Reporter reflects on the Mexican border

Marc Lacey, the New York Times' new Southwest bureau chief, is coming up from Mexico City and in Sunday's Week in Review section he observes that the border is especially nasty these days.

Never a particularly pretty place, the border is at its ugliest right now, with violence, tensions and temperatures all on high.

Once thought of by Americans as just a naughty playland, the divide between the United States and Mexico is now most associated with the awful things that happen here. In towns from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, drug gangs brutalize each other, tourists risk getting caught in the cross-fire, and Mexican laborers crossing the desert northward brave both the bullets and the heat.

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as I cross back and forth at some of the border’s most troubled points, I find that even a journalist faces scrutiny going both ways. American authorities grilling those entering the United States wonder just what an American could possibly be doing south of the border in this climate. And entering Mexico elicits surprise as well from the American inspectors who now regularly stop southbound cars, looking for gun traffickers and money launderers.

“You sure you want to go down there?” one of them said to me recently.