NATIVE AMERICAN OFFICERS USE ANCESTRAL SKILLS TO CAPTURE VIOLATORS AT BORDER

SELLS, Ariz. -- Customs officers Al Estrada and Kevin Carlos examine
footprints in the dirt of the Tahono O'Odham Indian Reservation, a few
miles north of the Mexican border.

"This guy tried to tiptoe across," said Estrada. Said Carlos: "To leave the
least amount of print."

Carlos counts the number of tracks belonging to probable drug smugglers.
"One, two . . . seven, eight. Nine. It was probably yesterday. When the
wind blows, it tends to erase the track. It's pretty wind-blown." The two
men are members of the only U.S. Customs Service patrol unit whose officers
are all Native Americans. They adapt old-time techniques for tracking
wayward cattle and horses to hunt smugglers, intercepting tons of
marijuana, cocaine and sometimes heroin.

Their low-tech methods have proven highly effective in stopping some of the
drugs flowing across the border from reaching their distribution points.
Last year, the unit's 10 officers, who oversee 70 miles of border along the
reservation, seized 58,000 pounds of marijuana, 2,300 pounds of cocaine and
$3.5 million in cash, and made 237 arrests, making them the
highest-producing office in the state, according to Roger Applegate, a
group supervisor.

The methods are so effective that officers have begun training border
patrols in foreign countries. Carlos, for example, just returned from three
weeks in the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where he
helped train border guards to look for smugglers of nuclear material. The
Sells unit, though, has no shortage of work at home. The amount of
contraband crossing the Arizona border is growing dramatically,
demonstrated by the rising number of drugs confiscated by Customs agents.
Agents in Arizona seized 50 percent more marijuana and 35 percent more
cocaine in 1999, for example, than in 1998.

A plan to increase the Sells unit to a record 25 officers will not mean
less work for people like Estrada and Carlos.

"The more guys you have, the more work you seem to find," Estrada said. "If
we had 100 officers, there'd still be as much work." Most U.S. residents
encounter Customs Service agents at airports and border crossings, where
they monitor goods brought from abroad. The Customs Service began to
disband the national patrols, whose job was to cover the areas between
border stations, in the mid-1980s. The Sells unit was spared because it was
created separately under an act of Congress to require that officers be at
least one-quarter Native American.

Although the Sells unit has high-tech equipment--night-vision goggles,
global-positioning sets, intrusion sensors--its members rely mostly on
ancient ancestral tracking methods.

The Sells officers have learned to read the smugglers' tricks for hiding
their tracks. Some drug couriers wear booties made of carpet. Some drag
branches behind them to disguise their prints. They step on shrubbery
rather than dirt, or skirt the rocky foothills that surround the sandy
desert. "They walk backward, they try hopping across," said Carlos, who has
been a member of the unit for two years.

The officers have adapted their skills accordingly. They can tell, for
example, the difference between a drug courier's tracks and an illegal
alien's. The stride of a person carrying a pack loaded with 40 pounds of
marijuana is not going to be as great and the prints will be deeper,
Estrada said. In brushy areas, the bulky pack will break branches off
trees. Couriers also rest more often, and there are telltale signs of where
a pack has been set on the ground.

"Have you ever given anyone a piggyback ride?" Carlos asked. "Your stance
gets wider."

While it is not part of the Customs patrol's mandate, the unit can't help
but encounter illegal aliens trying to cross into the United States.
Crackdowns on the southern borders of Texas and California--as well as
parts of Arizona's border--have funneled even more aliens through the
region around Sells, which lies almost at a midpoint of Arizona's border
with Mexico. When the Customs officers encounter illegal aliens, they hold
them until the Border Patrol can take over.

In the first 10 days of May, Applegate said, the unit detained more than
600 illegal aliens. "And we're not trying to catch them," he added. Estrada
and Carlos began one recent morning on a dirt road that parallels the
border. Some officers ride horseback, but this day the pair used a silver
four-wheel drive. Carlos drove at 5 mph, hanging his head out one window,
while Estrada leaned out the other side. They were "cutting for sign," or
looking for suspicious tracks.

Whenever either spotted something, Carlos would back up and stop the truck.
"What's that, Al?" Carlos asked about a thick, hyphenated trail across the
dirt. "It looks like a snake with something in its belly." The tracks of
desert creatures are time clues. Since animals and insects here are most
active at night, their tracks on top of human prints indicate the people
made their journey the night before.

Tracking is a skill that Native Americans may be losing in their daily
lives. As a younger member of the Customs unit, Carlos is learning tracking
techniques from elders such as Estrada, who has been on the force since
1975. Growing up in Sells, Carlos used some tracking when he hunted, but
that was about it.

"I knew it could be done, I just never saw it being applied," he said. His
first outing was with a veteran officer, Marvin Eleando, as they followed
smugglers' paths across the foothills, whose rocky terrain is among the
most difficult to read, to a cave.

"Marvin goes, 'The guys are in there, resting.' And that's exactly what the
officers found," Carlos said.

Training is informal, consisting simply of the experienced officer guiding
the less-experienced one. Estrada said his own skills are still evolving,
even after 25 years with the unit.

"Tracking is something you continue to learn," he said. The smugglers
continue to learn too.

"We've got to write down everything we do. They'll read the police report,
see how we're doing what, and where we're doing it," Carlos said. For
example, the "carpet people," who tie pieces of rug to their shoes to hide
their prints, learned that the officers were finding fibers snagged in the
shrubbery. So they switched to higher-quality carpet less likely to shed.
But when smugglers wise up, it's not long before the Sells unit does too,
tracking terrain that's as familiar to them as it is to another desert
dweller. "We refer to ourselves as the wolf pack," Carlos said, "because we
split up like wolves and go find what we're looking for, call in the rest
of the wolves, and hunt down the prey."