05/19/2002

By BRYAN WOOLLEY / The Dallas Morning News

LAREDO - María Eugenia Guerra is talking about her past. "Maybe I wasn't an outright hippie," she says. "Sometimes my blue jeans were pressed at the cleaners. My parents had opened an account there for me. But certainly I was an earth mother and rabble-rouser, an organic farmer, a chicken-raiser. My son was raised on whole grains and raw milk.
"She's talking about the late '60s and early '70s. Meg, as everybody calls her, was bouncing from one university to another because of bad grades. She owned a no-chemicals plant nursery called Jungle Stores in Austin for a while, was married "about five or six years," had a baby. After her divorce, she worked for a botanical company called Sweetheart Herbs and lived in bucolic Wimberley with her toddler, George Altgelt.
"I raised him by myself," she says. "I hated being his mother when he was a teenager, but everything worked out. Now he's 28 and married to a wonderful woman. He's a law student at St. Mary's University in San Antonio. He's a real smart boy. He's a wonderful surprise."
The rabble-rousing that Ms. Guerra did in those long-ago days was about Vietnam. The war was a subject of heated discourse around Austin and the University of Texas, one of the schools where she was a sometime student between "forced withdrawals."
The war was a hot topic at home in Laredo, too. "My father was chairman of the draft board," she says. "My sister's husband was a pilot in Vietnam. But I believed the war was wrong. I believed we shouldn't be there."
She remembers it as a rich time. "The friendships I made, the way I felt things so deeply, I loved that time. I think that time helped me find the ethic that I've always tried to push through in my work."

A borderland journal

Ms. Guerra is almost 54 years old now, but she hasn't mellowed much. Rousing rabble is her principal occupation. She owns, publishes and writes much of the copy in LareDOS, a butt-kicking monthly tabloid that she and an erstwhile partner cranked up in December 1994. In the spring of 1996, she bought out her partner and "pretty much started over," she says. She rented the bottom floor of a turn-of-the-century duplex that a bank was managing for an estate and moved LareDOS into it. When the building came up for sale, she bought it.

The paper comes out about the middle of every month. Ms. Guerra prints 5,000 copies, most of which are stacked beside the cash registers in Laredo restaurants and given away.

"They fly out of there," she says. "They go like hot cakes." She sells enough advertising to publish 64 to 72 pages most months.

"I've stopped at nothing to keep it going," she says, "finding ways to sell more ads, doing the kinds of stories that need to be written." She and her editor, Tom Moore, write most of them.

Her paper is subtitled "A Journal of the Borderlands," and the DOS is capitalized because there are, of course, dos Laredos, the Texas border town of 185,000 and its more-than-three-times-larger Mexican sister, Nuevo Laredo, just across the Rio Grande.

That's really too much territory for Ms. Guerra and her staff of four to cover. She acknowledges that the Texas Laredo occupies nearly all her time and attention.

"I've always been interested by public corruption," she says. "How dare they, with taxpayer money, enjoy themselves to the extent that they do?"

So, for seven years, she has dogged the school board, the county commissioners, the City Council and various law enforcement and social services agencies with notebook and camera and Telephoto lens, exposing the sins committed at the public trough.

From time to time, her efforts result in a "shakeout," she says.

"But it's a shakeout in the Laredo way. Nobody gets fired. People get reassigned. People decide to retire. There's a certain degree of decorum used in Laredo. They always soften the blow."

Infuriating indifference

Ms. Guerra's main passion is the Rio Grande. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement, Laredo's bridges over the river are glutted with trucks carrying goods up and down Interstate 35. The river also is Laredo's water supply. The U.S. government's role in its environmental deterioration, the unbridled development along its banks and Laredo officials' seeming indifference to the river's condition all infuriate her.

"The federal government, in its zeal about drug interdiction and illegal visitors from Mexico, has peeled back the riverbank," Ms. Guerra says.

"They've taken away the bank and made a road where they can four-wheel drive. The Border Patrol doesn't do anything very well. They're not stopping the flow of drugs, and they're plucking people off the landscape who really just want to work. They should put all their money into drug interdiction. That's the real crime."

Even worse atrocities are committed against the river, in Ms. Guerra's opinion, by U.S. developers building end-to-end warehouses along its banks, and pell-mell development on the south bank in Nuevo Laredo, which has no apparent plan to include a sewage treatment plant. Ms. Guerra fears that raw sewage in the river - already a huge problem along the Rio Grande - will increase.

"The water quality in Laredo isn't good," she says. "I don't drink it. I know a lot of people who don't drink it. It's laden with heavy metals. Every study done on the river says Laredo has major problems. But city officials don't read the studies or don't understand them or don't believe them.

"We try to let people know that gravity will prevail. What we do to the watershed ultimately will end up in our water. All those chemicals people use to make their yards look not like part of the Chihuahuan Desert but like a golf course, those they will someday drink.

"And we still have people on the City Council who say, 'Conserve water for what? So that McAllen can get it?'"

Despite her constant surveillance and rolling volleys of journalistic buckshot, Ms. Guerra says she gets along pretty well with Laredo's public officials.

"I'm not sure they like me a lot," she says. "I don't know what they say when I'm not there. But in Laredo everybody kisses everybody on the cheek.. It's the custom."

Dancing with Marthas

Maybe the hearty doses of satire and humor that she includes in LareDOS soften the bite of her criticisms and crusades.

"We poke fun at City Hall," she says. "We make sure they don't take themselves all that seriously. And we bop them when they misbehave."

Two years ago, when the mayor and City Council were beating the drums for a new arena for a minor-league hockey team, a LareDOS cover featured a doctored full-page photograph of the local politicos in hockey garb, on the ice and wielding sticks. The smiling mayor appeared to be missing a front tooth.

When the fire chief resigned after allegedly ridiculing the religious beliefs of one of his firemen, LareDOS superimposed the chief's mug shot on a picture of a saint standing in flames.

Ms. Guerra especially enjoys spoofing the Society of Martha Washington, a group of Laredo socialites that celebrates President Washington's birthday every year with a pageant and ball at which everyone dresses as an officer in the Continental Army or a colonial dame.

Another debutante society called the Princess Pocahontas Council dresses in American Indian costumes and stages another pageant "designed to re-create the lives and values of our first Americans." In 2001, the theme was "Legends of the Totem Pole Through Indian Eyes."

"That's pretty strange stuff for a town on the Mexican border to do," Ms. Guerra says. "But, every year, Laredo outdoes last year's celebration. I really try to understand what this is about, but I can't."

Last year, LareDOS proposed an alternative "Colonia Ball" and suggested that everyone come dressed as a social, environmental or political issue.

"The Marthas laughed," Ms. Guerra says. "They thought it was hysterical. We're good friends with the Marthas. They advertise with us."

Roots that run deep

The first of Ms. Guerra's Western Hemisphere ancestors arrived at Mexico's Caribbean port of Veracruz in 1602, only 83 years after the Spanish conquered the Aztecs. Over the centuries, the family moved northward until they reached the Rio Grande, crossed into Texas in the late 1880s and settled in the Laredo area.

Ms. Guerra's father was a Laredo businessman. Her mother's family worked a ranch near San Ygnacio, a small Texas town south of Laredo.

"As my family had always done, I moved north, too," she says. "I went to Austin, I even went to Dallas, but I came back." (Her first attempt at college had been at the University of Dallas, then UT-Austin, and then Southwest Texas State University at San Marcos, from which, in her 40s, she eventually graduated with a journalism degree.)

When she moved back to South Texas over a decade ago, she went to work for the Zapata County News, one of two rival newspapers in the tiny town not far from Laredo. Then she was hired to run its competitor, the upstart Zapata Weekly Express, for a couple of years until it went out of business. Then she was the first director of the Rio Grande International Studies Center, an environmental organization that monitors water quality in the Rio Grande and tries to be a voice for the river. Then LareDOS happened.

Meanwhile, she had moved into the old family house on the ranch near San Ygnacio and had taken over management of the place.

"My parents were horrified when I told them I wanted to live there," Ms. Guerra says. "It's very primitive. But I filled it with books and made it comfortable. It's not splendid, but it's a wonderful, beautiful place."

So, at the end of a long workday on the streets of Laredo, she climbs into her Ford F-250 four-wheel-drive pickup, shoves a CD into the player and heads the 40 miles south toward home while Dwight Yoakam sings "Cattle Call." There, she feeds her free-range chickens, gathers their eggs and worries about the next issue of the paper.

"There are deadline nights when we're still wondering what's going on the cover," she says. "Sometimes, we're too loose. We don't plan ahead a lot. And it certainly doesn't make much money. It's always on the edge of overdraft."

In December 1999, she published a special issue of LareDOS, celebrating her paper's fifth anniversary. "Anyone versed in the publishing business knows that in newspaper years five years is practically a lifetime," she wrote. "Little papers don't have a life past a couple of years."

Then she wrote: "I love this place. I love the faces of this town. I love the scoundrels that run for public office and sometimes get there.... I love the principled ones, the compassionate ones. I love the ordinariness of this place, but I love, too, our penchant for pomp and circumstance.... I love the goodness of us, this town of pretty children."

Maybe that's why she and her edgy little tabloid are still around.