A Border War on Boozing

The deejay shouts his query over the din: “How many alcoholics do we have tonight?” The crowd of party-hearty American college students answers with a gleeful roar.

It’s the height of spring break season on Tijuana’s Avenida Revolucion, and hundreds of collegians from north of the border swarm a thumping five-block stretch of bars and discos that is one of the booziest strips of real estate anywhere.

This year, however, the youth invasion, heightened by a drinking age of 18, weekly “college nights” and a reputation for lax enforcement, is under unprecedented attack from authorities and health activists on both sides of the border who charge that it has spawned binge drinking and a scourge of chaos and danger.

In a flip-flop of usual border enforcement practices, U.S. officials have imposed a high-profile spring break crackdown on southbound travelers--stopping teenagers under 18 at the border and turning them back by the hundreds. Authorities on both sides of the border have also stepped up efforts to nab motorists of all ages returning drunk.

The binational push, which includes spot identification checks by Tijuana authorities in the 30-odd bars along Avenida Revolucion, was inspired by a new study showing that of an estimated 9,000 people who cross the border on cheap-drink Wednesday college nights and on weekend nights, more than 1,000 who intend to drive home are legally drunk.

Officials say their efforts are the first step in a broader campaign to calm the party on Revolucion, where sidewalk pitchmen tout free tequila shots, clubs offer all-you-can-drink specials and whistle-blowing waiters pour the tequila straight down your throat. A bacchanal of “sexy underwear” contests and wee-hours dancing has planted a decidedly youthful and coed look on Revolucion, once a hub of seedy strip joints and nocturnal offerings for U.S. servicemen and others seeking a walk on the wild side. The servicemen still frequent Tijuana, but nowadays are more likely to be found alongside collegians in the discos.

“The draw is the atmosphere, the price, the legality of it,” said Leah Hyman, a UC San Diego student and one of hundreds pouring through the pedestrian border crossing for college night. “I’m 18 and it’s legal [to drink] down here--less trouble to get into.”

Amid official hand-wringing over beer sold by the bucket looms a wider quandary about image, as tourism boosters seek ways to draw more family visitors and free-spending conventioneers to Tijuana’s most famous, if historically licentious, street.

“We want to upgrade our tourism and we’re sure we will not upgrade it while we are receiving this kind of tourism,” said Sigfrido Pineda, a spokesman for the city. “This kind of tourism scares the families.”

Few parents with children are in evidence along Avenida Revolucion after dark, when the waiters peel off the tablecloths and “family restaurants” ready their balcony terraces for the onslaught. The avenue’s many curio shops are long closed by the time the party starts.

There have been sporadic attempts to calm the nocturnal festivities along Revolucion in the past, zeroing in on establishments that were not properly licensed or ignored closing-time rules. There was even talk of a youth curfew a few years back. But the party has stubbornly survived.

Officials insist that the difference this time lies in what they describe as a unique level of international coordination at the local level, coupled with hard data on the extent of the drinking problem. Local police on both sides of the border set up drunk-driving checkpoints last weekend and plan to do the same this weekend. While authorities on the U.S. side checked IDs of youths crossing into Mexico--a California law forbids unaccompanied minors to cross the international border--teams of Tijuana bar inspectors plunged into the clubs in search of underage youths.

The Tijuana inspectors were trained recently by their counterparts at the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control in spotting phony identification.

The inspectors, armed with walkie-talkies and a picture guide of U.S. driver’s licenses, detained two dozen suspected U.S. minors over a three-hour period Friday, said Enrique Mendez Juarez, head of the bar-oversight agency. Some of the youths were hustled out of the bars with just a warning. Others were carted off to face a judge on suspicion of using fraudulent documents.

Michelle Hancock, a Citrus College student from Duarte who swore she was 18, ended up in the police station’s crowded lobby after midnight, desperately trying to explain in English why her two ID cards bore different names. (One rendered her first name as Shelly and her last as Scolinos, the surname of her husband-to-be.) The police officer, who did not speak English, seemed not to comprehend. Hancock would have to see the judge.

“I should have listened in Spanish class,” she groaned.

But her pleas to the judge, ruling from a tiny office with a television tuned to soccer, succeeded. Hancock and her fiance, Peter Scolinos, hurried from the station’s bleak confines and headed for home. Hancock said she didn’t get a single drink.

The spring break push, called Operation Safe Crossing, is the splashiest in a series of efforts in recent months aimed at curbing trouble caused by the legions of collegians, military service members and underage teenagers with false IDs flooding Tijuana. Most park in lots on the U.S. side in San Ysidro and walk through the border turnstiles a few blocks from Avenida Revolucion.

The party scene, often marred by gang fights, bottle-throwing and revelers passing out in the bars, has prompted consternation since the bustling avenue became fashionable as a teen mecca a decade ago. But it was not until recently that anyone bothered to measure the mayhem.

A San Diego-based public health organization, called the Institute for Health Advocacy, surveyed border crossers on weekends and Wednesdays over six months last year, going so far as to administer a voluntary Breathalyzer test to respondents returning to the U.S. from a night of festivities. The study found that 29% of late-night pedestrians were legally drunk--a rate about 10 times higher than the national average. Drivers were found to be legally drunk at twice the rate of the rest of the nation.

The average 21-year-old male walking back into the United States had a blood-alcohol level of 0.096%, above the legal driving limit of 0.08%, according to the study. The average 18-year-old male returned with a blood-alcohol level of 0.09%. State law sets the legal limit for those under 21 at 0.01%.

The group says its estimates of 9,000 revelers a night are probably too low because the surveys didn’t count the hefty number returning after 4 a.m.

“People know about the problem--that kids could get into a car crash at 4 in the morning and get killed. But until now, no one knew the magnitude,” said James Baker, the group’s executive director.

Baker pointed blame at sales tactics such as two-for-one beers and free drinks all night for women. He compared it to a “buffet” of free consumption.

And consume they do.

At a popular club called Vibe, waiters work the dance floor to administer tequila “poppers,” pouring the booze into the mouths of sometimes-reluctant customers. Outside, a young celebrant stakes out a spot next to the front door and, in full view of waiting patrons, throws up on the sidewalk. By 2 a.m. the street is a carnival of ear-ringing music and flashing lights from the clubs--and from the police cars that forever zoom back and forth. A bottle thrown from a passing car smashes near a busy intersection.

“It’s ugly,” declares Edgardo Flores Campbells, a law student and assistant director of the Tijuana agency that enforces beverage laws. For its troubles, the city gains “a bad reputation,” he said.

An anything-goes image is hardly new to Avenida Revolucion, which has peddled forbidden fruit of one sort or another to Americans since Prohibition, notes Alfonso Garcia Cortez, a Tijuana poet and communications professor who has studied the avenue’s history. The street, veering between raunch and respectability, has worn varied masks--as a shopping hub for duty-free jewelry, a playground for San Diego-based servicemen, a haven for quickie marriages and a stage for live rock ‘n’ roll.

Life on Revolucion has mirrored that of Tijuana itself, reflecting the city’s growth from an isolated frontier town to a diverse and increasingly cosmopolitan melting pot and binational meeting ground, Garcia said.

Tourism officials also see the avenue as a magnet for a different crowd of visitors, one likely to spend more than the club-hoppers. (Daytime family visitors spend an average of $37 per person, compared to about $8 for the nighttime set, according to Tijuana’s Convention and Visitors Bureau.) The city is studying possible construction of a convention center at a site yet to be decided, part of the push for higher-end tourism.

To these ends, officials are organizing longer-term measures aimed at taming Avenida Revolucion. Tourism officials and public health advocate Baker will meet with bar owners next month to talk over revitalizing the zone and to begin lobbying against the high-volume approach to drink sales. Dumping the discounts won’t be easy--competition for customers is brutal on a strip boasting so many bars. One manager suggested that bad publicity was authored by bar owners north of the border. “They don’t like when people come to Mexico,” he huffed.

But all agree that, as long as Tijuana has a drinking age three years younger than California’s, the Revolucion party is unlikely to wind down any time soon.

To 19-year-old Nikki Hazel, who was looking forward to a night’s worth of “Sex on the Beach” cocktails for just $3, that would be just fine.

Nothing should change, she said, at least “not until I’m 21.”