Losing The War On Drugs: At The Border, Part 5

WHY BORDERS DON'T STOP ILLEGAL DRUGS

U.S. Customs agents at the world's busiest crossing have an impressive
record in busting smugglers. But, the U.S. admits, 'drugs still flood in.'

SAN YSIDRO, California - 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 almost certainly here, somewhere, in this
river of machines and people.

It's mid-morning 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 agents. They 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 total,
would be open and 65,000 vehicles would pass by for inspection.

In a typical day, around 35,000 pedestrians will do the same.

These numbers don't include commercial truck traffic, which uses a separate
crossing nearby.

Located between San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico, the San Ysidro
border crossing is overflowing with cars, people and symbolism. It's a
pulsing demonstration of globalization -- the rapid growth in exchange
between the First World and the Third, and the promise it holds for both.

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 that same planner's nightmare, a
sprawling agglomeration of shanty neighbourhoods, massive factories and
fortified haciendas, all spiced up by raucous nightclubs, bars and
establishments that would make a sailor blush.

Still, whatever their outward differences, San Diego and Tijuana are
Siamese twins sharing one economic heart. Both cities 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 NAFTA, is hastening the day when the twins will share even
more than an economic heart.

Migrants from all over Mexico flock to Tijuana. They come for work in the
maquiladoras -- factories making everything from televisions to trucks --
that were built here by American and Asian companies to take advantage of
the cheap labour. Workers typically earn about $75 U.S. 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 commuter traffic over the border, with
American-based executives travelling south while Mexican maids,
landscapers, construction workers and other labourers go north. It may seem
an inequitable arrangement, but each side needs the other. San Diego and
Tijuana share an economy. The free flow of people, services and goods over
the border is its lifeblood.

That flow 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 whole region. Efforts to fight drug-smuggling are one such
restriction.

The more time border agents are given to inspect travellers, the more
likely they are to stop drugs -- and the more economic damage they will
cumulatively do. "No one want drugs to come into the United States," says
W.B. Ward, the 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."

It's a lesson learned from experience. In 1969, when the U.S. and Mexican
economies were far less integrated than today, the Nixon administration
decided to stop Mexican marijuana and heroin by searching every third car
crossing the border. Immediately, there were traffic backups that stretched
for miles. Locals were furious, the Mexican government outraged. The
U.S. government quickly dropped the policy.

Today, in the era of NAFTA, the push is on to make crossing ever
faster. Mr. Ward notes that San Diegans spend $4 billion U.S. in Tijuana
every year and Tijuanans spend the same amount in San Diego, "so there's
tremendous pressure from the stores in both sections to get people across
the border."

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
agents just 30 to 45 seconds to size up a vehicle and its driver and decide
whether they should do a more thorough search. To help keep up this frantic
pace, San Ysidro expanded its workforce from 48 inspectors 14 years ago to
370 now. They also have sniffer dogs, x-ray machines, a national database
and other bits of technological wizardry to help.

Raw numbers suggest that the agents have great success in stopping
smugglers. "We get around 15 drug loads in a 24-hour period," says Mr.
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
10,000 pounds of cocaine were seized, along with 225 pounds of heroin and
1,100 pounds of methamphetamines. A small mountain of marijuana -- 380,000
pounds -- was stopped at the border.

But these numbers mean little in isolation. Does seizing even 225 pounds of
heroin, 10,000 pounds of cocaine and 380,000 pounds of marijuana make a
difference to the availability and price of heroin, cocaine and marijuana
in the United States?

No. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, 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 United States government, a pure gram of heroin
cost $1,194 U.S. at the wholesale level; in 1998, it cost $317. Estimates
vary, but some 60 per cent or more of the cocaine that enters the United
States each year -- some 393 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
the U.S. Congress, has documented the spectacular failure of the U.S. to
stop drugs at its borders. "Despite longstanding 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 of drug lords 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.
For Mexicans whose best hope is a job in the maquiladoras, that's an
irresistible offer. An endless stream of people try to make the border
alchemy work.

The traffic in marijuana alone is so big that Mexicans caught smuggling the
weed in amounts less than 150 pounds are turned back at the border without
charges. "We just don't have the bed space" in jails, Mr. Ward explains.

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," Mr. Ward says. "There's no profile for it."

Without a profile, customs agents must trust intuitions to tell them who
might be trying to hide something. "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 since 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 within
their vehicles. They simply pile millions of dollars worth of drugs in the
trunk, as if they were golf bags or suitcases.

Serious smugglers also use other strategies. Corruption among American
customs officers is nothing like the level of graft among Mexican police,
but it is not uncommon. Mr. Partida insists that corruption is rare but
notes that in his 17 years of service, "I have seen many, many officers
that have gone bad."

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, Mr. Ward points a telescope toward the Mexican side of
the border and immediately picks out a man watching the crossing while
speaking into a cellphone. 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 2,000 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 66 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, there 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
in this little sector are illuminated at night by stadium lighting.
Forty-seven 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.

In the 1990s, the total Border Patrol complement has nearly tripled. The
main focus of this escalation 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.

The smugglers, Agent Mason says, "are very organized and more complicated
than people perceive them to be. They have an intelligence network of
guides at high points that sit and monitor our operations, watching our
patrol patterns. They operate with people on the north side that live in
close proximity to the border."

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.

Agent Mason cites smugglers who tunnelled 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-sized packages of heroin or cocaine into
American backyards, where colleagues snatch them up and walk on.

Last year, a Border Patrol truck travelling 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. Officials have no idea how long it was in use. "You figure, how many
tunnels like that are operating?" asks Agent White with a shake of his head.

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 discretely hinged on the Mexican side, and
tire tracks from trucks using the gate were carefully swept away after each
use, so nothing looked amiss. Again, it's not known how long, or how often,
the gate was used.

"It's kind of cat-and-mouse," says Agent 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's a strange game of sorts, one that
has been going on since the Patrol was founded in 1924, in part to fight
liquor smugglers violating Prohibition.

The violence never stops, either. During Prohibition, agents and smugglers
alike died trying to send or stop alcohol. The Border Patrol and other
agencies continue to take casualties fighting drug-smugglers.

In a particularly bizarre incident two years ago, customs agents asked a
72-year-old man crossing the border to go for a secondary
inspection. Because of the man's age, he wasn't frisked. He pulled a gun
and murdered an agent before being shot dead; he was, it turned out, a
ranking member of the Tijuana cartel.

In the San Diego sector, four Border Patrol agents have been killed since
1995. There are reports that the Juarez cartel has offered to pay up to
$250,000 U.S. for every agent murdered.

Agent White declined to have his picture taken for this story. It's a
Border Patrol policy to lessen, at least a little, the dangers faced by
agents and their families.

Back at San Ysidro, the sun is sinking on a Tuesday evening. Through the
day, tens of thousands of people, cars and trucks had crossed from Mexico
into the U.S. 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. It has been just another day at the border.

Dan Gardner is a Citizen editorial writer.

Losing the War on Drugs

Is the war on drugs causing more harm than drug abuse itself? The Citizen's
Dan Gardner spent five months researching this question, travelling to
Colombia, Mexico and the United States.