TUNNEL USED TO SMUGGLE 'BILLIONS' IN ILLEGAL DRUGS

TIERRA DEL SOL, Calif. - Down the dust-blown driveway, past a chain-link
fence and the Keep Out sign, past the beefy Rottweiler and the tire swing,
in a closet under the staircase in a little two-story bungalow, Mexico's
most violent drug lords kept a secret at Johnson's pig farm.

When U.S. drug agents broke into the closet on Wednesday, they found a
large safe. They opened it and found nothing. Then they spotted the false
floor. And when they pried it up, they found the entrance to a 1,200-foot
tunnel - complete with electric lights, ventilation ducts and wooden walls
- - that ended in a fireplace in a house just beyond the metal wall that
separates the United States from Mexico.

Investigators are calling the tunnel in this remote section of rocky border
scrubland, 70 miles east of San Diego near a small town called Tecate, one
of most lucrative drug-smuggling mechanisms ever discovered along the
U.S.-Mexico frontier.

'It's one of the most significant finds ever along the southwestern
border," said Errol Chavez, special agent in charge of the San Diego office
of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. "They used this tunnel to
smuggle billions of dollars worth of cocaine, marijuana and other drugs
into the United States for several years."

Chavez, speaking to reporters in San Diego, said investigators believe that
the tunnel was built at least two or three years ago by the notorious
Tijuana cartel, headed by several brothers in the Arellano Felix family.

He said the Arellano Felixes moved tons of drugs in carts that rolled on
railroad-style tracks through the tunnel, which is about 20 feet below ground.

The drugs were then likely loaded into pickups and other small trucks,
which were used to deliver the drugs to Los Angeles and beyond.

Chavez said investigators have learned that the Arellano Felixes charged
other smuggling rings a fee to use the tunnel. He said that the tunnel
seems to have been used exclusively for drugs and that there was no
evidence that illegal immigrants were also moved through it.

The tunnel, which is four feet square, offers further evidence of the
difficulty of sealing the 2,000-mile border despite efforts to cut off drug
smuggling and illegal immigration. Since Sept. 11, border security has been
sharply increased and drug seizures are way up. But Vincent Bond, a
spokesman for the Customs Service in San Diego, said the tunnel shows that
when one route is closed to smugglers, they find a new one.

The discovery came just days before a visit to Mexico by Tom Ridge, the
U.S. director of homeland security, who will discuss border security with
top Mexican officials.

Tunnels are nothing new along the border. Several have been discovered
since 1990. The largest one, found in 1993, stretched about 1,452 feet
under the border at Tijuana, Mexico. That tunnel was never used because it
was discovered just before it was completed. Chavez said it belonged to
drug lord Joaquin Guzman, known as "El Chapo," who tried to keep the tunnel
secret by murdering the workers who dug it.

No arrests have been made on the U.S. side in the tunnel case. Chavez said
investigators from the DEA and the Customs Service, which assisted in
Wednesday's raid, are seeking several suspects, including a man who leased
the house and was living there.

Mexican police said they have detained for questioning two people who were
found in the house at the Mexican end of the tunnel during the raid.