REYES OUCKLAND

eyes and O'Rourke have a history together. O'Rourke, who who was raised in El Paso and speaks Spanish fluently (Beto is a nickname for Robert), won a city council seat in a largely Hispanic district in 2005. But it was four years before he started thinking seriously about the Drug War. Before then, the problems across the border were "of no interest or impact to me," O'Rourke explained. "It just seemed like an academic exercise." An uptick in cartel violence, much of it in nearby Ciudad Juarez, changed that.
"Sixteen-hundred-plus people had been murdered in Juarez in the most horrific, brutal fashion imaginable," O'Rourke said. "It caused me and many others in the region to think about what the causes of that were." In Mexico, the problem was weak and often corrupt public institutions. "And then on the US side," O'Rourke said, "I thought the two key inputs…were drug demand and drug prohibition."
In January 2009, O'Rourke introduced a resolution in the city council calling for the federal government to revisit its prohibition on marijuana. The resolution was not, he takes pains to note today, specifically advocating repeal—but he wanted Washington to think about it. The eight councilmen, often at odds, passed the resolution unanimously, but after the mayor (a fellow Democrat) vetoed the measure, their coalition fractured. O'Rourke needed six votes for an override; he got four. He blames Reyes.

O'Rourke says Reyes threatened to cut off federal funding for one of the poorest zip codes in the country.

The incumbent congressman "ended up pressuring or threatening or extorting the members of the city council…to change their votes to block that resolution that we had passed unanimously," O'Rourke claims. In O'Rourke's telling, Reyes had specifically threatened to turn off the federal spigots for his city council district, an area of El Paso that included El Segundo Barrio, one of the poorest zip codes in the country. O'Rourke says other councilmen got the same call.
Reyes, a former Border Patrol sector chief, viewed the violence across the river as a natural process that would, if given time, sort itself out. He compared the bloodshed to the Bruce Willis flick Last Man Standing, suggesting that the United States would be best served by letting the cartels have at it.
In early 2010, O'Rourke and his allies settled for a public letter, signed by luminaries from El Paso and nearby Las Cruces, New Mexico, declaring the "War on Drugs has been a dismal social, economic and policy failure." A few months later, O'Rourke launched his campaign against Reyes.
Gregory Rocha, a UTEP political scientist, credits O'Rourke for personally knocking on doors (10,000 of them by early March) and doing his homework, and he thinks the young challenger caught Reyes flat-footed. "There's been no response from the Reyes campaign—and I watch this stuff pretty carefully," he says. "You've seen those ads, and you think, 'What's going on here? Why isn't he replying or responding quickly?' He's getting defined, for all intents and purposes, by the O'Rourke people."
Case in point: Reyes' campaign website set up a page devoted to the "Truth About Beto," but as of Tuesday, one week before the election and eight months after the Times poll showed the race deadlocked, it still says "coming soon."
This time around, the last man standing might just be O'Rourke.