texas At- torney General’s office. The Laredo St. to 17th St. neighborhood, located west of the Crosstown Expressway The Sarita Checkpoint, located on Interstate 69 40 miles south of Kingsville and 65 miles north of Harlingen, is the last Border Patrol inspection station north of the United States/Mexico border.