Next: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n099/a01.html

STATE IS PIPELINE FOR ILLEGAL DRUGS

Arizona Is America's Newest Drug Mainline.

Pot, methamphetamine and heroin roll across the southern border so
fast and in such large quantities that almost no part of the state is
unaffected.

In Nogales, storm drains provide a smuggling superhighway, with
traffickers parking over sewer grates to load cars through holes in
the floorboards. A barrio on the east side of town has begun to empty
because of the violence wrought by a narco-gang whose leader lives
just across the fence in Sonora, on a hill overlooking town.

Thickets along the normally dry Colorado River bed south of Yuma
conceal a maze of trails from Baja California. When the river flowed
with runoff last spring, smugglers ferried loads across by boat.

Near Douglas and Naco, agents exchange gunfire with drug "mules" and
get into smash-ups with those running the border by car.

In the Tohono O'odham Nation, Indian trackers pursue midnight
footprints through the desert.

Cities away from the border also pay a price, especially Tucson and
Phoenix, which have been transformed into distribution hubs, with
spokes pointing to all corners of the nation.

It has gotten so bad that federal agents refer to Arizona as
"America's doormat for marijuana" and Tucson as its "stash house." The
numbers are staggering:

U.S. Customs agents confiscated nearly 84 tons of pot in Arizona in
fiscal 1999, four times what was seized at the start of the decade.

Narcotics cases filed in U.S. District Court here have nearly tripled
during the past five years.

Total drug arrests statewide have tripled in two decades to more than
22,000 annually.

Last year, Tucson police raided a home and found ledgers showing a
shipment of 3,300 pounds of dope, two suspects counting $109,000 in
the kitchen, and a third guy smoking a Cheech-and-Chong-size joint in
the bedroom.

"At any given time in Tucson, there are more than 2,000 locations
where you can buy drugs or find stash houses," said Kermit Miller, a
city police captain.

Phoenix also has emerged as an importation center for dope and crime.
Last year, the Office of National Drug Control Policy reported that
more than two-thirds of the homicides in Phoenix and more than half
the assaults were drug-related.

Police say the narcos, frequently paranoid and heavily armed, kill
snitches and competitors, leaving them by roadsides with lead in the
head. Investigators pursuing one East Valley ring have been stymied by
the gunshot murder of at least four prospective witnesses.

According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, 11 "major
drug trafficking organizations" are based in Arizona, working directly
with Mexican cartels. Countless smaller syndicates smuggle and
distribute drugs from barrios to burbs.

It doesn't stop with narcotics. The syndicates also smuggle
immigrants, extort money, steal cars and launder money.

They are everywhere, and no one seems able to stop
them.

A deputy says "Go!" as the van skids to a halt. Four SWAT team
members, armed to the teeth, race into the darkness. A concussion
grenade rolls under the trailer as a flak-jacketed lawman bolts up the
steps to crash the front door.

The ear-mangling boom gets every dog in Yuma barking.

A minute or two and a lot of shouting later, two sleepy-eyed women are
led outside in handcuffs. A small boy follows, weeping for his mom.

Yuma County sheriff's Commander Jimmy Schroeder, an exuberant bundle
of nerves, enters the stuffy rig with his warrant in hand. There's a
bag of "critty" - methamphetamine - and a half-eaten burrito on the
kitchen counter. Schroeder starts rifling drawers and closets. Out
come several grams of foil-wrapped black-tar heroin. From the tiny
bedroom, he fishes out a handgun, a couple of police scanners,
assorted drug pipes and two more bags of meth, a quarter-pound in all.

One of the women, he says, is the stepdaughter of a Mexican smuggling
chief.

Surveying the growing stack of contraband in the kitchen, Schroeder
breaks into a joyous shuffle. His partners chortle at the "critty dance."

Why Arizona?

Until the mid-1980s, most of South America's cocaine was smuggled into
the United States via Florida. But when Dade County drug rings started
having gunbattles in broad daylight, federal authorities cracked down.

What happened was predictable: The cartels looked for new routes,
finding allies among Mexico's pot and heroin smugglers. They had
decades-old inroads through Texas, Arizona and California,
black-market systems that dated to Geronimo in the mid-1800s.

Colombians paid their Mexican collaborators cash at first, then agreed
to share the coke and the U.S. market. Mexican syndicates quickly
doubled their power and exportation business.

Law enforcement followed the crime, shifting its efforts from Florida
to the Southwest and Mexico.

But narco-democracy, government dominated by drug cartel money and
intimidation, was already entrenched. And the task was huge. Along
America's southern border, there are 39 crossings, 24 ports of entry
and 2,000 miles of badlands. For the past six years, President Clinton
has beefed up Southwest interdiction forces in a strategy to stop the
smuggling of drugs and immigrants. The number of Border Patrol agents,
now about 8,000, has more than doubled since 1993. Nearly a quarter of
those were hired last year alone.

California and Texas were targeted first as authorities tried to shut
down pipelines through San Diego and El Paso. The squeeze sent more
and more drug shipments through Arizona, the point of weakest
resistance. Only in the past 18 months have substantial border
reinforcements landed in Arizona, chiefly in and around Nogales, an
import-export crossroad about 60 miles south of Tucson.

Predictably, traffickers swarmed east to Cochise County - Douglas,
Naco and Sierra Vista. Some have begun to move out of Arizona
altogether, back to old Caribbean routes. Drug Enforcement
Administration analysts say Colombian cartels supplying most of the
U.S. cocaine grew weary of sharing profits and drugs with Mexican
traffickers, who helped them move their supplies through Mexico and
across the Southwestern border.

Plenty of pot, however, is still coming into Arizona from Mexican
sources. Federal agencies are betting it will eventually ebb as they
put more people along the border in southeastern Arizona.

Eventually, the smuggling bulge will move to rural stretches of
western Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, and that suits federal agents
just fine. Smugglers are easier to spot in remote places than in cities.

But no one expects it to stop. There's just too much money to be
made.

Across the border from Douglas, at Agua Prieta's Iglesia de Guadalupe,
the rectory is protected by double locks and window bars.

The Rev. Cristobal Valenzuela says drugs are eating at the heart of
Mexico, as well as America. But he understands why poor campesinos
take jobs as smugglers. They are accustomed to making $4 a day, if
they can find work. They see narco-neighbors with nice cars, building
new homes. They watch TV and drive across the border on shopping
sprees, seeing how Americans live.

What are they to think? Valenzuela wonders.

So, they agree to carry one load of cocaine or pot across the line.
They come home with more money than they would earn in a month. They
pay the rent.

Need gives way to greed for other things - jewelry, cars and stereos.
So, they carry more loads. And when they've carried enough, they move
up, hiring others to be the mules.

There is something desperate about Agua Prieta, a dirty clump of
businesses and homes, clogged at the border. Families and furtive-eyed
young men move up and down the streets, waiting.

Valenzuela looks outside through wrought-iron bars, shaking his head:
"How can we help these people? How can we feed them, bathe them, give
them shoes?"

Guerrilla Warfare

Smuggling across Arizona's border is nothing new.

For 150 years, bandidos, Apaches, bootleggers and gunrunners have
carved black-market routes along la frontera.

What's novel these days is the volume, and the danger.

Before retiring last July, Thomas Constantine, head of the Drug
Enforcement Administration, described the Arizona border from Nogales
to New Mexico as one of the most hazardous law enforcement beats in
America.

"The traffickers in this area are bold and confident, and less
hesitant to confront law enforcement officers," he told Congress.
"Since 1992, there have been 23 documented assaults and threats
against law enforcement officers in the border area of Cochise County."

The conflict is fought across an enormous and foreboding swath of
desert and mountain. U.S. agents say Mexican military units sometimes
serve as armed escorts for the drug runners.

In the dead of night, interdiction becomes a perilous game of cat and
mouse. Agents watch through an array of night-vision scopes, hidden in
tarp-draped vans on hillsides or lying in wait along trails.

The outlaws use their own technology and trickery.

They haul dope on their backs, hide the stuff in false truck beds and
thrash across the line in four-wheel-drive trucks. A few carve
underground tunnels or fly the low-level gantlet through U.S. Customs'
radar net.

"Every night, there's a load. Every night, people are chasing each
other," said Ritchie Martinez, an intelligence analyst for southern
Arizona's High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. "We are shouldering a
lot of the nation's problems here in terms of dope."

Both sides use quasimilitary tactics. Undercover narcs set up stings.
Smugglers use illegal immigrants as decoys. Customs agents call in air
support. Smugglers pay bribes to inspectors.

The game has created human logjams in small towns on both sides of the
border, prompting public outcries over federal tactics.

Southeastern Arizona ranchers have taken up rifles and formed
makeshift posses to patrol their lands against the invasion of
smugglers and illegal immigrants.

"These people cut fences, (urinate) in their water tanks, leave trash
everywhere and don't ever close a gate," complained Bill Wendt, a
businessman in Douglas. "I tell you what, if you live in this part of
the country and you go out in the country, you'd better have a gun!"

Others, such as Raul Enriquez, owner of the T-Bone restaurant in
Douglas, view the drug war as a charade that keeps border towns thriving.

"Legalize?" Enriquez says with horror. "We'd have a . . . depression.
Do you know how many people would lose their jobs?"

The Astar chopper kicks up dust as rotor wind rips at dry scrub below.
Moving to a nearby wash, the chopper hovers as all hands scan for
bales. A smuggler panics, bolting from a clump of bushes. The chopper
banks and chases as one man becomes three.

Minutes earlier, U.S. Customs pilots scrambled from Tucson's
Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. The Arizona Department of Public Safety
and the U.S. Border Patrol have tailed a carload of pot to a house in
Tucson. It is a "hot car" sent ahead by smugglers to grab police
attention. A bigger load, it turns out, is waiting in the desert a
dozen miles north of the border, near Arivaca.

The chopper's blinding dust storm stops the smugglers in their tracks.
Border Patrol agents round up the runners. In the wash, they find the
prize: 14 bundles of marijuana, some gift-wrapped in Christmas paper.

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