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Betty Flores.

Article Excerpt
Does the prospect of no longer being mayor of Laredo make you happy or unhappy?

Neither one. I knew there was a beginning and an end. I worked as fast as I could, as hard as I could, and now I move on. I was a Laredoan when I started, and I'm a Laredoan when I leave. That's the most important thing.

Given what's going on along the border right now, it has to be true that of all the mayors of your city in recent history, you've had the toughest go of it.

It's almost like, Be careful what you wish for. We've always wanted people to pay attention to the border, but some of the attention we've received has obviously not come in a good way because of the violence in Nuevo Laredo. For the most part, it does not define who we are. In fact, in my daily life it's a very minute part of any discussion--even when I'm with the mayor of Nuevo Laredo. He and I just got back from Yuma, Arizona, promoting a rail bridge project we're working on with the governor of Tamaulipas. We were together from seven in the morning until seven in the evening, and I don't think we ever once talked about the violence.

That's amazing, because people outside Laredo would imagine it's the number one thing on your mind, that it's all you talk about during the workday and that you're hyperaware of it off-hours because you have to get home and you have to go out to eat and go shopping. The perception, at least, is that it's a war zone environment out there.

And that's the wrong perception. [Laredo and Nuevo Laredo are] a combined community of approximately a million people. If you compare our community to any other of its size, you'll see that the crime rate and violence are really not so out of whack. However many deaths we've had in total, it's really not a lot of people in a population like this one. So we come and go and do our daily business--

Not affected by it.

Not affected by it. More than 30,000 people cross the bridges every day. Do they focus on the violence? Perhaps if they read the headlines, because it's always on the front page. Perhaps if they're going to go across the river from the U.S. side in the evening. We used to have trouble keeping our kids home because, obviously, the curfews for drinking in Nuevo Laredo were a lot more lenient. They'd sneak across....

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