BRAZEN TRAFFICKERS WANT THE RUN OF THE BORDER

Drug flow from Mexico now more frequent, deadly

TIJUANA -- Mexican police at a checkpoint outside Mexicali stop a truck
loaded with rustic furniture bound for Tijuana. Under the tables and chairs
are more than 800 pounds of marijuana.

Just across the border in Calexico, U.S. Customs agents at the port of
entry are near the point of collapse after seizing 13 loads of marijuana in
one day.

A few miles inland, Border Patrol agents staffing a highway checkpoint nab
one of the few loads the customs agents let slip past them, more than 3,500
pounds of the illegal herb the Mexicans call mota, hidden in the bed of a
pickup truck.

Meanwhile, about a half-mile east of San Ysidro, a vehicle rips out panels
of the steel border fence in broad daylight, enabling another pickup to
plow across the border, roaring past startled Border Patrol agents.

Sheriff's deputies eventually find the truck abandoned in Chula Vista,
along with 1,500 pounds of marijuana.

All of the above occurred in a single day last week.

"We're getting inundated by volumes (of smuggled narcotics), both in San
Diego and Calexico," Ed Logan, customs special agent in charge, said in San
Diego.

"We're getting killed here."

Logan was speaking figuratively. In Tijuana, however, the killing is
literal, the number of victims is growing, and authorities are convinced
that eight homicide cases out of 10 are drug-related.

According to statistics kept by the Baja California Attorney General's
office, Tijuana alone has recorded 84 homicides between December and this
month, most of them thought to be gangland-style executions related to
drugs.

The area of La Presa, whose Rodriguez Dam reservoir was once popular with
picnickers, has in recent months taken on a different kind of popularity as
a dumping ground for the bodies of slaying victims.

According to Errol Chavez, chief San Diego agent for the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration, the large flow of marijuana may be a
combination of seasonal harvest cycles and an effort to move tons of pot
that had been stored just across the border in Mexico, waiting to be
shipped.

"We have traffickers who have been warehousing the marijuana until they
were properly equipped to smuggle it," Chavez said. "It's not just a matter
of harvesting. You've got to get your people in place, get your equipment
in place."

Someone had everything in place Wednesday morning in Tijuana, when a Ford
F-250 4-wheel-drive pickup came barreling through a hole in the border
fence about 8:30 a.m.

Border Patrol agents believe smugglers attached chains from a second
vehicle, possibly a sport-utility vehicle, to the fence and pulled out
several of the heavy steel panels, enabling the truck to crash through the
gap.

"It got onto the mesa at a high rate of speed and came through before we
noticed it," said Border Patrol spokesman Sal Zamora. "This isn't the kind
of thing you usually see happening around 8 or 8:30 in the morning. It was
pretty bold action, and it really caught us off guard."

The smugglers chose their spot with great care, Zamora said. That section
of fence had been cut with blowtorches before and patched with individual
steel mats. It was those mats to which they were able to attach chains to
pull them out, Zamora said.

Logan said the sudden spurt of major loads indicated both a successful
harvest of marijuana and increased desperation on the part of the
smugglers, who not only have to contend with steel fences but a growing
presence of the Border Patrol, which seizes more drugs than any other
agency in law enforcement.

"They're attacking any weak spots they think they can find," Logan said.
"They're going around the ports, between the ports. If they think they can,
they're trying to go through the ports.

"We've been deluged like this (with marijuana) for the past month, the past
two months. We're even seeing more cocaine than we have in the last few
years, albeit in 50-pound or 75-pound loads, not the 8-ton loads like the
old days."

As well as trying to intercept these increased flows, law enforcement
agents are pouring time and money into analyzing the arrests and seizures,
trying to figure out what it all means.

"We don't know if we're dealing with a short-term phenomenon or a
longer-term, cyclical increase," said Logan. "We're trying to get some
perspective on this."

The increased effort to smuggle pot from Mexico into the United States may
be having a deadly side effect in Tijuana, as various smuggling rings
compete for territory and the best routes.

The competition often takes the form of gangland-style slayings, with the
victims usually executed by gunshot and their bodies left in out-of-the-way
places.

"It's a statistic that a great majority of the homicides committed in
Tijuana are related to questions of drug trafficking," said Juan Manuel
Nieves Reta, Tijuana's municipal police chief.

Others, such as Gen. Josi Luis Chavez Garcma, chief representative of the
federal Attorney General's Office in Baja California, think the actual
number of drug-related homicides, while high, may not be as high as many
believe.

"There will be some that are the product of drug trafficking, vengeance,
vendettas among drug traffickers," he said. "But others will not be. We
need to make a full analysis of this."

Copyright 1998 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.