MEXICAN POT GANGS INFILTRATE INDIAN RESERVATIONS IN U.S.

WARM SPRINGS, Ore. -- Police Chief Carmen Smith says he knows three
things about suspected drug trafficker Artemio Corona: He's from
Mexico, prefers a Glock .40-caliber handgun, and is quite possibly
growing marijuana on the Indian reservation that Mr. Smith patrols.

Last year, Mr. Smith's detectives identified Mr. Corona as the
alleged mastermind behind several large marijuana plantations on the
Warm Springs Indian Reservation in central Oregon. These "grows," as
police call them, had a harvest of 12,000 adult plants, with an
estimated street value of $10 million. Five suspects were arrested
and pleaded guilty to federal trafficking charges. But their alleged
boss, Mr. Corona, who has not been indicted, remains a "person of
interest" to federal authorities and hasn't been found.

Cultivating marijuana in Indian country represents a new twist in the
decades-old illicit drug trade between Mexico and the U.S., the
world's largest drug-consuming market. For decades, Mexican drug
gangs grew marijuana in Mexico, smuggled it across the border, and
sold it in the U.S. But in the past few years, they have done what
any burgeoning business would do: move closer to their customers.

Illicit pot farms, the vast majority run by gangs with ties to
Mexico, are growing fast across the country. The U.S. Forest Service
has discovered pot farms in 61 national forests across 16 states this
year, up from 49 forests in 10 states last year. New territories
include public land in Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, Alabama and Virginia.

The area where Mexican gangs seem to be expanding the fastest is on
Indian reservations. In Washington state, tribal police seized more
than 233,000 pot plants on Indian land last year, almost 10 times the
2006 figure. Pot seized on Washington's reservations accounted for
about half of all pot seized on both private and public land last
year. Police are finding pot farms on reservations stretching from
California to South Dakota.

"These criminal organizations are growing in Indian country at an
alarming rate," says Chief Smith. "The [growers] on our reservation
were sent directly from Mexico."

At Chief Smith's reservation, police found trash piles that included
crushed Modelo-brand beer cans and tortilla packages. They also
recovered cellphones with a flurry of calls to and from MichoacA n,
Mexico -- an important drug-producing state. One grow in Washington
state's Yakama Reservation featured a makeshift shrine to Mexico's
unofficial patron saint to smugglers, JesA s Malverde, complete with
votive candles and a photograph of the mythical figure.

Part of the trend is due to unforeseen consequences of stepped-up
security on the U.S. border to slow the tide of illegal immigration
from Mexico. Tighter borders make it harder to smuggle pot north,
creating the need to produce the cash crop closer to market.

U.S. officials say the quality, and thus price, of U.S. grown weed is
much higher than that grown in Mexico. The Mexican variety, typically
full of stems and leaves, with a lower content of THC, the active
narcotic in marijuana, brings in about $500 to $700 a pound,
estimates Washington State Patrol Lt. Richard Wiley, who monitors
marijuana grows on the state's public lands. By contrast, a pound of
Washington-grown marijuana can command $2,500 locally or up to $6,000
on the East Coast.

Marijuana is a lucrative business for Mexican cartels, generating at
least $9 billion a year in estimated revenues, according to U.S. and
Mexican officials. Mexican gangs are relying even more on income from
pot, U.S. drug authorities say, as they burn through cash fighting
each other and the Mexican government, which has launched a
crackdown. The math is tempting. Start-up expense for about dozen
plots, with 10,000 plants each, is well under $500,000, U.S.
officials estimate, including the cost of hiring 100 workers to plant
marijuana and then several "tenders" to water them for three to four
months until harvest. Incidental costs might include generators, PVC
pipe and food supplies for the growers. Those plants could fetch
about $120 million on the open market. With such impressive profit
margins, a cartel can afford to have dozens of grows spotted and
eradicated for every one that it harvests successfully.

The tighter U.S.-Mexican border is also prompting an unwillingness by
illegal farm workers to cross back and forth. These migrants have
decided to stay put in El Norte rather than return to Mexico after
harvest -- creating a year-round labor force in rural areas. In a
down economy, those workers face long stretches of unemployment --
leaving them easily swayed by offers to make quick cash growing marijuana.

That seems to be happening in Indian country. Chief Smith, who is a
Wichita tribal member from Oklahoma but came here for the job, says
the cartel growing pot on his reservation was paying tenders $2,000 a
month each to water and watch their plots.

Indian reservations are full of transients, either people from other
tribes whose members have married into local families, or
undocumented farmworkers from Mexico. "Around here it's not easy to
tell who's a tribal member and who's Hispanic," says Police Chief
Keith Hutchenson of Idaho's Coeur d'Alene Tribe. That makes it easier
for Mexican drug traffickers to blend in, he adds.

A decade ago, police in Washington state say most of the state's pot
was grown by hobbyists indoors, using high-powered lamps. But that
has changed in recent years to larger, outdoor grows that are more
"corporate," run by sophisticated Mexican gangs.

At first, the Mexican growers began using remote public parkland in
California, and have since expanded toward neighboring Oregon and
Washington. Both states have two things gangs need: lots of unguarded
forest land and lots of cheap Mexican labor.

Mexican gangs also are moving east, into Idaho and the Dakotas, using
reservations to grow pot as well as distribute narcotics smuggled
from Mexico and Canada, according to U.S. law enforcement.

Mexico-based cartels exploit several conditions unique to
reservations, starting with chronically understaffed tribal police
departments. Overlapping jurisdictions between tribal courts and
outside agencies -- from the local sheriff to the federal Drug
Enforcement Administration -- confuse the issue of who should take
the lead in prosecuting crimes.

Federal authorities coordinate with tribal authorities on issues
related to investigations, search warrants and other criminal
proceedings, says Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathleen Bickers of
Portland, who prosecuted the men growing pot on the Warm Springs Reservation.

Another attraction is the sheer size of the jurisdictions. Colville
Reservation is 2,200 square miles and patrolled by just 19 tribal
police officers. The ancestral homes of tribes such as Oregon's
Umatilla, Idaho's Nez Perce and Washington's Yakama have thousands of
acres of often uninhabited land, and also abut huge tracts of public land.

The cartels often mix the marijuana plants in with other crops, such
as corn, or plant them deep inside forests amid pine and oak trees to
make them difficult to detect from air patrols.

The reservations aren't only home to marijuana farms but are becoming
sites for gun trafficking. At the Yakama homeland, a 1.4-million-acre
reservation near Toppenish, Wash., a Mexican gang allegedly has
planted hundreds of acres of marijuana and run guns to Mexico. U.S.
investigators say the guns have ended up in the hands of Mexico's
most feared paramilitary drug group, Los Zetas.

There is enough gun trafficking that Washington state now ranks
fourth as a supplier of weapons to Mexican drug gangs after Texas,
California and Arizona, according to police. "A weapon bought here
for $1,000 can be sold for $3,000 or even $6,000" south of the
border, says Michael Akins, lead investigator for a multiagency drug
task force, called Operation Green Jam. "That might buy cocaine for
$3,000 a pound, which then could be sold in Washington for $20,000 a pound."

State police believe gunmen from Los Zetas, a group initially formed
by deserters from Mexico's army and famed for its brutality, are
already in Washington to provide security during harvests. In 2008
police recovered a small arsenal of powerful weapons near the Yakama grows.

"AR-15s and Berettas, mostly. At least a dozen," says Lt. Wiley, of
the Washington State Patrol.

There is enough money involved in growing to tempt some legal
residents. In September, law-enforcement officials in Benton County,
Wash., busted three men working at a private ranch owned by Jose Luis
Cardenas, a legal immigrant from Mexico. He allegedly earned $3,000
from a drug gang to rent his barn for eight days, the Benton County
officials said. Stalks of fresh marijuana were dried and picked by
workers arranged in a circle, like an old-time shucking bee,
according to state police. Mr. Cardenas, who was charged with
harboring and abetting illegal production of a controlled substance,
is in custody, and didn't respond to requests for comment.

The operations can be elaborate. One site at the Yakama reservation
sat more than a dozen miles from the nearest paved road. Tapping
water from an abandoned livestock trough, growers had workers string
more than 1,000 yards of plastic irrigation pipe down to a cistern
that fed a primitive treetop sprinkler system.

Tribal police uncovered another irrigation network in July at the
Colville Reservation, just south of the Canadian border. After
damming a small spring, guerrilla cultivators strung drip irrigation
pipe hundreds of yards to marijuana fields. At one spot, the gang dug
a rustic cistern from the crater of a fallen ponderosa pine. Nearby,
they ran a gasoline-powered generator hitched to a pump that took
spring water to a second cistern almost a mile away. The jury-rigged
spillway nourished a total of 24,000 plants along the mountain slope.

That grow at Colville was found deep in the backwoods, where the
tribe harvests timber for two reservation lumber mills. Colville
Police Chief Matt Haney suspects immigrant workers hired to replant
trees end up doing reconnaissance work for drug organizations.

"We've got over a million acres and forest fires are common," the
chief explains. "Mexican laborers are hired by the U.S. Forest
Service to do replanting, and work for the tribe's timber operations,
too. They notice where there are streams, where there aren't streams.
What can be reached by road, what can't. They share that information
with some very sophisticated growers."

Warms Springs Reservation police say the drug gangs planting
marijuana on the reservation since 2007 may have had Mexican workers
spotting sites for them. Workers are often hired by tribal
enterprises, including a small company that collects pine cones and
fronds to fashion into Christmas tree ornaments.

John Webb, a tribal police detective, says collecting pine cones
gives outsiders an excuse to be on the reservation -- something
normally not allowed -- and form friendships.

Mr. Webb doesn't know whether pine-cone collecting prompted Oscar
Castillo s arrested for assault after allegedly firing his Glock
semiautomatic pistol into a van departing from his home, striking one
passenger in the neck. Eventually police linked him to the outdoor
marijuana grows, together with aedo Olivera.

The men told authorities, as part of a plea bargain, that they
reported to Artemio Corona, who was also a relative. In court papers,
some of the suspects claimed to have been terrorized by Mr. Corona,
who they say threatened them with his own Glock as he supervised work
in the secret marijuana gardens.

At first, the Mexican suspects thought operating on tribal land
shielded them from prosecution, says Mr. Webb. While the tribal court
declined to prosecute, federal authorities were eager to take the
case. To avoid the cost of trial, the U.S. attorney in Portland
allowed the five defendants to plead guilty to a relatively minor
charge of "conspiracy to manufacture marijuana," and receive
sentences of up to 70 months in prison. Four are now serving time in
U.S. federal prisons. One received probation.

Tribal police in Washington and Oregon say they expect Mexican gangs
to keep reappearing every year during the summer harvest season. Says
Chief Smith: "If we ever catch them, we'll run them off the reservation."