GROWERS HIT STREETS FOR POT-HARVEST LABOR: MEXICAN CARTELS RECRUIT, IMPORT
WORKERS

Miguel Alvarado, 19, said he was pushing his ice cream cart on Fruitridge
Road in Sacramento 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 for. 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 claimed 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 percent higher than last year's previous 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 multitiered 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
investigators recently arrested two laborers hired by someone who stopped
them at a gas station and offered $100 to $150 a day. He said many Mexican
drug operations recruit workers during the summer in Tijuana, then arrange
for a smuggler to spirit them across the border. But later in the season,
he said, additional marijuana field hands are rounded up from California
bars or job sites catering to migrant laborers.

John Gaines, a state Department of Justice special agent, said some workers
claimed they were hired for farm work and -- upon seeing the marijuana
fields -- were threatened at gunpoint. They were "told that if they don't
do what they are told their families will be harmed," Gaines said.

But many go along willingly, he added. As marijuana growers promise, "They
can make hundreds of dollars. What a deal."

In Colusa County, Jose Luis Flores Camacho, 25, one of seven people facing
felony marijuana cultivation charges, told authorities he was working at a
construction site in Rancho Cordova on Sept. 21 when a man drove by in a
maroon or red van. The man said he was willing to pay $15 an hour for
people to harvest grapes, said Flores, who was making only $6 an hour as a
construction worker. Flores said he readily accepted the man's offer.

According to court documents, Flores told Colusa sheriff's investigators
that the man later picked him up at a Sacramento restaurant and then
stopped at an apartment complex and picked up six more workers. Flores said
the man told his passengers not to talk to each other. The driver talked on
a cellphone as he took them down a mountain back road to a place where four
or five other workers were already waiting, Flores said.

"They took us to the campground and I saw marijuana plants there," he said.
"... The next morning I was told that my job was to cut leaves off of the
marijuana buds. I saw two other Mexican guys dressed in camo fatigues pack
the marijuana buds into plastic bags. One of these guys carried an AK-47
rifle with him all the time."

Flores said he worked in the garden for a week before authorities raided
it. He said he ran off and took four days to make it out of the mountains.
He was arrested when he stopped to use a pay phone in a nearby town.

Marysville attorney Roberto Marquez, who is representing another Colusa
defendant, Jose Maria Figueroa Navarro, 37, said the drug cartels seem to
"target people that they know are down and out."

Marquez said his client was recruited from Tijuana for seasonal farm work
in California. He said a client he represented in another area marijuana
cultivation case had been recruited from a coin laundry in Los Angeles by a
man who struck up a conversation. Upon learning that his client was
unemployed, Marquez said, the man then announced: "I've got an opportunity
for you."

"It appears that they just pluck these guys up and bring them in,
intentionally, from outside the area so that they are secluded, without
transportation, abandoned and dependent on the growers," Marquez said. "To
get your food you have to cooperate. And to get the hell out you've got to
cooperate."

Wheeler, the chief deputy sheriff in Colusa County, said all seven suspects
held in the local case appeared to be low-level laborers who wound up
wandering in the mountains as their supervisors got away. The workers said
they never got paid.

"It's frustrating," Wheeler said. "When it comes down to it, these guys
(the laborers) are going to be victimized by the organization. It's a risky
job. What's keeping the bad guys from killing them and leaving them in the
hills?"