Pot-smuggling tunnels in Tijuana grow more elaborate

McClatchy / Boston Herald
February 20, 2012
by Tim Johnson

TIJUANA, Mexico _ When smuggling goes smoothly for the marijuana division of the huge Sinaloa Cartel, cross-border deliveries unfold with clockwork precision.

Harvested marijuana arrives in plastic-wrapped bales to a depot hidden among the rundown warehouses on the Mexican side of the concrete U.S. border fence.

Once enough marijuana is collected, workers drop the vacuum-packed bales through shafts leading to the ever-more-elaborate tunnels that cross underneath the border through the clay-laden soil.

U.S. agents have been waging war against the tunnels for years, using a range of high-tech devices from ground-penetrating radar to seismic sensors to find and destroy them. But despite the efforts, drug smugglers continue to build the tunnels, often spending $1 million to dig a single pathway equipped with lighting, forced-air ventilation, water pumps, shoring on walls and hydraulic elevators.

Lately, new tunnels have included railways. The bales move on electric mining carts with hand throttles that roll at up to 15 mph.

"A tunnel represents an incursion into the U.S., and it’s a national security event," said Jose M. Garcia, who oversees the federal multi-agency San Diego Tunnel Task Force.

The location of the tunnels helps explain why agents have such difficulty finding them. The area where the most advanced tunnels have been found is adjacent to the Tijuana international airport, where scores of planes take off and land daily. Nearby warehouses buzz with legitimate activity.

"All that noise from the airport is a great advantage to them," said Victor Clark Alfaro, an anthropologist and human rights activist in Tijuana who also lectures at San Diego State University. "This border is perforated like an anthill."

U.S. officials say they have found more than 160 tunnels since 1990 along the 1,954-mile border, mostly in the stretch of Mexico that borders Arizona and California. In the past 15 months, U.S. agents have busted increasingly sophisticated tunnels.

Geography and geology make the intensely urban Tijuana-San Diego corridor ideal for the tunnels. Tijuana is Mexico’s sixth largest city, with 1.3 million people, while San Diego is the eighth largest U.S. city, with several interstate highways. Moreover, soil here has a composition that’s easy to dig.

In a two-week span last November, U.S. agents shut down two sophisticated tunnels that led from an area near Tijuana’s airport to the Otay Mesa industrial park on the U.S. side. Some 49 tons of marijuana were seized. The discoveries marked the second year in a row in which elaborate tunnels were found within a mile of the busy Otay Mesa border crossing.

U.S. officials are sensitive about a public view that they aren’t finding the tunnels.

"Understandably, American citizens react to news stories about the discovery of a large tunnel, complete with plumbing, lights, ventilation and a rudimentary railway system, with a mixture of surprise, indignation, alarm and dismay," Laura E. Duffy, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California, told the Senate drug caucus last June.

"How, they ask, can such a sophisticated illegal structure be constructed right under our noses?"

Part of the difficulty, she said, is that drug traffickers use horizontal drills that cost up to $75,000 and can cut without disturbing topsoil. The tunnels run anywhere from 30 to 90 feet deep, avoiding greater depths, which would hit underground water tables.

Drug traffickers also have been adept at setting up bogus U.S. companies to rent space in bustling Otay Mesa and its 600 warehouses and 12,000 businesses. Many firms are unaware of activities by their neighbors, perhaps noticing only if there’s truck traffic at unusual hours.

Garcia said that even with devices such as seismic sensors, a majority of tunnel busts came from tip-offs by informants or suspicious warehouse operators.

Big tunnels are thought to be the work of the Sinaloa Cartel, which has seized control of Tijuana from the local Arellano-Felix cartel after years of bloody conflict and now is operating in tandem with remnants of the group.

Sinaloa operatives employ mining engineers and architects to help construct their tunnels, while keeping knowledge of locations to as few people as possible.

Experts on the San Diego Tunnel Task Force say "some tunnel excavators in Mexico are killed when the job is done to prevent them from spreading the word on the location," Duffy told senators.

Marijuana growers are turning to ever-larger plantations to meet the capacity of bigger tunnels. Last July, soldiers found a 300-acre screened and irrigated marijuana plantation near San Quintin, 150 miles south of Tijuana, which was four times larger than any such site that had been seized before. Eight months earlier, soldiers seized 148 tons _ 134 metric tons _ of pot in Tijuana, a record.

U.S. and Mexican agents say that tunnel digging, using pneumatic spades, generally is limited to teams of six or seven men. They live at the Tijuana site where the tunnel begins, and excavation is timed to conclude with the harvesting of marijuana crops in late summer and early autumn, so there’s little time for the tunnel to sit idle and be detected.

"The process is tedious," Garcia said, involving working day and night and lugging bags of dirt along the shaft for removal.

But even with million-dollar investments, Garcia said, the tunnel builders "recoup that by making just one trip, given the value of the narcotics we’ve seized."

Most bales of marijuana carry stickers, often fanciful images such as Donald Duck, Captain America, Budweiser or Homer Simpson. The stickers indicate ownership and destination, U.S. agents said.

Tunnel operatives make sure to recoup their investments first.

"The way it works is the tunnel guys build it, so their stuff gets through first. Once it gets through, they start hiring out" to other drug organizations, said Louis Gomez, the supervisor of the San Diego Tunnel Task Force, which includes agents of Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement.

Tunnel shafts on the Tijuana side that a McClatchy Newspapers journalist visited included one hidden in the floor of a walk-in freezer in a warehouse that’s only two football fields away from warehouses on the U.S. side of the border.

Another shaft was hidden in a unique fashion: "It was the entire floor of a bathroom that went up and down, and they used a hydraulic lift like you’d see in a service station," Garcia said.

Tijuana Police Chief Alberto Capella Ibarra said the tunnels kept growing in sophistication.

"It speaks of the strength and economic power of the cartels, because these tunnels are a huge investment for them," Capella said.

http://news.bostonherald.com/news/international/americas/view.bg?&articleid=1405102&format=&page=1&listingType=intamer#articleFull

U.S.-Mexico fence building continues despite Obama's promise to review effects

New York Times
April 16, 2009
by April Reese

“On the day of its first foreign policy discussions with Mexico, the Obama administration remains mum on whether it will honor a campaign promise to alter a Bush administration policy establishing a massive fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, including in federally protected areas.”

So far, the Department of Homeland Security has erected about 613 miles of new pedestrian fencing and vehicle barriers to thwart illegal border crossers and drug smugglers trying to enter the United States.

While President Obama voted for the 2005 Secure Fence Act as an Illinois senator, he pledged on the campaign trail last year to review the Bush administration's fortification efforts, in part due to concerns about environmental impacts.

"I think that the key is to consult with local communities, whether it's on the commercial interests or the environmental stakes of creating any kind of barrier," Obama said last year at a debate in Austin, Texas.

While acknowledging that some areas may need fencing, Obama said deploying new surveillance technology and stepping up patrols would "be the better approach."

Yet almost three months into the new administration, neither Obama nor Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano are addressing the issue. Meanwhile, construction is beginning on two new sections of the fence, one through the Rio Grande Valley near Brownsville, Texas, and another in the Otay Mountain Wilderness in California's San Diego County.

Homeland Security spokesman Matt Chandler said Napolitano decided to allow border fence projects already contracted under the Bush administration to go forward. But she is reviewing the fence policy as part of a comprehensive examination of all immigration and border security programs. "She will discuss her review of immigration and border security policies once it is completed," he said.

Lloyd Easterling, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a DHS subagency, said, "As it stands right now, we're committed to completing the project at hand."

Proponents of the the border fence say the project is an effective deterrent to would-be illegal border crossers, and they cite government data showing precipitous drops in illegal border crossings at places like Yuma, Ariz., once a hot spot for illegal immigrants driving into the United States.

But critics point to a 2008 Congressional Research Service report that found the new fencing simply shifts illegal crossings to other, more remote locations.

Perhaps more important, any attempt by the administration to scale back the border fence is likely to attract intense public scrutiny at a time when Mexican drug cartel violence has flared up along the border, fueled in large part by guns smuggled from the United States. Obama is making his first visit to Mexico today, where among other things he will discuss the intensifying drug war, which killed 6,300 people last year.

Needs are critical

Even so, critics say they are dismayed by the Obama administration's slow progress in addressing the fence's environmental impacts.

"The need to address all the negative impacts that have already occurred is critical," said Michael Degnan, lands representative for the Sierra Club.

Matt Clark, Southwest representative for Defenders of Wildlife, said his group was "hopeful that the administration would quickly change course, and even reverse the Bush-era wall-building approach to border issues."

Defenders of Wildlife has joined a coalition of other environmental groups -- as well as faith-based organizations, immigration groups and border community organizations -- backing a bill to be introduced later this month by Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) calling for mitigation of the environmental damage caused by the fence.

While the language of the Grijalva bill is still being hammered out, proponents say it will probably seek to reverse a 2005 provision allowing the Homeland Security secretary to waive any federal or state law deemed to interfere with fence construction, including the nation's core environmental laws. Former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff invoked the waiver authority four times during his tenure.

In February, Grijalva and seven other members of Congress -- five from Texas and two from California -- sent a letter to the Obama administration asking for a suspension of fence construction. "Though there are places where a fence is the most feasible option, we strongly believe the Bush Administration's approach of constructing a fence along much of the Southwest border was ill-conceived as it was void of any meaningful input from the local communities or the Border Patrol Sector Chiefs who are most familiar with the challenges of securing our border," the letter read.

Jose Borjon, a spokesman for Rep. Solomon Ortiz (D), who represents the southeastern tip of Texas, said the congressman met with DHS officials two weeks ago and urged them to find an alternative to the border fence. "But that has not happened," he said. "Construction in Brownsville has begun."

Mitigation efforts

Environmental groups, meanwhile, are concerned about fence sections in Texas, Arizona and California that have been built across wildlife refuges, national monuments, national conservation areas and other federal lands (Land Letter, Jan. 15).

In Arizona's San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, for instance, a pedestrian fence now stretches to the river's edge, where it is met by a river-crossing vehicle barrier and a new section of pedestrian fence on the other side. Clark of the Defenders of Wildlife said the area has been significantly degraded by the fence and construction of a temporary road down a steep embankment. "It's not a pretty sight," he said. "And even though they've got a couple of things to try to prevent erosion into the river, the damage has been done, and we are seeing increased erosion."

Newly erected sections of fence in Texas and Arizona bisect protected habitat for the federally endangered jaguar and ocelot, the Sierra Club's Degnan added. "We've seen lands that Congress protected in perpetuity scarred by roads and other damage," he said.

The Interior Department has tried to offset some of the effects under a January agreement with DHS establishing a $50 million mitigation fund (Land Letter, Jan. 26). Officials expect to release a list of mitigation projects this summer, but environmentalists say the funding will fall short of what is needed to fully mitigate the damage.

http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/04/16/16greenwire-usmexico-fence-building-continues-despite-obam-10570.html?pagewanted=2

Border Patrol discovers underground tunnel in Otay Mesa

February 23, 2009
San Diego Union Tribune
By Debbi Baker

SAN DIEGO – Border Patrol agents discovered an underground tunnel in Otay Mesa on Saturday that authorities suspect was built to connect a storm drain in the United States to a pipeline in Mexico for smuggling purposes.

The passageway, which was about 3 feet wide and 3 feet tall and reinforced with wooden beams, was discovered about 110 feet north of the border near Via de la Amistad, just east of the Otay Mesa border crossing, said Border Patrol Agent Richard Smith.

Agents suspected that the tunnel is linked from the storm drain to a parallel natural gas pipeline that is not in use.

It appears that the tunnel had been used recently, Smith said.

It was found after members of the San Diego Tunnel Task Force, which is made up of the U.S. Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Drug Enforcement Administration agents, came across the information while investigating recent smuggling activity in the area and conducted a search, Smith said. No arrests have been made and no contraband was found.

In December officials discovered a cross-border tunnel just west of the San Ysidro border crossing after a bus tire sank into a road along the border fence.

That tunnel, which was about 15 feet underground and 3 feet in diameter, extended about 10 feet into the United States but had no exit, customs spokeswoman Lauren Mack said.

The tunnels, which are used to smuggle people as well as drugs into the United States, range from crude to elaborate.

One that ran underground from a house in Tijuana to a San Ysidro parking lot had electricity and ventilation and a pulley system designed to transport bales of marijuana. They have also been found with lights, water pumps and hydraulic systems as well as rails for electric cars and concrete floors and walls.

At least 75 of the clandestine passageways have been found along the U.S.-Mexico border since the 1990s, according to U.S. immigration and customs officials.

http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/feb/23/bn23-tunnel-discovered/