ALONG THE BORDER, SMUGGLERS BUILD UNDERGROUND WORLD

Federal Agents This Week Uncovered a Drug Smuggling-Tunnel That
Stretched Across the Border in Tecate.

TECATE - The tunnel opening cut into the floor of a shipping
container here drops three levels, each accessible by ladders, first
a metal one and then two others fashioned from wood pallets.

The tunnel stretches 1,300 feet to the south, crossing the Mexican
border some 50 feet below ground and proceeding to a sky-blue office
building in sight of the steel-plated border fence.

Three or 4 feet wide and 6 feet high, the passageway is illuminated
by compact fluorescent bulbs (wired to the Mexican side), supported
by carefully placed wooden beams and kept dry by two pumps. The
neatly squared walls, carved through solid rock, bear the signs of
engineering skill and professional drilling tools.

Shrink-wrapped bundles of marijuana, nearly 14,000 pounds worth $5.6
million in street sales, were found in the shipping container and in
a trailer next to it, making clear the tunnel's purpose: to serve as
another major smuggling corridor. Found Monday here in Tecate, it is
the latest of 56 cross-border tunnels found in the Southwest since
the onset of additional guards and fencing above ground after Sept. 11, 2001.

"I'm never alarmed when they are found," said a senior investigator
with a task force of federal law enforcement agencies still combing
the scene on Tuesday. "I am alarmed we don't find them enough."

The authorities believe that the increased border enforcement has
helped deter illegal immigrant traffic and allowed agents to make
more drug seizures. But they acknowledge that it has also been
driving traffickers to redouble their efforts to find alternative
ways of breaching the border.

It is not just tunnels. Immigration agents in San Diego say they are
concerned about a spate of rickety boats found in the last year along
San Diego County beaches, some having just dropped off illegal
immigrants. People smuggled through official border crossings have
been discovered tucked into hollowed-out dashboards in vans and
trucks and in perilous pockets in vehicle undercarriages.

"It's like squeezing a balloon," said Michael Unzueta, the
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in charge of the San Diego
area. "The air has got to go somewhere."

But the tunnels are now found with alarming regularity, and often
just under the noses of law enforcement officers. This latest one is
a block from a Border Patrol station and next to a hill that agents
often use to watch for illegal immigrant traffic. And in September, a
Border Patrol vehicle became stuck in a sinkhole in San Luis, Ariz.,
50 yards north of a border fence, that turned out to be a collapsed
segment of a smuggling tunnel under construction.

A total of 69 such tunnels have been discovered - 68 along the
Southwest border, the other at the Canadian border with Washington
state - since the authorities began keeping records on them in 1990.
Of that total, 80 percent have been found, mostly through informant
tips, since the terrorist attacks, when border enforcement was
significantly stepped up. The longest, found last year in the Otay
Mesa district of San Diego, stretched nearly half a mile.

Because of concerns that terrorists could adopt the tactic to smuggle
radioactive and chemical materials into the United States, a military
team checks each underground passageway discovered; no residue from
such materials has ever been found.

Most of the tunnels are of the "gopher" variety, dug quickly and
probably by small-time smugglers who may be engaged in moving either
people or limited amounts of drugs across the border. But more than a
dozen have been fairly elaborate affairs like this one, with
lighting, drainage, ventilation, pulleys for moving loads and other
features that point to big spending by drug cartels. Engineers have
clearly been consulted in the construction of these detailed corridors.

The tunnel here has drawn additional scrutiny because just hours
after it was discovered, the deputy police chief of the twin city
across the border, Tecate, Mexico, was killed in a fusillade at his
home, in what appeared to be a cartel assassination. The deputy chief
had helped find the passage's Mexican end.

A Border Patrol agent on routine patrol discovered the tunnel when
his drug-sniffing dog reacted to the smell of marijuana several
hundred feet away. When the agent entered the container, the Border
Patrol said, a man with a pistol in his waistband disappeared deep
into the opening.

The tunnel, like the others found, will be sealed at the border and
eventually filled with cement slurry.

Though few people have been prosecuted for activities related to the
construction of these tunnels, a federal law enacted this year makes
it a felony to design or build one.

There was no answer at the telephone number listed for the owner of
the lot where the tunnel was discovered on the American side. But The
San Diego Union-Tribune identified him as Flavio Aguirre, an auto
broker in Tecate, Mexico, who told the paper that he rented the site
a couple of years ago to men who said they operated a furniture-moving company.

The building where the tunnel opens on the Mexican side has been
closed by the police. People who work nearby say that drug
trafficking is common in the area but that they never saw anything
unusual at the building, at least during working hours.

"They are all over here," one man said of drug smugglers, "but you
don't see anything."