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99% Invisible

339- The Tunnel

99% Invisible

SiriusXM Podcasts and Roman Mars

Design, Arts

4.827.5K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2019

⏱️ 47 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In May of 1990, law enforcement raided a warehouse in Douglas, AZ and a private home across the border in Agua Prieta, Mexico.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

0:06.2

Back in the 1980s, Kyoki Skinner was a reporter with a newspaper called the Arizona Republic.

0:12.0

He covered the drug trade and the border and it's been a lot of time in different parts of Mexico.

0:17.3

But he was getting tired of traveling and of being a stranger in every place he went.

0:21.8

He wanted to actually settle down in Mexico and to make a life.

0:25.6

That's when I thought about, well, I would like to be part of a community in Mexico.

0:31.1

If I lived here and knew what was going on here, I could probably file some pretty good stories.

0:35.1

So Kyoki moved to Agua Prieta, a town right on the border where he'd done some reporting before.

0:41.2

Agua Prieta sits just across the line from Douglas, Arizona.

0:45.0

The two cities are contiguous. One urban area that spans the border,

0:49.5

divided by a towering, rust-colored metal wall, a steep concrete ditch, a line of concertina wire,

0:55.4

and a mesh fence. And Kyoki did what he'd set out to do. He settled down and made a life there.

1:02.1

That's our own Delaney Hall. He built a house, married a Mexican woman,

1:06.5

continued mastering the slainy Spanish of Northern Mexico and ended up having five kids.

1:12.8

Agua Prieta became his home. And the thing I liked about Agua Prieta, it wasn't

1:17.5

tourism oriented at all. It was a very Mexican community. And I was very intrigued by the town

1:23.3

for that reason. Kyoki ended up scaling back his full-time reporting job so he could open a

1:28.5

smoothie shop and juice bar. What better way to get to know this city than to have a business here,

1:32.8

where people will come in and hang out and talk. He could listen and observe and probably pick up

1:37.9

a few good ideas for the occasional freelance story that came his way. He named his smoothie shop,

1:43.7

El Mito Te. Which in Spanish, it means like a gossip spot or there's a ruckus going on,

1:51.0

for example, the sirens going down the street. Everybody kind of runs out to see where the

...

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