THE PLAZA

Tijuana Cartel Dominates Choice Route For Smugglers

SAN YSIDRO -- "It's a boy," exults the U.S. Customs Service mechanic in
mock celebration.

The tire he has just pulled off a 1988 Isuzu Trooper II trying to enter the
United States from Mexico at the San Ysidro Port of Entry yields hefty
bundles of marijuana. The other three tires are all similarly stuffed with
about 47 pounds each of large marijuana bricks.

Estimated street value for this 189 pounds of dope -- about $114,000.
Customs has the load, the vehicle and the driver all in custody.

It's a small victory in the ceaseless campaign waged against drug smuggling
all along the Southwest border, in the air above it and the seas beyond it.

Drug traffickers call it the "Plaza." U.S. government officials say it is
currently the most heavily used drug corridor into the United States. "This
is the focus of drug trafficking now," says Rudy M. Camacho, the Customs
Service's director of field operations for San Diego and Imperial Counties.

The Arellano Felix Organization sits aside the Plaza and dominates this
choice smugglers route from the cartel's base area in the
Tijuana-Mexicali-Ensenada triangle.

If the Arellanos owned the Isuzu load (ownership is always difficult to
determine), its loss is no doubt considered an acceptable cost of doing
business. Vehicles for smuggling are cheap, the drivers ("mules" in drug
jargon) are expendable and $100,000 lost in a confiscated load is a
comparative trifle for a cartel grossing perhaps $1 billion or more a year.

No one knows for certain what percentage of the drugs entering the United
States is detected and seized by the government. But few estimates run more
than perhaps 15 percent, and many are much lower.

In one recent period of 21 hours stretched over three different days spent
with Customs Service inspectors at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, about a
dozen drug loads were seized. All consisted of marijuana. Total estimated
street value might have reached $1 million. A safe guess is that as much as
10 times that amount got through, although not necessarily at San Ysidro.

"I personally think we are barely touching them," says one agent with years
of experience in the Southwest border drug wars.

The truest test is probably the street value of a given narcotic. If
interdiction were catching, say, a third or a half of all drug shipments,
street prices would be rising. But they are not. Instead, street prices for
cocaine and marijuana have actually declined since the 1980s. That clearly
suggests that interdiction is more a holding action than any sort of cure
for America's drug habit.

The odds against the Customs Service, which is responsible for drug
interdiction at all border crossings, seaports and airports, are especially
formidable at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. San Ysidro is the busiest land
border crossing in the world. Daily vehicle traffic entering from Mexico
typically averages between 42,000 and 60,000 cars. Commercial trucks from
Mexico enter at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry, on average more than 2,000 a
day. Pedestrian crossers at San Ysidro total roughly another 20,000 on a
typical day.

In recent congressional testimony, Edward W. Logan, who runs Customs'
Office of Investigations in San Diego, cited the even bigger numbers from
the Southern California region in 1999:

"We encountered over 30 million passenger vehicles, 95 million persons,
almost a million trucks, thousands of pleasure craft and cleared for entry
into U.S. commerce over $12 billion of trade-related merchandise from Mexico.

"Culled from this enormous haystack of people and conveyances, the Customs
Service seized 192 tons of marijuana, 5 tons of cocaine, 1,164 pounds of
methamphetamine and 226 pounds of heroin along with arresting over 4,000
drug smugglers."

Logan notes that drug smuggling through the Plaza is definitely a growth
industry, a point he also made in his testimony to a congressional
subcommittee last March:

"In eight short years, we have witnessed drug seizures rise at our
California Ports of Entry from 370 in 1991 to over 4,000 in 1998. Last
year, over 58 percent of all detected drug smuggling events at U.S. Ports
of Entry along the Mexican border occurred in California."

To combat this flood of drugs, 75 percent of the approximately 800
uniformed Customs inspectors and agents in the San Diego region have an
anti-narcotics mission.

Customs operates an air-interdiction force of several twin-engine jets plus
helicopters based at North Island Naval Air Station. The daily missions
flown by these intercept aircraft along the U.S.-Mexico border are
controlled from a continent-scanning radar surveillance center at March Air
Reserve Base in Riverside. The center's giant display screens cover the
entire southern tier of the United States and can track virtually every
aircraft flying from the Pacific coast to the Caribbean.

Air intercept operations flown by Customs with help from the U.S. military
have diminished airborne drug smuggling from a daily occurrence to a
relative rarity. Mexican drug traffickers now typically fly loads of
cocaine and marijuana to locations just south of the border and then move
the drugs across by land, or around the border by sea.

The latter option has prompted Customs to build a maritime interdiction
capability with several fast patrol boats based in San Diego.

"It is an hourly battle of wits between us and the smugglers," Camacho says.

Customs inspectors like to say that "the smugglers must be lucky every time
they cross and we only have to get lucky once."

In fact, however, the sheer volume of traffic puts the odds mostly with the
smugglers.

Kirk Patterson, the assistant port director for passenger operations,
explains what his inspectors are up against.

"This is a tremendous haystack here and the smugglers know that. Their
spotters watch us constantly from the Mexican side. Narcotics is our top
priority but we're also enforcing more than 400 laws from over 40 federal
agencies.

"We have less than 30 seconds per car to make decisions about whether
something just doesn't look right. We look for something that doesn't match."

Glancing out at the lines of cars waiting to cross the border, Patterson
then refers to the obvious -- "that fine line between traffic facilitation
and narcotics interdiction."

Logan makes the same point.

"I'd like to get every gram of narcotics, but that would be wholly
inconsistent with a functioning border," he says.