DRUG TRAFFICKING GROWS IN DESERT

Smuggling: The fragile ecosystem and legitimate visitors to a stretch of
Arizona desert are endangered by trade in contraband.

ORGAN PIPE CACTUS NATIONAL MONUMENT, Ariz. - Until recently, this vast
park 130 miles west of Tucson and cheek-to-cheek with Mexico was known
for its 26 varieties of cactus and stunning high-desert views.

But during the past year, Organ Pipe has become a place where someone
toting a backpack or driving a camper might be involved in something
more than sightseeing.

Park officials estimate that illegal users of the back country
outnumber legitimate overnight hikers and campers 10 to 1. So far this
year, there have been 25 major drug and alien smuggling incidents.

Superintendent Bill Wellman can only shake his head when he talks
about the increase in smuggling at his park.

Organ Pipe's seven rangers confiscated 10,000 pounds of marijuana last
year and are approaching 7,000 pounds this year.

They deployed spiked rods, or "speed sticks," to stop fleeing vehicles
17 times last year and at least eight times this year.

"We are responsible for about one-quarter of all drug confiscation and
one-half of all speed stick deployments in the National Park Service,"
says Wellman, a 31-year veteran.

A partial list of recent incidents:

A recreational vehicle stops in a park campground to unload bales of
marijuana for backpackers heading north. After an off-road chase,
officers seize 470 pounds of the drug.

A speeding truck hurtles through the visitors' center parking lot and
is abandoned 15 miles away at a desert trailhead. Inside, park rangers
and Border Patrol officers find 433 pounds of pot packed and ready for
delivery.

Rangers surprise the drivers of four sport utility vehicles in the
desert and a chase begins. A Chevy Tahoe stops when it hits spikes set
out by officers. An Isuzu Trooper becomes disabled in a wash. The
other two vehicles speed back into Mexico. Rangers seize more then 830
pounds of marijuana.

The incidents might have Hollywood overtones, but officials fear that
the "extras" in high-speed chases and guns-drawn confrontations could
soon be innocent bystanders on a family vacation.

"I can't say it's 100 percent safe," says Border Patrol Agent Joseph
Korchmaros. "You can be walking down a trail and come across [drug
smugglers]. They have something to lose and they may be willing to
take drastic measures."

Reacting to increased security at major ports of entry between Mexico
and the United States, smugglers of drugs and people are spreading out
the defense - and Organ Pipe seemed a logical place to test it.

"I used to joke that when it came to Organ Pipe, it was a bad place to
put a park and a bad place to put a border," says Rene Andreu, the
U.S. Customs Service agent in charge of the 5,000 square miles,
including Organ Pipe's 515 square miles. "The two don't mesh."

What makes the park so attractive to smugglers is Highway 85, a
two-lane blacktop that slices through the park and links Mexico to
east-west U.S. interstates that go to Phoenix and San Diego.

"If they shoot straight north, they will make I-8. The faster they can
get into a town, the better they'll blend in," explains Border Patrol
spokesman Rene Noriega.

Not that the traditional entry points have been abandoned. In Nogales,
100 miles east of Organ Pipe, drug smugglers carve crude tunnels
connecting sewer lines in Mexico to houses just north of the border.

This year alone, Customs agents have found eight tunnels used to
transport bundles of cocaine and marijuana into Arizona.

Slightly to the east of Nogales, at the Douglas port of entry, Customs
officers guarding the southbound lanes have been startled by
headlights coming from Mexico. Border jumpers in stolen cars get a
running start and crash through oncoming traffic at the checkpoint.

"They're coming straight at us, around us and under us," says Kyle
Barnette, associate special agent in charge of the Customs office in
Tucson. "About the only thing we haven't caught in Arizona is a submarine."

The federal government has pumped money into agencies such as the
Border Patrol and U.S. Customs to reinforce the Arizona border.
Although they are reluctant to give out exact numbers, officials say
there are more than 1,600 agents in trucks, on horseback, in Black
Hawk helicopters and on foot, with hundreds more to be hired.

Korchmaros, who supervises the Border Patrol station at Ajo, just
outside Organ Pipe, says he has about 60 agents and is scheduled to
get an additional 40 by the end of the year. But that's a small force
given the scope of the problem.

Sometimes the drug smugglers and the illegal immigrants become one and
the same.

"An alien who doesn't have any money may make a deal with a smuggler
to help move 400 pounds of marijuana in exchange for free passage,"
explains Noriega. "They unknowingly get into something that could
endanger their lives."

"In 1996 when they cracked down in San Diego, things started to pick
up here, but visitors didn't notice," Wellman explains as he sits in
his office a stone's throw from one of the smuggler's favorite trails.
"Then in the late '90s, the border was toughened in Arizona. Up until
last year, [illegal activities] weren't apparent to visitors."

Now, it's hard to ignore. One day last month, Border Patrol officers
set up a checkpoint on Highway 85 just north of Organ Pipe. In no
time, 70 vehicles northbound caused a minor traffic jam as they turned
around in the park a short distance from the checkpoint and sped back
to Mexico.

"If we force them off the road, we increase the foot traffic through
the desert," says Wellman. "Right now the best trails in the park
aren't the ones we build. Unfortunately, they all go straight north."

Hundreds of thousands of people skirting the law have crushed the
fragile desert ecology. Empty water jugs, trash and the blackened
remains of campfires scar the park. And rangers sometimes track the
smugglers by following trails of soda cans, legally purchased at park
vending machines.

One recent day, Wellman's rangers had to tow 14 cars abandoned by
smugglers.

Even worse is what the foot traffic is doing to the plants and
wildlife. Illegal aliens and "mules," the nickname for the smugglers
who backpack dope to a pickup site, rarely carry enough water to make
it safely through the desert.

For the mules, it's economics; they can't haul as much marijuana if
they have to carry water. For the illegal aliens, it is often a case
of not being told how long and far they'll have to walk to safety.

Either way, they wind up dangerously dehydrated with no help in sight.
Last year, 100 people on foot perished in the Arizona desert; 23 have
died so far this year.

Wellman says the unprepared illegal visitors are using up the scarce
water needed by the park's animals and plants. He has instructed park
employees to establish large caches of water in the desert to
alleviate the problem and concentrate travel along certain corridors.

That, he hopes, will help reduce the destruction of cactus seeds and
small cacti.

"Along these trails, we're losing a generation of cactus - some of
them rare," he says. "And being the national cactus monument, that's a
big deal here."

Andreu says smugglers know his Customs officers are reluctant to
trample the fragile desert to arrest them and instead concentrate on
traffic through the nearby Tohono O'Odham Reservation.

"We either chase them on foot or we have no chance at all. They just
run away. We cannot operate effectively in the park because of
environmental concerns," he says. "It's our own political correctness
coming back to bite us."

The immediate outlook is gloomy, law enforcement officers say. The
rainy spring means a bumper crop of pot heading north.

"We're already seeing this year's harvest. It's still green and rich
in odor," says Andreu. "This is another year of job security."

Wellman is bracing for the onslaught and worried about the workload
for his rangers. The only relief, he says, is knowing that legitimate
tourism falls during the searing hot summer months.

He is hoping that someone up the chain of command in the cash-strapped
National Park Service will notice what's happening and send
reinforcements.

"If we could keep and sell what we've confiscated," says Wellman,
"we'd be the best-funded park in the nation."