[420 Girl]

TIJUANA, Mexico — Artists and intellectuals now sip wine where drug traffickers once convened. Sculptures have replaced bundles of U.S.-bound marijuana.

Tijuana's newest cultural center sits atop a former drug trafficking tunnel that ran from this Mexican border city to a California parking lot. Called The House of the Tunnel, the center opens Saturday to the public.

The building — once a house — abuts a steel border fence and is 200 yards from one of the world's busiest border crossings.

There is little evidence of the tunnel. It is now largely filled in and the opening is covered by beige tile in the corner of a first-floor silkscreen workshop.

When it was operating, pulley cables moved bundles of marijuana on skateboards, U.S. authorities say drugs were hoisted into a truck parked over the exit some 100 feet north of the border at a lot where tourists leave their cars for quick jaunts into Tijuana.

The center's founder, Luis Ituarte, says some neighbors worried the center would glorify drug violence. But Ituarte, a Tijuana resident who works part-time for Los Angeles' Cultural Affairs Department, saw the project as an opportunity to show people how the future can be different.

"This is a place with a bad reputation that we are saving," Ituarte, 65, told a group of academics attending a private opening Thursday night.

The tunnel was one of at least 60 that have been discovered along the U.S.-Mexico border since 2001, when the United States tightened security following the Sept. 11 attacks.

The cultural center's building was owned by a prominent Tijuana attorney who built it about 50 years ago and rented it out. He died in 2004, a year after the tunnel was discovered. Ituarte won the family's blessings to turn the house into a cultural center.

Visitors shouldn't expect a history lesson on the drug trade, though.

The center's exhibits dwell on environmental ruin, with photos of South America's oil-tinged Rio de la Plata and Southern California's evaporating Salton Sea. But Ituarte has commissioned a painting of the drug tunnel that he hopes to display with court documents on the case.

Amelia Malgamba, an Arizona State University art history professor at Thursday's inauguration, said she was impressed that the center turned "a drug-trafficking place into a place that traffics in art and ideas."

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