By Juan MontoyaWe were making our daily rounds to the gas pumps and stopped at the Stripes convenience store at the corner of Boca Chica and McDavitt when we noticed a military, drab olive-green armored vehicle parked in the front.
Thinking (wishfully, it turned out) that perhaps there might be a hostage situation in the offing, we took out our camera and went to look. Well, it turned out that it was merely the driver of a SWAT vehicle that was stopping at the store for refreshments on his way to a hostage exercise.
We asked him if we could take a photo of the vehicle and he consented, rattling off specifications about tire size, cost, and other fascinating facts about the armored truck. We asked him if there was someplace where we could photograph their exercise and he grew very tight-lipped saying that the Sheriff’s Department wanted to keep those things “secret” so the bad guys wouldn’t get tipped off.
The Lenco BearCat Armored Transporter, with a $200,000 price tag, was impressive simply standing there at the Stripes parking lot, no doubt inspiring fear into the hearts of passing wrongdoers.
Being, as we are, highly deferential to our law enforcement public servants, we though this was a reasonable justification and we parted company affably.
The next day, as we perused through the pages of El Bravo, presto!, there it was. There must have been at least a half-dozen photographs of the BearCat on site of the Sheriff’s boys storming an empty house. They even enacted a fake arrest of a crack dealer. Very impressive, we thought.
Was this a pre-emptive psychological exercise on the part of Sheriff Lucio to warn the bad guys across the river (El Bravo readers), the firepower they would meet if they crane their dastardly necks across the charco? Or was the department merely flexing its firepower muscle, a kind of "shock and awe" for the Mexican public?
There are, after all, U.S. citizens who can vote in Cameron County elections.
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