Run For The Border - Television Tropes & Idioms

"Better run for the border
He's never gonna understand
Better find a place to hide
On the other side of the Rio Grande"

— Johnny Rodriguez, "Run For The Border"

A character desires to escape something in his home country, and resolves to flee or relocate to a neighboring one.

This usually manifests itself in one of two ways:

Type A is your standard getaway for criminals and malcontents after they rob a bank or engage in a crime spree, to escape arrest and prosecution. This can even include travel within the same country. In the US for instance, the criminal will cross a "state line" (border between states) because the police of the state they were in has no jurisdiction in adjoining states. Especially common in Westerns, and other old U.S. movies. This also includes Prisoners of War who have escaped to an allied or neutral country as their goal after an escape attempt. Whether these types make it or not varies: it's an almost even split between those who do (and live in a lazy beach town Happily Ever After) and those who don't (usually dying in a Bolivian Army Ending).

Type B is the sufficiently more noble version, where a character's home country is either going Crapsack World by way of After the End, or is taken over by a totalitarian movement which quickly brings an end to the previous civil liberties, and escape is the only sane alternative. Fleeing the country is usually the end goal, and they'll likely either have to escape or avoid capture by the roving death-gangs or evil repressive authorities to leave.

May end in a Border Crossing scene. For another method of evading the law by escaping their jurisdiction, see Diplomatic Impunity.

Examples

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Type A:

Films

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. While fleeing from their pursuers:
Sundance: Let's go to Mexico instead.
Butch: All they got in Mexico is sweat. There's too much of that here.
- They eventually decide to go to Bolivia.
In one version of The Shawshank Redemption the heroes flee to Mexico.
Spoofed in Super Troopers, where one of the highway patrolmen scares three stoners by pretending to get shot by a criminal (another patrolman in disguise), who hijacks the police car they're in the backseat of, and is intent on escaping to Mexico, despite Canada being only a few miles away.
Disguised Patrolman: You boys like Mex-E-Co?!?
The Wild Bunch heads to Mexico after a robbery goes to hell and ends up getting involved in Pancho Villa's war for independence.
Mexico is Charlie Sheen's destination in The Chase. And, ultimately, Kristy Swanson's, too.
The Great Escape
Von Ryan's Express
The famous lovers (in real life, too) of Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw in The Getaway
The big ending of Blue Streak starring Martin Lawrence as an ex-con posing as a cop to get into a police station to recover a diamond.
The majority of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song consists of this.
As the title suggests, this is the main character's plan in Going South. However, once he gets across the Mexican border, he stops to taunt the pursuing posse that they cannot legally touch him. They ignore the legal niceties and promptly drag him back across the border. In later scenes he practices his Spanish and makes another break for Mexico.
In Young Guns Billy the Kid constantly promises that he'll take the gang over the border into the relative safety of Mexico. He never leaves New Mexico however, and gets everyone killed for it.
One Charlie Chaplin short ended with him escaping authorities by crossing over to Mexico... where he's almost caught in the crossfire of a bandito shootout. He decides to just straddle the borderline instead.
From Dusk Till Dawn opens with the Gecko brothers, having pulled off a bank robbery, making their way to Mexico. Worth noting is that they actually have arrangements for living there (set up by a third party for a share of the loot).
In Tank, the hero must drive his son across a state border in order to escape the jurisdiction of a corrupt sheriff who'd framed his boy for drug dealing. In a Sherman tank he'd bought and restored.
This is the entire plot of The Last Stand, as an escaped cartel boss tries to evade the FBI by fleeing back to Mexico, and the police force of the last small town before his planned crossing point try to stop him.

Literature

In the first Serpentwar Saga novel, Rupert and Eric try to flee to the Sunset Isles after killing Eric's half-brother due to a law there that said that criminals who stayed there without causing trouble for a year had their records cleared. They didn't even get close.
Played for Laughs in Jeeves and Wooster whenever an Oh Crap situation is met by an escape to another country.

Live-Action TV

Andrew and Jonathan flee to Mexico at the end of season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
See CSI: Crime Scene Investigation's Season 9 opener for an example of A.
CSI:NY's season premiere had the perp try to escape to Canada before Mac caught up with him. Needless to say, he failed.
Referenced occasionally in Friends. Phoebe's future plans tend to end up with her and an accomplice fleeing to Mexico for some reason. Which is odd, considering that Canada is much closer...
In an episode of The Closer a murderer fled to Mexico to avoid prosecution. But because his victim, an illegal immigrant, was a Mexican citizen, Brenda smiled, got him to sign a paper stating that he had no intention of leaving Mexico, then told him that he was now under Mexican jurisdiction. And Mexico takes a dim view of people murdering its citizens. Just as two Mexican cops haul him off.
- The murderer only steps into this trap because the victim's mother had claimed to be from (IIRC) Costa Rica, not Mexico.
Spoofed in The Beiderbecke Affair, when the protagonists help a dissident escape across the Yorkshire-Lincolnshire border, and later the Yorkshire-Lancashire border.
Shane Vendrell wants to do this in Season 7 of The Shield, but needs to hang around Los Angeles trying to wait for the heat to cool off and to get some money to do so. Lem was going to do the same thing, until Shane murdered him.
Due South had a rather interesting variant of type A. Ray was accused of killing a perp, though he actually didn't, and it looked worse because he had GSR on his hands from spending the morning at the range. Ray runs into the Canadian consulate and because it's technically Canadian territory, extradition proceedings have to be done before he can be removed. That gives Fraser time to find the evidence to clear him.
Joy attempts this in My Name Is Earl, when she is facing felony charges, but it doesn't work out so well. Earl takes the rap for her and goes to prison in her place, when he sees that Darnell and the kids are suffering without her.
An episode of Dexter wonderfully subverts this: after the previous season ended on a cliffhanger, with his sister discovering one of his murders, the next episode opens In Medias Res, with him rushing to the airport to buy a ticket out of the country. You only find out later in the episode, he was just there to kill a Ukrainian mobster, and had no intention of actually getting on the plane.
Spoofed by a Top Gear segment that didn't make it into the final cut. After "escaping" from Colditz (now a hotel, and Jeremy checked out with his credit card), they make what ends up being an economy run for the Polish border on 11.3562354 liters of fuel. James May is taken out and shot when he fails to make the border.

Music

Burl Ives song "One Hour Ahead of the Posse". A murderer tries to reach the Rio Grande river and cross into Mexico.
Inverted in the Johnny Rodriguez song "Run For The Border," where the narrator is running for the border to get out of Mexico so he can get away from the irate knife wielding husband of a woman that he spent the night with.
Subverted in Warren Zevon's "Lawyers, Guns and Money" - he makes it to Honduras, but the trouble has followed him. "Send lawyers, guns, and money/The shit has hit the fan."
Deconstructed somewhat in Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho And Lefty"; Lefty sells Pancho to the federales so he can run for the border himself... and ends up dying alone and broken-hearted.
Blues Traveler's "Get Out of Denver" is a local variant.
Bruce Springsteen's "Highway Patrolman" ends with one - the twist being that the runaway and the cop chasing him are brothers who ended up on different sides of the law.
I chased him through them county roads
'Til a sign said "Canadian border, five miles from here"
Pulled over to the side of the highway, and watched his taillights disappear
George Strait's "The Seashores of Old Mexico"
Christopher Cross's "Ride Like the Wind"
"Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace" by The Mountain Goats is about torturing a man to death and then fleeing to Mexico

Tabletop Games

Border Crossing, an adventure for Espionage and Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes, is closest to a Type A. The player characters are Western spies who infiltrate East Germany during the Cold War to investigate a mysterious "factory", and then have to get themselves out of East Germany. Unless the players have done an incredible job (or the GM has incredibly lousy die rolls), the secret police will be coming after the characters at some point in the mission.
In Spycraft 2, if you find yourself the subject of a manhunt you can escape by invoking this trope to initiate a chase scene: the manoeuvre is actually called "Run For The Border".

Real Life

Averted in real life: During WWII, German POWs were imprisoned in Kansas. A few of them managed to escape ... for three days. They asked how close they'd gotten to Mexico. They were very disappointed to discover that they hadn't gotten out of the state, let alone the country.
- Late in the war, 25 Germans broke out of a camp near Tucson, Arizona. Most tried to hike to Mexico, but only two got farther than a few miles before being caught. Three built a boat, intending to row down the Gila River — which they did not know was a dry riverbed until they were actually standing in it. (It only runs during flash floods, so it wouldn't have been much help anyway.)
- When was this? Because if it was after May 22, 1942, Mexico wouldn't have been too welcoming.
- They might not have liked U-boat sailors, but they weren't famed for their security.
- There was a Movie "The One That Got Away" about a German pilot who escaped from Canada, to the USA (pre-Pearl Harbor). True story, but he really was the only one. Mostly because they just plunked the prisons in the middle of lots of empty wilderness where even if they did escape, they wouldn't last long.
Truth in Television. Partly the reason why the FBI was formed was because during the Prohibition era, the lack of any centralized police force meant that gangsters could commit their crimes and cross state or county lines without fear of pursuit.
The reason why many American criminals (especially serial killers and murderers) escape to Mexico is because the Mexican Constitution forbids to deport people who are going to face death penalty in their home countries. That law was created during the Cold War and during the time period when almost all Central and South America were controlled by military dictatorships, but the law doesn't have exceptions for criminals for democratically-elected countries (like the U.S), and while they can be deported back to the U.S., they can't face death penalty due to a treaty with the Mexican government.
- Ironically, this law ended biting the Mexican government in their ass, thanks of the Zhenli Ye Gon case since the main culprit, by law, cannot be stripped of his acquired Mexican nationality and deported back to China, since he will be executed if he puts a foot there in this case, but the Mexican government neither wants him in the country, and since the American law agencies also wanted him too, he was extradited to the U.S. instead.

Western Animation

Hong Kong Phooey: One of his fellow superheroes had to let a criminal go because said criminal had crossed the state border.
Sheriff Ricochet Rabbit pursued a criminal named El Loco Lobo until Lobo crossed the border and was arrested by Ricochet's Mexican counterpart.
A strange example in The Simpsons episode "The Bob Next Door". Sideshow Bob tries to kill Bart at Five Corners, a point where five states meet, intent on carrying out the murder in pieces across the different state lines so that he hasn't committed a murder in any specific jurisdiction and cannot be tried for it.*
In the United States, murders committed across state borders fall under Federal jurisdiction, so this wouldn't work.
When the cops show up, Bob tries to use the border to escape Chief Wiggam, only to find police officers from the other four states have him surrounded.

Type B:

Anime and Manga

A Certain Magical Index: Hamazura is forced to flee Academy City when he learns that he has topped Aleister's hit list. He certainly escapes in style: stealing a supersonic plane and auto-piloting it to Russia. Then World War Three happens and AC forces continue pursuing him, so he has to make a run for the Elizalina Alliance border... but that doesn't stop the AC forces either, since it's a World War and he's only twenty meters inside the border anyway. He kicks himself mentally for thinking that such things as national borders would deter Academy City.

Comicbooks

In Marvel's Civil War, Ben Grimm took off for France when the government passed a Super Registration Act, forcing him to take up sides against friends and colleagues. He took a third option.