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Fed up: the FBI's investigation of corruption in El Paso isn't just another crime story. It's the latest chapter in the frustrating saga of a city cheated of its destiny.

Article Excerpt
El Paso is a city that believes in its soul that it has been cheated of its destiny. You can't talk to political or community leaders for very long without hearing that in 1950 El Paso had a larger population than Phoenix (130,485 to 106,818). Or that El Paso would be better off if it were part of New Mexico, a state in which it would be the dominant city. (And so it might have been but for the Compromise of 1850, in which Texas ceded its claim to Santa Fe, but not to El Paso, in return for $10 million from the federal treasury to pay off the state's debts.) Or that the city is closer to Los Angeles than it is to Texas's eastern border. There is a palpable feeling of isolation here, of a city being left to fend for itself. That sense is amplified by the intrusion into the heart of the city of the Franklin Mountains. so that El Paso is bisected into east and west sides, neither of which can b e seen from the other. At night, from the heights above downtown, the impression is one of a third-world capital, where the rich look down on the poor below, in the Segundo Barrio and across the border into the maelstrom of Mexico.

The peculiarities of geography help define the civic character. In 1994 state district judge Edward Marquez invoked a little-known provision of the state judicial code to call a court of criminal inquiry into whether the state government was shortchanging El Paso in the manner in which it distributed...

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