DRUG HIDE-AND-SEEK ON MEXICO'S BORDER

Customs Agents Play A Frustrating Game To Stem The Rising Tide

SAN YSIDRO, Calif. -- Here at the busiest border crossing in the
world, 41,000 cars travel every day from Mexico to the United States.
Some of them are carrying drugs. All U.S. Customs Inspector Robert
Hood and his colleagues have to do is figure out which ones.

Strolling 24 lanes of seething, stinking traffic, Hood scans for clues
- -- a newly painted panel on an old car, possibly a sign of a hidden
compartment; a jumpy driver whispering to a passenger; the acrid smell
of a solvent intended to foil drug-sniffing dogs.

"It's a big thrill when you stop someone and realize, 'Gotcha! There's
a load,' " says Hood, a former high school history teacher who has
been with the Customs Service for 12 years. One secret of his success,
he says, is avoiding stereotypical thinking about smugglers: "I had a
70-year-old guy in a Honda Accord last month with 18 pounds of cocaine
in his gas tank. I had a family in a van with marijuana stuffed in the
seats and the kids sitting on it."

Inspectors seized more drugs than ever last year along the 2,000-mile
U.S.-Mexico border, and some U.S. officials note the tonnage stopped
as a measure of their success. But others say the numbers more likely
reflect the growing flood of narcotics from Mexico, which supplies
two-thirds of the cocaine and, by some estimates, as much as one-third
of the heroin consumed in this country.

"If a drug trafficker decides to increase his drug volume over the
border, seizures are going to go up," says Peter Andreas, a Harvard
University political scientist who has studied the border around San
Ysidro, between the cities of San Diego and Tijuana. "To continue to
insist that seizures are a measure of progress is ridiculous."

Most of the cocaine and heroin that ravages Baltimore, shattering
families and fueling theft and violence, arrives by car and train from
New York City. But before the drugs reach New York, they cross the
U.S. border, and the chances are greater than ever that they cross
from Mexico at a place like San Ysidro.

The Mexican cartels emerged in the 1980s chiefly to transport drugs
for far more powerful Colombian producers. But during the 1990s, as
U.S. and Colombian law enforcement pressure squeezed the Medellin and
then the Cali cartels, Mexican drug organizations eclipsed their
Colombian rivals, emerging as the major powers in the world drug trade.

"These Mexico-based criminal organizations have rapidly become the
primary entities responsible for distributing drugs to citizens of the
United States," Thomas A. Constantine, then-director of the Drug
Enforcement Administration, told Congress last year. He said the
Mexican cartels' turf spread during the 1990s from the western United
States to the East Coast, giving them virtual control of the
nationwide drug trade.

Residents of drug-troubled neighborhoods in cities such as Baltimore
often ask why the government can't stop narcotics at the border. The
scene at San Ysidro is a vivid answer.

On the Mexican side, on a steep side road lined with shops and a taco
stand, several people gaze down at the border's permanent traffic jam.
A few others slouch against the fence atop a bridge above Interstate 5
on the U.S. side. They seem idle. They are not.

They are sentinels of the drug cartels, the "spotters" who study
search tactics and note lazy and corrupt inspectors. When inspectors
and their drug-sniffing dogs are diverted temporarily to a suspicious
car, they pass the word to their bosses via pager or cell phone: Send
a load now.

On the other side in this round-the-clock chess game, U.S. border
agents patrol in the exhaust fumes. Hood, an upbeat man with a neat
beard and wire-rim glasses, is renowned for his uncanny sense of who
is a smuggler.

He knows the tricks: Smugglers "shotgun" four or five cars loaded with
drugs at the same time. Or they send "decoys," easy-to-find bags of
marijuana or cars rigged with telltale signs but no drugs, to draw
personnel off the checkpoints while valuable loads of cocaine are sent
across.

"It's a game of hide-and-seek. They're trying to beat me. But I'm
going to get their load," says Hood, who recently joined the customs
unit at the San Diego airport.

Border inspectors' vigilance has prompted the cartels to try
alternative methods: tunnels dug under the border; smugglers crossing
the desert with drug-stuffed backpacks; personal watercraft carrying
loads up the coast at night; even hollowed-out surfboards, paddled
from a Mexican beach into U.S. waters.

But the big volume, most experts believe, is hidden in the unending
stream of traffic. Every day, in addition to the 41,000 cars, 20,000
people walk north across the border, some of them carrying drugs. Four
hapless smugglers were caught at San Ysidro 16 months ago with 8
pounds of cocaine concealed in their shoes.

Cesar E. Trevino, a former San Diego lawyer who ran drugs north and
money south through San Ysidro in the mid-1990s, says the Mexican drug
exporters consider seizures an annoyance but not a threat.

"It's just a business cost," says Trevino, who cooperated with
prosecutors after his arrest and is in the federal witness protection
program. "They can't close the borders. It's like a piece of thin
sheet metal, and the cartels are shooting BBs and pellets into it.
Some loads get stopped, but plenty get through."

The task of border officials has become more daunting as legal trade
has swelled under the North American Free Trade Agreement and pressure
increased to avoid traffic backups.

"If we're looking for a needle in a haystack, the haystack's gotten a
lot bigger," says Special Agent-in-Charge Edward W. Logan, who
oversees customs operations in San Diego and Imperial counties.

Mexican drug lords

U.S. and Mexican authorities have made little progress against the
ruthless Arellano-Felix cartel, which profits from virtually every
load of drugs crossing at San Ysidro. The Arellano-Felix brothers have
lured into the trade the sons of well-to-do Tijuana families and
recruited San Diego street gangs to steal cars and kill informants. In
1996, Arellano hit men killed Tijuana's federal police chief; in 1997
they shot and wounded a Tijuana newspaper editor who had reported on
the cartel.

Three of the Arellano-Felix brothers have been indicted in the United
States, and one has been on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list for two
years. But by encrypting their communications, terrorizing
subordinates into silence and paying off legions of Mexican officials,
they have evaded arrest.

The Arellanos and other Mexican drug lords often move cocaine from
Colombia to Mexico in huge quantities. U.S. Coast Guard vessels found
118 bales containing 3 tons of cocaine off the Mexican coast last
month, after an 8-ton seizure from a fishing boat in June and a 10-ton
seizure from a shark-fishing vessel in August.

But to move drugs from Mexico into the United States, the cartels
break the loads into small packages carried by low-paid, expendable
couriers driving cars bought at auction.

"Most of the mules don't know much," Logan says. "They're kids,
homeless people, convicts. They may know only that they were paid $500
to drive this car across, leave it in this parking lot and walk away."

Recognizing that most drug seizures can only nick the cartel --
especially when bulky, hard-to-hide marijuana accounts for most drugs
seized -- U.S. authorities have focused increasingly on the money
flowing back to Mexico.

At San Ysidro, inspectors regularly set up checkpoints to search
southbound vehicles for drug cash, aided by a "money dog" trained to
sniff out currency.

"The biggest money seizure I've seen?" says Customs Inspector David
Lighten, one of a dozen officers manning a southbound checkpoint. "It
was a gold-and-white Mercury Villager with $1,275,000 in cash. There
was money in the seats, in the half panels, everywhere."

To fool the spotters watching from the nearby bridge, Lighten says,
"we'll announce a break and leave." When the spotters relay to the
money couriers that the coast is clear, "we pop right back out and
catch them," he says.

The smell of money

But money is even easier to hide than drugs, and it can be wired or
laundered through legitimate businesses. Customs officials at all the
California-Mexico crossing points seized less than $5 million last
year, a fraction of profits from the border drug trade.

It was money laundering that lured Trevino, the now-disbarred lawyer,
into the drug trade. A former stockbroker from a respected family who
counts among his relatives a former San Diego mayor and a current
Mexican congressman, Trevino, now 39, used a connection with a
prominent San Diego bail bondsman to build a criminal defense practice
around the drug trade.

The scale of drug profits was a revelation. He recalls the day an
arrested drug courier brought him his fee in a shoebox, $15,000 that
had just been dug up.

"You could still smell the dirt on it," he says.

One day in 1993, Trevino stuffed $700,000 in drug cash into the trunk
of his white Mustang and headed to Tijuana with his cousin. They
breezed across the border at San Ysidro, hired an armored car to carry
the loot and drove around Tijuana for hours in search of a banker to
launder the money, Trevino says.

"Two guys in suits and ties in a convertible with a Brinks truck
following them," Trevino recalls. "It was comical. We were so naive."

He laundered many more loads of cash, becoming far more sophisticated
about the border. He paid an associate to watch the southbound lanes
at San Ysidro and send him coded pager messages -- 666 when inspectors
were on duty, 777 when the coast was clear.

When Trevino learned that U.S. investigators were onto him, he fled to
Mexico and spent the next three years -- until his arrest in Panama in
1996 -- working with traffickers associated with the Arellano-Felix
organization. Federal prosecutors and court records confirm his
knowledge of drug and money-laundering operations.

By Trevino's account, most of the cocaine crossing at San Ysidro
begins its journey from Colombia in aircraft that drop plastic-wrapped
bales into the sea in an area of international waters known as "the
Scorpion Triangle." The Mexican cartels pay the Colombians about $800
per kilo (2.2 pounds) of cocaine; the price rises to $9,000 a kilo in
Tijuana and to $16,500 or more in Los Angeles.

"The money is not in the product. It's in the transport," Trevino
says. That's because moving a multiton load from the ocean drop to a
U.S. stash house is a complex, risky operation that requires months of
planning and millions of dollars in upfront costs. The smugglers must
buy or rent fishing boats, equip them with radio and radar equipment,
and pay captains and crews to retrieve the floating bales of cocaine.

The fishing boats often travel in pairs, Trevino says; if patrol craft
approach, the decoy boat flees to draw police away.

The drugs are often stored in the hold under a load of fish or shrimp,
he says, and moved to the beaches south of Tijuana at night using
inflatable Zodiacs. By then, "jumpers" have been hired to drive the
cocaine over the border.

Endemic corruption

The passage is smoothed at every point by payoffs to Mexican police
and other officials. Such bribes are so routine, Trevino says, that
the rare attempt to move a load without paying off authorities -- "a
la brava," in cartel slang -- is seen as foolhardy.

"If they catch you with a load and you didn't work with them, they're
going to beat you," Trevino says. "Then they're going make you buy the
load back from them."

On the U.S. side -- where a border inspector can earn well over
$50,000 a year -- corruption is far less common, but exists, Trevino
says. He says his associates paid $25,000 to $35,000 to corrupt U.S.
inspectors for agreeing not to inspect a single, designated car. A
crooked inspector can double or triple his salary by accepting a few
bribes a year.

Trevino's account is supported by testimony from senior federal
anti-drug officials and by the occasional prosecution of inspectors of
the Immigration and Naturalization Service and customs for accepting
bribes. An INS inspector at San Ysidro was charged in August with
allegedly accepting $350,000 in bribes for waving through his
inspection lane vehicles carrying 2 tons of marijuana and 23 illegal
immigrants.

Aware of the threat, U.S. authorities have moved to pre-empt border
corruption. At San Ysidro, some inspectors roam freely among the
waiting northbound cars, while those who sit in inspection booths are
shuffled unpredictably from lane to lane. Smugglers can no longer be
certain that an inspector they have paid off will be assigned to a
particular lane.

Such tactics can reduce corruption. But it is not so easy to stem the
flow of drugs across the border to the point where the impact is
noticeable on the drug corners of U.S. cities.

Logan, the Customs special agent in charge in San Diego, says the
"drug war" metaphor has led to an unrealistic expectation of final
"victory."

"This is not a war. This is a law enforcement action," Logan says. No
one expects that policing will eliminate burglary or bank robbery, he
says.

"Are we individually frustrated that we can't stop smuggling?" Logan
asks. "I'm sure all agents and inspectors feel that at some time. But
we feel a sense of satisfaction at what we do accomplish."

Andreas, the Harvard political scientist, says the border guards are
easy targets for the frustration of a country whose cities are
devastated by drugs. But the blame is misplaced, he says.

"If they got twice as good at what they do," he says, "it still
wouldn't affect drug use in this country."