BORDER HAS BECOME MAIN BATTLEGROUND IN DRUG WAR

Despite Enforcement Efforts, Tremendous Amount of U.S. Use Drives
Trafficking Trade

The US port of entry at San Ysidro is the world's busiest land border
crossing, processing millions of people a year through 24 car lanes
and a pedestrian processing area. Previously

Is U.S.-Mexico border secure enough?

The southwest border has become the nucleus of the U.S. and Mexican
war on drugs.

Thousands of law-enforcement agents, from nearly every three-letter
acronym agency, are focused on drug traffickers' northward push of
narcotics and the southbound flow of American guns and cash intended
to fund and arm organized crime.

Despite sophisticated intelligence efforts, unprecedented cooperation
between the United States and Mexico and billions of U.S. dollars to
pay for law-enforcement operations along the border and within
Mexico, leaders of both countries are bedeviled by one other part of
the equation.

Tremendous U.S. drug use is the fuel that drives the trafficking
trade -- and with it the murders of more than 35,000 Mexicans since
2007, authorities and researchers said. These experts agree the cycle
of crime and violence will continue as long as high consumption persists.

"The U.S. government is acknowledging that the demand for drugs in
the U.S. is driving instability and violence in Mexico," said Rafael
Lemaitre, spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy. "While you are enforcing the law and taking down
violent drug organizations, at the same time you also have to educate
every new generation of young people that drug use is harmful."

Post-9/11 Buildup

The enforcement buildup against drug trafficking has increased
significantly since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, especially after late
2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war on drug
cartels and pressed the U.S. to go after guns and money bound for
those organizations. The focus includes cartels in Central America
and Colombia that use Mexico as a transit highway to the U.S.

The Department of Homeland Security expanded Customs and Border
Protection in the past decade through added staffing, technology and
infrastructure. In addition, the agency began screening southbound
rail and vehicle traffic for weapons and cash.

Across the nearly 2,000-mile southwest boundary, Customs and Border
Protection, Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are
joined by the Drug Enforcement Administration; Federal Bureau of
Investigation; U.S. Coast Guard; U.S. Marshals; Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and dozens of state and local
agencies. Many of the agencies already had a presence along the
border, but their activities intensified after 2006.

Interagency efforts and the shared approach by Calderon and President
Barack Obama to address drug traffic and the flow of cash and weapons
have led to more seizures, arrests and intelligence sharing, said
Alan Bersin, commissioner for Customs and Border Protection.

"This is not to say the work is done. It will never be done until we
have a regularized border management that involves immigration reform
and involves far less drug consumption in this country and far less
gang corruption in Mexico," Bersin said. No centralization

The campaign involves a lengthy list of task forces, operations and
initiatives, with names such as The Alliance to Combat Transnational
Threats and The Southwest Border Counter Narcotics Strategy.

"We are involving all of the stakeholders, state and local partners
are taking a role and some of our foreign law-enforcement
counterparts are as well," said Steve Andres, unit chief for ICE's
Border Enforcement Security Taskforce. "That has been a cornerstone
of our success -- having people sitting next to each other."

These operations account for thousands of arrests, hundreds of
thousand of pounds of narcotics found, billions of dollars
confiscated and massive loads of firearms seized. The total counts
are hard to come by because each agency records its statistics
differently, with occasional overlaps.

No agency keeps a comprehensive tally of all the task forces,
strategies and projects.

The binational enforcement efforts have not been particularly
effective at significantly curbing the flow of contraband, said Ted
Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy
studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C.

Recent missteps have not helped, including the ATF agency's practice
of tracking specific guns heading into Mexico but not confiscating them.

"As long as the great demand exists, as long as you have the huge
black market premium, the cartels are going to be fully in business,"
Carpenter said. "They are going to fight for turf and the most
lucrative routes."

Last year, the National Drug Intelligence Center gave a similar
assessment in its National Drug Threat Assessment report. The group
found that the availability of illicit drugs was on the rise in the
U.S. Contrasting approaches

But William Sherman, acting special agent in charge of the DEA in San
Diego, said the collaborative enforcement push has succeeded by
eliminating cartel leaders, fragmenting drug organizations and
causing traffickers to change their distribution patterns.

Increased tunneling and maritime activity -- which are harder ways of
transporting drugs into the U.S. -- prove it, Sherman said.

Across the southwest, 149 such tunnels have been shut down since
1990, 55 of them in or intended for California, said Joe Garcia,
deputy special agent in charge of ICE Homeland Security Investigations.

Tunnels vary from rudimentary holes under fences to sophisticated
passages complete with rail lines and ventilation. Garcia oversees
the seven-member San Diego Tunnel Task Force, created in 2003 to
respond to the escalation. Similarly, marine task forces have grown
in recent years as drug smugglers took to the high seas.

"All the parts work together," Garcia said. "There is no stand-alone
panacea to the problem."

Each agency and task force attacks parts of the total problem, with
some overlap and a lot of cooperation, said Keith Slotter, special
agent in charge of the San Diego FBI.

His office dedicates about half of its criminal-division activities
to border issues, going after traffickers and looking for corrupt
border officers.

"Our goal is to cut the head off the beast and not just clip his
toenails," Slotter said. "Dismantling the organizations and putting
the leadership in jail is the best scenario."

The problem with the "mega security" model is the U.S. will never be
drug-free, especially in light of domestic production of drugs in the
U.S., said David Mares, professor of political science and
international relations at the University of California San Diego.

"It's not the Colombians' fault or the Mexicans' fault that this
country uses drugs," said Mares, author of "Drug Wars and
Coffeehouses: The Political Economy of the International Drug Trade."

"As a society, we should be examining these issues rather than
focusing on an impossible project -- to seal the border."