You can live your whole life in Tucson and not realize it’s a foreign city.

That’s because you’re not looking at it from the south.

Viewed from northwestern Mexico — Sonora and Sinaloa, mostly — Tucson serves as a sort of haven, just out of reach of the problems of home and close to the conveniences of the United States. Changes in government sometimes lead to people in politics heading north to cool their heels as new power arrangements are worked out.

Years ago, I reported on the 1999 escape of a newspaper owner in Hermosillo, who had to flee in the trunk of a car after the state police seized the paper and surrounded his house. He fled to his second home in Tucson and remained for years.

But lately, the border is not providing much protection for those who are seeking a sort of exile in the Old Pueblo or other parts of Arizona. The unfolding scandal involving corruption in the last Sonoran government led to the arrest last week in Tucson of the former second-in-command of Gov. Guillermo Padres’ administration, Roberto Romero Lopez.

This comes after years of investigation have uncovered what may have been laundering of millions in diverted public money here as well as the arrest of another former official hiding out in Arizona.

“The Arizona-Sonora region has a lot of contact and communication,” Gilberto Gutierrez, president of the PRI party in Sonora, told me by phone Friday, in Spanish. “But at the same time it’s a region where there are two jurisdictions, two legal systems, each autonomous from the other.”