BORDER'S GROWING ARMY FIGHTS A LOSING BATTLE

SAN YSIDRO, Calif.--The broad sidewalk is filled with pedestrians
streaming north. Alongside, across 16 lanes, hundreds of cars are
lined up to drive in the same direction.

Uniformed agents pick their way through the idling vehicles, their
dogs sniffing for the drugs that are certainly here, somewhere, in
this river of machines and people.

It's midmorning on a sunny Tuesday. This is as slow as it ever gets
at the San Ysidro port of entry on the Mexican-American border--the
busiest border crossing in the world.

Today, around 43,000 vehicles will drive up to U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service agents, who will have about 30 seconds to ask
questions and decide which of the 43,000 drivers is hiding something.
If this were a busier day, another eight lanes of traffic, 24 in all,
would be open, and 65,000 vehicles would pass by for inspection.

In a typical day, around 35,000 pedestrians will cross at the same
checkpoint. These numbers don't include commercial truck traffic,
which uses a separate crossing nearby. Located between San Diego and
Tijuana, Mexico, the San Ysidro border crossing overflows with cars,
people and symbolism. It's a pulsing demonstration of globalization.

It's also a symbol of the growing futility of fighting drug smuggling
with police and fences in a world where goods and people flow across
borders in swelling floods.

It's hard to think of two cities that look more different than San
Diego and Tijuana. In the heart of the economic marvel that is
Southern California, San Diego is the bustling, shiny embodiment of a
city planner's dreams.

Just across the border, Tijuana is the planner's nightmare, a
sprawling mass of shanty neighborhoods, massive factories and
fortified haciendas, spiced with raucous nightclubs, bars and
establishments that would make a sailor blush.

Still, San Diego and Tijuana are conjoined twins sharing one economic
heart. Both are growing up to and along the border, producing a
merged metropolis with a fortified fence running through its middle.
The liberalization of Mexico's economy, culminating in the North
American Free Trade Agreement, is hastening the day when the twins
will share more. Migrants flock to Tijuana.

They come for work in the maquiladoras--factories run by American and
Asian companies to take advantage of cheap labor. Workers typically
earn about $75 a week, an excellent wage by Mexican standards. The
management offices of these factories are usually in San Diego. The
result is a torrent of daily border traffic. And the flow of people
is growing stronger every year.

In 1995, 28 million vehicles crossed from Mexico into California. In
1999, it was 31 million. In the same time, commercial truck traffic
grew by more than one-quarter. Anything that restricts quick travel
across the border is a major economic threat to the region. Efforts
to fight drug smuggling are one such restriction.

The more time border agents are given to inspect travelers, the more
likely they are to stop drugs--and the more economic damage they will
do.

"No one wants drugs to come into the United States," says W.B. Ward,
deputy port director at San Ysidro, "but I think the San Diego and
Tijuana communities would be up in arms if we started to do intensive
searches on every car down there. I mean, we're talking four-, five-,
six-hour waits. That's just intolerable."

Indeed, in the era of NAFTA, the push is on to make crossing ever
faster. Caught between the contrary demands of globalization and the
war on drugs, the agencies handling San Ysidro compromise. They keep
the flow of traffic quick by requiring agents to get 90 to 120 cars
through every hour, giving the agents just 30 to 45 seconds to size
up a vehicle and its driver and decide whether to do a more thorough
search.

San Ysidro has expanded its workforce from 48 inspectors 14 years ago
to 370 now. There are also sniffer dogs, X-ray machines, a national
database and other bits of technological wizardry to help. Raw
numbers suggest the agents have great success in stopping smugglers.

"We get around 15 drug loads in a 24-hour period," says Ward. "I
think our record is 27 drug loads in a 24-hour period. Most of those
are marijuana, but we also get cocaine, heroin and precursors for
methamphetamines."

Last year at the California crossings alone, almost 9,900 pounds of
cocaine were seized and 1,089 pounds of methamphetamines. A small
mountain of marijuana--376,200 pounds--was stopped.

But these numbers mean little in isolation. Does seizing all of these
drugs make a difference to the availability and price of heroin,
cocaine and marijuana in the United States?

No. Throughout the 1980s and '90s, the war on drugs caused American
seizures of all drugs to rocket up. At the same time, every one of
the major illegal drugs became more widely available, and most became
cheaper. In 1980, according to the U.S. government, a gram of pure
heroin cost $1,194 wholesale; in 1998, it cost $317.

Estimates vary, but 60 percent or more of the cocaine that enters the
United States each year--about 353 tons in 1998, according to the
U.S. government--gets in via Mexico. Over the last 15 years, the
General Accounting Office, the research arm of Congress, has
documented the spectacular failure of the United States to stop drugs
at its borders.

"Despite long-standing efforts and expenditures in the billions of
dollars," a typical GAO report concluded in 1998, "illegal drugs
still flood the United States."

Even headline-grabbing arrests and the seizure of huge drug shipments
"have not materially reduced the availability of drugs in the United
States." The reason is as clear as the fence between San Diego and
Tijuana.

"The border is alchemy," explains Eric Sterling, president of the
Criminal Justice Policy Foundation in Washington, D.C. "Over there,
it's cheap. Here, it's worth more than gold."

Banning drugs makes them hugely profitable. Even a "mule," the
lowest-level person carrying a small amount of drugs, can make
thousands of dollars just by taking a package across the border. Any
one of the 100,000 people who cross at San Ysidro every day could be
a smuggler.

"We'll get 70-year-old ladies strapped around the waist with four or
five pounds of heroin," Ward says.

"There's no profile for it."

Without a profile, customs agents must trust intuition.

"It's not what people tell you, it's how they tell you," says Miguel
Partida, the assistant port director at San Ysidro.

Inevitably, amateurs and small-timers are caught more often than
professionals because they are more likely to betray themselves with
a shaky voice, twitchy eyes or other signs of nervousness.

So confident are many professional smugglers that a decent appearance
and calm voice will do the job that many don't bother with elaborate
efforts to hide drugs. They simply pile millions of dollars worth of
drugs in the car trunk, as if they were golf bags or suitcases.

Smugglers also use spotters, who watch the lanes from a distance and
direct cars to agents who seem lax or ineffective. In his office on
the second floor at San Ysidro, Ward points a telescope toward the
Mexican side of the border and immediately picks out a man watching
the crossing while speaking into a cell phone.

Somewhere in the hundreds of cars awaiting inspection, there's at
least one heavy with drugs. And it probably got through, just one of
43,000 cars that day. If stopping drugs at San Ysidro seems hopeless,
consider that at least the border crossing is a bottleneck, where
traffic is forced to file past inspectors. Outside San Ysidro and
other crossings, there are 1,240 miles of land border stretching from
the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

Sometimes the border runs straight through cities; more often, it
winds across some of the most rugged desert terrain in North America.

It's the job of the Border Patrol to hold this thin line. The
resources at the patrol's disposal are impressive. In the San Diego
sector alone, which covers more than 62 miles of land border from the
Pacific eastward, the Border Patrol has 2,180 agents and 1,800
vehicles.

There are 10 helicopters equipped with infrared cameras developed by
the military and another 60 infrared scopes mounted on vehicles and
poles. Buried in the ground are 1,200 sensors that detect the heat of
human bodies, or the magnetic patterns of passing vehicles, or even
the footsteps of a hiker. Six miles of the border are illuminated at
night by stadium lighting. More than 46 miles are blocked by a fence
designed to be unclimbable. Night-vision goggles, computer databases,
the best communications equipment: the Border Patrol is better
equipped than many modern armies.

The main focus is the fight against illegal aliens and
people-smuggling, but, as Border Patrol Agent Merv Mason explains,
the people and organizations who smuggle aliens are "very much
related" to those smuggling drugs. Backed by good intelligence, the
smugglers constantly devise new methods to get their goods over the
border.

The only restriction is human ingenuity--and that seems limitless.
Mason cites smugglers who tunneled under the border into the sewer
system on the American side. There they surfaced through a manhole
cover--directly into a parked van with a hole cut in its floor.

In urban areas where homes are built right up to the border fence,
smugglers simply toss softball-size packages of heroin or cocaine
into American backyards, where colleagues snatch them up and walk on.

Last year, a Border Patrol truck traveling on a remote dirt road
suddenly dropped into a sinkhole. The truck had fallen into a tunnel
complete with concrete walls, a railway track and a cart to shuttle
drug loads back and forth.

"You figure, how many tunnels like that are operating?" asks an
agent. At another barren spot in the desert, smugglers were
found--also just by the accident of an agent happening by at the
right time--to have cut a gate in the fence. The gate was discreetly
hinged on the Mexican side, and tire tracks from trucks using the
gate were carefully swept away after each use, so nothing looked
amiss.

"It's kind of cat-and-mouse," says Mason. "They're as intuitive and
creative as we are at coming up with ways to solve a problem. Every
time we come up with a new method of dealing with something, they
come up with a new way to smuggle."

Smugglers stuffing vehicle tires with cocaine gave agents the idea of
tapping tires; those that didn't have a hollow vibration contained
drugs. Smugglers responded with compartments within the tires so
tapping would hit hollow sections. This sort of evolution never
stops. It has been going on since the patrol was founded in 1924, in
part to fight liquor smugglers violating Prohibition.

Back at San Ysidro, the sun is sinking on a Tuesday evening. Through
the day, tens of thousands of people, cars and trucks crossed from
Mexico into the United States under the watch of hundreds of agents,
sniffer dogs, helicopters and an arsenal of high-tech gadgetry. So,
too, had hundreds of pounds of drugs. Just another day at the border.