Flood of Contraband Hard to Stop

Mexican Traffickers Benefit From Heavy Traffic, New Technology
By John Ward Anderson and William Branigin
Washington Post Foreign Service

McALLEN, Tex.—Border Patrol agent Joel Martinez and his dog Brutus were on
routine patrol six months ago in Combes, Tex., checking freight trains
for illegal aliens when the dog started whimpering, barking and chewing
the corner of a boxcar.

Martinez looked inside. It was empty. But using crowbars and a blow torch,
agents discovered the source of Brutus's unflagging agitation: more than
two tons of marijuana stashed behind false walls. "I damn near kissed that
dog on the mouth," Martinez said.

The incident was but one recent example of how the U.S.Mexican border is
under siege by Mexican drug trafficking organizations. The traffickers have
virtually unlimited funds to build the most elaborate secret compartments,
to buy the best countersurveillance technology and transport vehicles
available, and to corrupt law enforcement officials on both sides of the
frontier.

The southwest border is being attacked from all angles, with traffickers
tunneling under it, flying over it, walking and driving across it and
boating around it.

Based on the rule of thumb, often cited by law enforcement officials, that
only 10 percent to 15 percent of the drug flow is discovered and seized,
traffickers are delivering between five and seven tons of cocaine,
marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin from Mexico to the United States
every day of the year.

That traffic is contributing to drug abuse and crime in the United States;
corrupting the Mexican economy, judicial system and government; and
poisoning relations between the United States and Mexico. But more
immediately, it is wreaking havoc all along the 2,000mile border between
the two countries, distorting and destroying the lives of ranchers,
policemen, federal and local officials, and people living in scores of
southwestern towns and cities.

"Texas is now where Florida was 15 years ago, and we need all the help we
can get," said Capt. Enrique Espinoza, head of the Texas Department of
Public Safety's narcotics unit in McAllen. "We're getting overrun by it."

The flood of drugs is being orchestrated primarily by two major Mexican
drug cartels one based in Tijuana and headed by the Arellano Felix
family and the second operating out of Ciudad Juarez on the Texas border
and formerly led by the late Amado Carrillo Fuentes. At least three other
smaller but powerful organizations also traffic drugs across the border:
the remnants of the Gulf cartel on Mexico's Gulf coast; the Caro Quintero
family's organization based in Sonora along the Arizona border; and the
Amezcua family, with a global methamphetamine smuggling business
headquartered in the central city of Guadalajara.

The Mexican cartels, which have replaced Colombianbased mafias as the
primary traffickers of cocaine, marijuana and other drugs in many parts of
the United States, have become so big, so powerful and such a dominant
factor in the drug trade that U.S. law enforcement officials now speak of
them in almost apocalyptic terms.

"I am not exaggerating when I say that the Mexican drug syndicates are the
premier law enforcement threat facing the United States today," U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration Chief Thomas A. Constantine told Congress
earlier this year.

What makes the Mexican drug organizations more menacing than those of
Colombia or Burma or Nigeria is the proximity and the porousness of
the border, a thinly guarded strip surrounded by a rapidly growing region
populated by tens of millions of Mexicans and Americans. This fivepart
series of articles about the border will show that:

U.S. and Mexican authorities are overwhelmed by the quantities of drugs
being smuggled into the United States, and acknowledge that geography,
technology, economic trends and the odds overwhelmingly favor the traffickers.

Mexican traffickers pay off corrupt police and officials both in Mexico and
the United States to allow drugs to cross the border. While corruption in
the United States is believed to be episodic rather than systemic,
officials are worried that it appears to be increasing.

Drugrelated crime and violence have made their way across the border as
well, with Mexican traffickers enlisting street gang members in U.S. cities
as foot soldiers. Cities like San Diego and Phoenix are seeing a vicious
new style of murder, while smaller communities along the border have
experienced a rash of drugrelated kidnappings.

Although the United States and Mexico close allies and freetrade
partners have pledged at the highest levels of government to work
together in the fight against drug trafficking, the reality on the border
is quite different. Crossborder relations among authorities are more often
characterized by suspicion and resentment than by cooperation.

The Mexican drug gangs, as their influence reaches deeper into the U.S.
heartland, seek to escape notice by immersing themselves in the
fastgrowing MexicanAmerican communities of the nation's large cities.
Some analysts worry that Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans might be
stigmatized by the drug gangs, much as Italian Americans were stigmatized
for years by the Mafia.

A Complex Region

The border is more than a battleground in the drug war. It is also a
distinctive and complex region where a growing assimilation of peoples,
cultures and economies is in some senses making the line between the two
countries gradually disappear.

Much of the border region is hot, dusty and poor. There are long stretches
of arid ranch land, rugged hill country and desert wilderness, with some of
the 38 official border crossings separated by hundreds of miles.

But this desolate expanse is punctuated by bustling cities, sunbaked
barrios and vibrant boom towns that face each other across the border in
pairs San Diego and Tijuana; Calexico, Calif., and Mexicali; Douglas,
Ariz., and Agua Prieta; El Paso and Ciudad Juarez; McAllen, Tex., and
Reynosa; Brownsville, Tex., and Matamoros.

Free trade between the United States and Mexico has drawn migrants from
other parts of Mexico north to the border, where small factories and
assembly plants have sprouted like desert wildflowers after a sudden rain.
People, money and goods move back and forth across the frontier in such
profusion that the two sides are more tightly linked more
interdependent, both economically and socially than ever before.

This melding, for all its beneficial effects, makes halting the flow of
drugs across the border all but impossible. Drug smuggling thrives amid a
tradition of smuggling that goes back generations; crossborder family
ties; high levels of poverty, illiteracy and unemployment; interlocking
economies; daily commuting by students, shoppers and workers; and a unique
southwest border culture and language. And thrown into the mix are a lot of
money, a little creativity and raw intimidation.

"They are just limited by their imagination," said a U.S. official who
closely monitors Mexican trafficking groups. "Money is no obstacle at all."

Trafficking schemes run the gamut from the mundane to the Byzantine. In
recent years, drug mafias have bought 727style planes and built a fleet of
twoman submarines to move drugs to the United States. They have secreted
loads in propane tanks and containers of hazardous materials, in small cans
of tuna fish and fivegallon drums of jalapeno peppers. One trafficking
group fashioned a special mold that was used successfully to ship cocaine
from Mexico through the United States and into Canada completely sealed
inside the walls of porcelain toilets.

The groups are using satellitelinked navigation and positioning aids to
coordinate airplane drops to boats waiting in the Caribbean and to trucks
in the Arizona and Texas deserts. They are using small planes equipped with
ordinary car radar detectors to probe radar coverage along the border, then
slipping other drugladen aircraft through the gaps before U.S. officials
can react. They are racing hauls of drugs up the coast in 22footlong
powerboats with massive engines, digging holes in the Gulf beaches of Texas
and burying their loads like hidden treasure for pickup at a later date.

They are outfitted with automatic weapons, nightvision goggles and the
latest hightech communications devices. In one case, after a wiretap went
dead, DEA officials discovered that the traffickers were calling each other
on a videophone and holding up written messages. In another case, 16 people
were indicted in Connecticut last June for allegedly selling devices that
intercept cellular phone conversations to Mexican traffickers; the
traffickers were believed to be using the devices, which are illegal for
private citizens to own, to eavesdrop on law enforcement officials and
other traffickers. Traffickers also "clone" cellular phones, stealing and
using phone numbers that belong to unsuspecting legitimate users.

Secret Tunnels

Among the more ambitious drugsmuggling methods in recent years was the
construction of tunnels under the border at Douglas, Ariz., and Otay Mesa,
Calif. According to the DEA, the former was built by the Joaquin Guzman
Loera organization and was used to smuggle tons of cocaine into the United
States until it was shut down following a tip from an informant. It started
in a private home in Agua Prieta, Mexico, where the opening was concealed
under a section of floor covered by a pool table and operated by hydraulic
lifts. From there, the tunnel went under a chainlink fence marking the
border and came up in a lumber warehouse behind a Douglas hardware store.

The tunnel at Otay Mesa ran 60 feet below ground through half a mile of
solid rock, U.S. officials said. It was intended to come up near the Otay
Mesa port of entry for commercial cargo, but was discovered before it could
be used.

California antidrug officials were first tipped to the growing
sophistication of traffickers more than five years ago after noticing tire
tracks emerging from a train tunnel that straddles the border near Campo,
Calif., about 35 miles east of San Diego.

As Border Patrol agents watched late one night, Mexican drug scouts
disabled electronic sensors along the train tracks. The traffickers then
ran a pickup truck through the 300footlong tunnel, while at the same time
jamming the Border Patrol's radios from a hillside in Mexico with a
Russianmade device that sent out a staccato clicking sound over every wave
band. When the truck hit two "stinger strips" of spikes designed to flatten
tires, its special "run flat" tires were unaffected by the puncture holes
and it raced down the tracks threequarters of a mile and up onto a highway.

The Border Patrol gave chase for about 12 miles until the truck sped back
into Mexico through the Tecate border crossing, where it was abandoned with
about 900 pounds of cocaine in the back. No one was arrested.

"A lot is hidden in plain sight," said one U.S. official, noting that much
of the massive drug supply up to 2,500 tons each year, according to
estimates smuggled from Mexico to the United States gets intermingled
and lost in the crush of legitimate commerce and people crossing the
world's busiest international border. Last year, 75 million cars, 3.5
million trucks and railroad boxcars, and 254 million people entered the
United States from Mexico. At some of the 38 official border crossings,
fewer than 5 percent of the cars and trucks were searched for contraband.

Railroad Smuggling

U.S. antidrug officials said that one of their biggest concerns is the use
of legitimate railroad cargo to conceal illegal drug shipments in the
same way that legitimate maritime trade is used. A case in point was the
4,659 pounds of marijuana, worth about $3 million, found in Combes, Tex.,
last May by agent Martinez and his colleague Brutus, a 5yearold Belgian
Malinois shepherd dog.

The boxcar and marijuana 200 packages doublewrapped with Saran wrap,
duct tape and a thick layer of transmission fluid to disguise the smell
apparently had come from the central Mexico city of Guadalajara.

"The whole front of the boxcar was found to be a secret compartment. They'd
taken a sheet of metal and welded it over the compartment, then they'd
painted it and rammed it with a forklift so it looked old," said Joe Garza,
the Border Patrol chief in McAllen, Tex. "We'd never seen anything this
sophisticated. I often wonder, how long was this going on? How many got
away from us?"

NAFTA's Effect

This needleinahaystack aspect of the search for illegal drug shipments
is likely to worsen: Legitimate imports from Mexico have doubled from about
$40 billion in 1993, the year before the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) took effect, to a projected $81 billion this year.

Traffickers often hide drugs in shipments of food, such as fish or produce,
that would spoil if they were stopped and thoroughly searched. "Much of the
time you're dealing with perishables, and unless we have specific
information [that drugs are in the load], the priority is business and
trade," said a federal official who, like many others, complained that
NAFTA's mandate of unfettered commerce has hampered drug interdiction efforts.

Especially at crowded crossings, where U.S. businesspeople and tourists can
swelter in traffic for more than an hour waiting to return to the United
States, U.S. border guards often find drugs neatly stacked in car trunks
with no effort to conceal the contraband.

"In El Paso in 1996, we had 4,545,657 pedestrian crossings [into the United
States], 594,434 commercial vehicles and 16,247,097 private vehicles, for a
total of 46,881,381 people," said Tom Kennedy, head of the DEA there. "With
that kind of volume, forget corruption. Simple math shows that if you run
enough across, the odds are in your favor."

Sometimes, if stopped for a search, socalled "port runners" will simply
slam their foot on the accelerator, race through a gate and try to outrun
police in highspeed chases.

Drug dealers also ship small packages of drugs to the United States via
express courier services or the regular mail. In another favored method,
traffickers divide large drug shipments into 50pound loads that are
floated across the Rio Grande and carried in backpacks across remote desert
areas by groups of people known as mules. In some stretches, as much as 250
miles of arid wilderness separates the ports of entry.

"It's a very long border, covering thousands of miles of the most remote
country you will find anywhere, and to smuggle drugs across it could be as
easy as getting a tire and floating across the river," said Leonard
Lindheim, the head of Customs Service investigations for southwest Texas.

"It just takes a little ingenuity," said a former DEA official from the
border region. "You need a safe house in Mexico where you can store the
drugs and take your time. . . . Wait until it's 115 degrees in Laredo and
there are 150 trucks lined up and just pop in line, or until you have a
huge train, and build the load into the walls of a boxcar. You can't put a
dog on a train because it's so hot it would kill him, and you need to open
it for hours to let it cool down. It's just so damn easy."

Customs and DEA officials say their greatest success comes from cases in
which they have informants give specific information about drug shipments.
At the border crossings, officials say that their best weapon is a
drugsniffing dog, which can smell a single marijuana cigarette wrapped in
plastic and hidden in a dashboard even through thick exhaust. Traffickers,
though, have begun acquiring their own drugsniffing dogs so they can
evaluate their packaging methods.

Authorities have tried to respond with countermeasures. At many crossings,
for example, concrete barriers have been erected to prevent cars and trucks
from switching lanes, and to send them into a series of turns when leaving
the gates to hinder port running.

More than 5,300 additional inspectors and patrollers have been added to the
border force since 1992. The border force is also supplemented by the
National Guard. The U.S. military conducted border surveillance for a
while, but that program was suspended after a Marine killed a young man who
was tending a herd of goats in May, mistaking him for a drugrunner.

"The idea is to be unpredictable, with more hands and more eyes," said
Leticia Moran, Customs director at Laredo, Tex., the busiest commercial
port on the border last year, clearing $20.7 billion in goods from Mexico.

Border officials are trying to counter the increasing technology and
ingenuity of drug traffickers with equal doses of their own. At one
crossing that is often watched by drug dealers, U.S. officials have begun
filming their surveyors with a longrange lens and recently spotted two
Mexican police officers helping to coordinate lane shifts by a vehicle
loaded with drugs.

Inspectors also use a small gadget called a "buster" to measure the density
of materials and a handheld laser that measures distances down to the
fraction of an inch, both of which can help detect hidden compartments.
Some crossings are being equipped with giant Xray machines to let agents
inspect cargoes. And most crossings have computers listing licenses of cars
and trucks that previously have been used in illegal activities.

Criminal Organization

In addition to their innovative smuggling techniques, the Mexican cartels
maintain their advantage by adapting quickly and ruthlessly when their
organizations are compromised. They have kidnapped and killed informants
and their families, and they change their trafficking techniques and
profiles at a moment's notice to stay ahead of the law.

The Mexican drug groups also learned valuable lessons from their Italian
Mafia and Colombian cartel counterparts on how to thwart law enforcement.
The Mexican groups usually are organized around family ties to prevent
infiltration by informants, and they are compartmentalized to protect the
leaders and to ensure that if one cell of their group is dismantled, the
entire business is not destroyed.

"There are many levels between the guy calling the shots in Mexico and the
people we arrest here," said a DEA agent on the border. "Often with trucks,
the drivers wait around an area near the border and a guy comes and says,
`I need a driver,' and he's told to take a truck from point A to point B in
the United States, leave the keys under the floor mat and walk away. If
he's caught driving a load, he can legitimately say, `I was simply hired
this morning and don't know anything about the people on either end.' Even
if he wanted to cooperate, there's nothing he can say."

And when a driver does have information, he rarely shares it with U.S.
police for fear of reprisals against his family in Mexico, investigators said.

Once in the United States, people working for the drug smugglers watch as
the smaller loads are subjected to a series of drops and transfers to
thwart police surveillance attempts. Finally, the loads are taken to a
"stash house" in the border region and reassembled into a larger load, then
taken to cities close to the border for shipment to the interior of the
United States.

Last December, Tucson police found about six tons of neatly packaged
cocaine worth about $100 million stacked in a downtown warehouse. And
earlier this year, police found more than 10,000 pounds of marijuana in an
empty house in downtown McAllen, then less than a week later discovered
another 2,400 pounds in a house just three blocks from local office of the
Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), the state's main antidrug agency.

Drug dealers also are quick to adapt to perceived threats and new antidrug
initiatives. Often, what DEA believes is a new trafficking trend is in fact
months old, and by the time it has been detected, the drug dealers have
moved on to a new technique.

"All drug work is done based on profiles, and the smugglers can adapt to
changes quicker than we can adapt to the new profiles," said Robert B.
Nestoroff, an airplane smuggling expert with the Texas DPS. A telling
example, he says, is the current disagreement among U.S. investigators over
how much crossborder smuggling is being done with small planes.

At the height of airplane smuggling in the 1970s and '80s, hundreds of
planes were used to smuggle drugs into Florida and to hop shipments over
the border. But now, Nestoroff said, intelligence experts suggest there is
very little plane activity.

"It could be we've lulled ourselves into a false sense of security and are
not prioritizing it," he said. "They've adapted to our profile and they
know our seams, and we're not recognizing it because we're not teaching it
anymore. This is the swing of the pendulum."

Others argue that there is no longer a typical profile for drug dealers.

"When I started with the Border Patrol [28 years ago] in Laredo, you'd look
for a young person crossing late at night. That was suspicious. We'd catch
marijuana in cars, and it would be wide open you'd look in the back seat
or the back of a truck, and there it was," said Garza, the Border Patrol
chief in McAllen.

"Now, you sit at the checkpoint and you can't profile anybody," he said.
"It could be someone who looks like a grandmother, a lady with children
sleeping on the drugs; it could be a bus driver or people in an official
vehicle. We find it in drive shafts, in car bumpers, in beer coolers where
they put it under ice and beer, in butane tanks, gas tanks, in air
conditioner vents, in the pistons of cars being towed. They'll try
anything. They carry it on their bodies, in the diapers of their children,
on their person anywhere you can imagine."

"The border is absolutely overwhelmed with numbers people, vehicles,
modes of transportation," said a DEA intelligence analyst. Even though
conventional wisdom says it is the riskiest choke point in the hemispheric
drug pipeline, he said, "it may be that the border is the easiest part of
the whole business."

NO METHOD TOO SIMPLE OR TOO EXOTIC

The 2,000milelong U.S.Mexico border is under siege by drug traffickers
who spare no effort or expense to ship marijuana, cocaine and heroin to
lucrative U.S. markets. Every day, the traffickers transport an estimated
seven tons of illegal drugs across the virtually indefensible border, and
the methods used range from human carriers, to planes and railroad boxcars
with false walls. Heavy traffic of people and legitimate goods, corruption
on both sides of the border, lack of cooperation of lawenforcement
officials across the border, and the traffickers' extensive family ties all
play into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

Number of commercial trucks and railroad boxcars that arrived in the U.S.
from Mexico, in millions per fiscal year

1992: 2.27

'93: 2.40

'94: 2.71

'95: 2.86

'96: 3.55

Seizures of cocaine and marijuana in commercial shipments crossing the
southwest border into the United States, in thousands of pounds per fiscal
year.

1992: 10

'93: 25

'94: 11

'95: 16

'96: 40

'97*: 40

through

July

U.S. imports from Mexico in billions of dollars

1992: $81.1 billion

'97**: $35.2 billion

'94 was first year of NAFTA

** projected

Number of people legally crossing the southwest border from Mexico to the
U.S. in millions:

1992: 256

1993: 260

1994: 272

1995: 268

1996: 254

SOURCE: U.S. Customs

SOURCES: The White House Office of Drug Policy, Washington Post staff
reports, U.S. Customs

Law enforcement officials have discovered these methods used by drug
traffickers:

1. Rail: Drugs behind false walls of boxcars at major rail crossing points,
particularly McAllen, Texas. In one instance a drugladen truck with
special tires was driven through a railroad tunnel.

2. Trucks: Drugs in false bottoms or in trucks carrying legitimate cargo,
particularly refrigerated food; the busiest commercial crossing is at Laredo

3. Cars: Hidden compartments in passenger cars; the busiest car crossing is
at Tijuana.

4. Planes: For years drugs have been flown across the border by planes, and
the loads dropped at points in the U.S. for later pickup.

5. Tunnels: Foot tunnels have been discovered into Arizona and California.

6. Boats: Speed boats that go from Mexico to beaches along the southern
U.S. coast.

7. Submarines: Traffickers apparently acquired a fleet of twoman submarines.

8. Mules: Hundreds of human carriers, known as mules, carry small loads
across the Rio Grande between regular crossing points.

9. Floating: Packages of drugs have been floated across the Rio Grande.

10. Mail: Drugs have been shipped in small quantities by the U.S. Postal
Service or private express carriers.

"Gatekeepers" and "stash houses:" Gatekeepers on the Mexican side of the
border stash drugs in places, such as homes or business places they rent,
and wait for an opportune moment to send the drugs across to stash houses
on the U.S. side, from where they are distributed.

ABOUT THE SERIES:

* TODAY U.S. and Mexico are overwhelmed by the amount of illegal drugs
crossing their porous 2,000mile border.

* MONDAY Drug traffickers pay off police officers on both sides of the
border.

* TUESDAY Drugrelated crime and violence spread to cities throughout the
United States.

* WEDNESDAY U.S. and Mexican governments collaborate at the highest
levels to stem the drug trade, but relations along the border are often
characterized by suspicion and resentment.

* THURSDAY Mexican drug gangs hide within the large immigrant communities
in U.S. cities.

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company