MARIJUANA TRAFFICKERS USE MIGRANTS TO HARVEST CROPS

Investigators Report Growers Hire Mexican Workers Off The Street, Promising
Good Pay.

SACRAMENTO -- Miguel Alvarado, 19, said he was pushing his ice cream cart
down a Sacramento street when a more lucrative opportunity came calling.

Two men had stopped to buy ice cream that mid-September day. One excitedly
told him he could earn $100 a day, "plus commission," if he'd just
accompany them to the mountains. Alvarado insisted that they said he would
work cutting pine trees. But according to a statement he later gave Colusa
County sheriff's investigators, he soon learned otherwise.

He said the men bought him camping equipment, then drove him deep into the
Coast Range west of Colusa. There, in a clearing surrounded by dense brush,
conifers and scrub oaks, Alvarado said he saw a man in camouflage fatigues
holding a rifle and guarding a vast garden of marijuana.

As his guides dropped him off and departed, Alvarado said, they told him
his job was to harvest the crop.

"If you want to leave, go ahead," Alvarado said one of the men told him.
"But remember, there are wild animals out there."

Colusa County Chief Deputy Sheriff Kevin Wheeler said authorities don't
believe all of the story, namely that Alvarado and others brought to the
mountains had no idea what they were being hired to do.

Yet in Colusa County and other parts of California, law enforcement
officials say there is mounting evidence that marijuana growers -- largely
associated with Mexican drug cartels --- aggressively recruit migrant or
other low-wage workers in a late-season race to harvest their illicit crop.

In Colusa County, investigators recently discovered pot fields with a total
of 4,500 plants and arrested seven workers who said they were hired off
street corners, at day labor sites and in bars in the Sacramento area and
Tijuana.

"I think they knew full well what they were getting into, but I have no
doubt that part of their story is true -- that they were probably recruited
off the street," Wheeler said. "Whoever is behind this knows that for a
small investment they can take these people to the fields and -- if they
get caught -- they will have no idea who the head honcho is."

Alvarado told authorities that he had fled the pot field and was lost in
the mountains as officers in a California National Guard helicopter spotted
the operation. Colusa investigators said they haven't been able to identify
who planted the garden or hired the workers to cut the crop.

Four days later, authorities arrested Alvarado and a companion as the
laborers -- tired and hungry with scratches and torn clothing -- wandered
out of the forest at remote Goat Mountain Road near the border of Colusa
and Lake counties.

This year, the state Department of Justice said a task force of more than
70 local, state and federal police agencies seized 345,207 marijuana plants
- -- worth an estimated $1.3 billion -- across California from July through
mid-October. The haul was 43% higher than last year's record.

In the past dozen years, sophisticated Mexican drug cartels have taken over
dominance of the California marijuana business, law enforcement officials
say. The cartels have developed multi-tiered operations to plant the crop
in secret patches in mountains from the North Coast to the southern Sierra
and then cut, package and distribute it for sale.

California-grown marijuana fetches $4,000 a pound -- nearly the price of
gold, state Attorney General Bill Lockyer said. And as the growing season
culminates in late summer and early fall -- and as the police close in --
drug traffickers become desperate for workers and will hire outside their
criminal networks, authorities say.

"It gets to the point at the end of the season where it's a race between
law enforcement and the people tending the gardens," said Brent Wood, a
state Department of Justice drug enforcement agent. "So they put 10 or 15
people in a garden, harvest it and move on to the next one. I don't think
they the drug bosses are worried about whether the guy they pick up to work
will talk to police, because by then they will have moved on to their next
garden."

Wood, assigned to drug-enforcement operations in Madera County, said many
Mexican drug operations recruit workers during the summer in Tijuana, then
arrange for a smuggler to spirit them across the border.