DRUG TRAFFIC'S NEWEST WAVE

Mexicans Getting Control, Agents Say

RALEIGH -- Eduardo Ambario Barrera left a $30 a week job in Mexico and
illegally crossed the United States border five years ago in search of work
and better opportunities for his young, growing family. He had been in the
country just two weeks, picking oranges in Florida, when a casual
acquaintance offered him $500, a new suit of clothes and a suitcase to
smuggle cocaine to North Carolina. He was arrested a few months later as he
arrived at Raleigh-Durham International Airport. Now serving time at
Harnett Correctional Institution in Lillington, the stocky 31-year-old is
part of a new wave of immigrant drug traffickers flooding local and state
criminal systems. When Barrera was sentenced, he was one of about two dozen
Hispanics in state prisons for drug-trafficking.

Today, there are hundreds like him in North Carolina, as more and more of
the drugs -- and the traffickers -- come from South America, and especially
Mexico.

"Mexican drug trade organizations [in North Carolina] have essentially
taken over the drug trafficking business from other groups," said Kerri
Pepoy, an intelligence analyst for the National Drug Intelligence Center.
Pepoy covers North Carolina for the Johnstown, Pa.-based agency, a
component of the U.S. Department of Justice. At the end of 1995, just 10
Hispanics were serving time in state prisons for drug trafficking
convictions. As of October, that number had risen to 400, according to the
N.C. Department of Correction.

In Wake County, where Hispanics make up 5.4 percent of the total
population, they accounted for nearly half -- 46 percent -- of drug
trafficking arrests in 2002, the Wake County Sheriff's Office reported.

"We're investigating high-level Mexican drug trafficking groups in the
area," said Matt Addington, special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration's Raleigh office. "Mexican drug trade
organizations are here, that's for sure."

Federal and state authorities say Mexico's drug trade dominance is in
direct correlation with the immigration wave to North Carolina during the
1990s.

The state's Hispanic population has soared 394 percent since 1990, with
about 65 percent arriving from Mexico, according to Census reports. The
number of Hispanic drug traffickers sentenced to North Carolina prisons
also skyrocketed over roughly the same period, authorities reported.

Hispanic drug dealers are not only targeting the Triangle, which is
geographically appealing because it is close to I-95. Nationally, nearly
half of all people charged with federal drug offenses between 1984 and 1999
were Hispanic, according to a 1999 U.S. Department of Justice report.

According to the DEA. about 65 percent of all the cocaine that enters this
country and the majority of marijuana comes in from Mexico. The majority of
marijuana available in North Carolina is smuggled from Mexico, the DEA also
says.

Hispanic leaders in the Triangle say drug dealers take advantage of poor
immigrants who are lured by the money. They worry that the increase in drug
arrests could paint an unfair picture of the growing immigrant community.

"To my knowledge, the majority of people coming here are just hard-working
individuals trying to support their families," said Andrea Bazan-Manson,
executive director of El Pueblo, Inc., a Hispanic advocacy group in
Raleigh. "Drug trafficking is not a part of that equation. Any community
has a criminal element, and I think it's important to separate the
immigrants that are here working from that element."

North Carolina lures immigrants with diverse blue-collar industries that
include agriculture, chicken processing and furniture manufacturing. While
those jobs are attractive to immigrants, many of whom live below the
poverty line in their own countries, the lure of drug money is powerful,
said Pepoy of the National Drug Intelligence Center.

"A courier can go from North Carolina to Texas, pick up or drop off a drug
shipment and make $2,000 to $3,000 in cash," Pepoy said. "They aren't going
to make that kind of money picking apples or plucking chickens."

Barrera said pressing financial needs motivated him to accept the $500 to
transport the cocaine.

The money from picking oranges in Florida was more than he had made in
Mexico, but it still wasn't enough. "My wife was pregnant and she needed a
Caesarean," said Barrera, who is serving 14 to 18 years for felony
trafficking in cocaine. "That's mucho dinero. A lot of money."

Jose Javier Solis Rodriguez, a fellow prisoner at the Harnett Correctional
Institute, said he also was lured by the drug business although he had a
steady job here. Solis, 31, left Mexico at age 16. He moved to North
Carolina in the 1980s after working a series of migrant and manual labor
jobs in Texas and Louisiana.

He had lived in Smithfield for six years, helping to build homes during the
Triangle's building boom, before he was arrested in 1997 for selling
cocaine to an undercover officer. Sol's is serving a 10- to 12-year
sentence for felony trafficking in cocaine.

"I was making good money," Solis said. "But I watched him [the drug dealer]
with his new truck and all the women. Pretty soon he convinced me."

Solis and Barrera shrugged off the notion that they were making a lot of
money in drugs.

"I feel like I've been used," said Solis, who added that there were about
100 Hispanics, mostly Mexican, doing time in Harnett County -- many for
drug trafficking. "I've met a lot of guys here that have been used. We're
the small fish. If we were the big drug dealers, we'd be doing federal
time, but we're not."

2 keys to strategy

Mexican traffickers have gained control of the state's cocaine and
marijuana distribution by increasing their volume while undercutting
competing groups' prices, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center.

The North American Free Trade Agreement, which led to the loss of thousands
of textile jobs in North Carolina, has also played a role in the drug
trade, said David Gaddis, assistant special agent in charge of the DEA's
North Carolina operations.

"The free trade agreement made it possible for the movement of thousands of
containers across the U.S.-Mexican border," Gaddis said. "It's common for
drugs to be woven into those legitimate cargoes."

Mexican drug lords work in tandem with Colombian cocaine suppliers to
transport the drug into the country as powder, Pepoy said. Once the powder
cocaine reaches the retailers, it's cooked and sold on the streets as crack.

Crack cocaine has long been associated with violent crime. Authorities say
the Mexicans' incursion in the drug trade has added another layer of violence.

"The other groups have retaliated," Pepoy said. "They are going into homes
and stealing kilograms of drugs and money. We're seeing that across the state."

Police think that's what happened earlier this year in Robbins, a small
town in Moore County in central North Carolina, where three men were killed
and a fourth was wounded during a robbery in which home invaders stole
cocaine. All four victims were from Mexico, police reported.

DEA officials say the emergence of methamphetamine poses even greater dangers.

The methamphetamine seized annually in transit from Mexico to the United
States has increased dramatically since 1992. Authorities seized 1,370
kilograms of methamphetamine in 2001, compared with only 6.5 kilograms in
1992, according to the National Clandestine Laboratories Database at the El
Paso, Texas, Intelligence Center.

Local DEA agents say they are seeing a lot of meth activity across the
state, particularly in Raleigh. In 1997, the DEA seized one meth lab in
this state. Last year, authorities seized 33. "The trends indicate that
it's filtering into the western part of the state, moving eastward and
extending outward," Addington said.

The DEA's task of identifying and dismantling Mexican drug trade
organizations is difficult, said Addington, who noted that the traffickers
are becoming increasingly sophisticated.

DEA officials said they were reluctant to discuss their strategies for
targeting traffickers. But officials did point to an interagency drug task
force involving a number of federal, state and local agencies, including
the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Internal Revenue Service,
the N.C. State Highway Patrol, Raleigh police and the Wake County sheriff's
office.

Agencies such as Immigration and the IRS are involved because major
traffickers often go beyond dealing drugs to laundering money through real
estate and other means.

The drug organizations are also successful because they are close-knit,
familial and distrustful of outsiders. "It's difficult to get a suspect to
roll over," said Eugenia Pedley, a Drug Intelligence Center unit
supervisor. "Even the victims of a crime are reluctant to talk to law
enforcement, especially if they're here illegally."