Mexican Drug War Affects U.S. Cattle Program

Fever tick inspections move to Texas

By Julian Aguilar, The Texas Tribune

LAREDO - An unexpected casualty of the drug cartel-fueled lawlessness in Mexico: the cattle industry.

At a temporary inspection site in the industrial sector of Laredo, home to the country’s largest inland port, the lowing of cows has been heard not far from the purring of the tractor-trailers that haul millions of dollars worth of goods from Mexico each day.

For about the past year, Mexican cattle have been examined here before being cleared for shipment to the rest of Texas and beyond -- part of an effort to eradicate a fever tick infestation that has plagued ranchers along the border for more than a century.

The tick carries an anemia- causing parasite that preys on cattle blood cells and spreads bovine babesiosis, which causes fever, paralysis and often leads to death if left untreated.

Until last year, the inspections took place in Mexico, and ticked cattle were kept from the U.S. But a ruthless battle between the Gulf and Los Zetas cartels in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas forced those inspection sites to close in March 2010.

“It’s become too dangerous for the veterinarians to conduct their inspections on the cattle that are going to be imported into Texas from Mexico,” said Roland Garcia, a Texas Ranger commissioned by the Department of Public Safety and the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. “That’s why these temporary pens in Laredo and Pharr have been established. I don’t know how long ‘temporary’ could be. It depends on how things settle out in Mexico.”

The inspection site is not the only modification being made because of cartel violence. The U.S. government takes the lead on regulating cattle in the “buffer,” or permanent quarantine, zone, where fever ticks thrive. It stretches more than 500 miles across the Texas border from Del Rio to Brownsville, an area of about 550,000 acres.

Temporary zones also are established if an outbreak spreads beyond that. Ed Bowers, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s director of field operations for the Cattle Fever Tick Eradication Program, said the zone is currently 1.5 million acres, including a large swath of Dimmit and Starr counties.

Bowers and his 97-member staff compose the US-DA’s fever tick riders, who patrol hundreds of miles of Texas border on horseback searching for infested stray Mexican cattle. Recent floods that have destroyed natural barriers and manmade fences have enabled their migration past the border, potentially aiding in the spread of the tick. And the tick riders have been forced to adjust their routes farther away from the border.

“We don’t do our patrol like we did a year ago, which was visible to Mexico and riding right down the riverbank,” Bowers said. “We don’t make a target of ourselves, but we still have to patrol that permanent quarantine zone and make sure there aren’t any Mexican strays.”

The economic consequences of an extended outbreak in Texas could be dire. An infestation outside the current quarantine zones - even one considered relatively small by industry experts - would still cost $123 million in the first year alone, according to a study conducted in 2010 by the Agricultural & Food Policy Center at Texas A&M University.

An outbreak spreading to the historic range that includes Texas, a portion of California and 12 Southern states east to Florida and north to Virginia would cost about $1.2 billion in the first year, according to the study. Texas would have the most to lose, as it currently has more than 13.3 million head of cattle, including 5.14 million beef cows, representing 16.4 percent of the nation’s total. The value of the livestock is about $11.7 billion.