BajaNews
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Elaborate drug tunnel yields record pot seizure
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/nov/30/drug-tunnel-y...
Written by
Sandra Dibble
Nov. 30, 2011
A six-month investigation into what authorities described Wednesday as the most sophisticated drug tunnel ever found beneath the California-Mexico
border has resulted in six arrests and a record confiscation of more than 32 tons of marijuana.
The passageway, which dropped to 40 feet below ground and was 612 yards long, connected warehouses in Tijuana and Otay Mesa. It had an electric rail
system, an elevator and walls shored up with wood.
The operation by U.S. and Mexican law enforcement marked the second major tunnel discovery in a two-week period. It comes almost a year after the
uncovering of two other major illicit cross-border passageways and related marijuana seizures.
Members of the San Diego Tunnel Task Force said the discoveries have followed a seasonal trend in recent years, with significant seizures taking place
in the latter months of the year.
Authorities “believe this coincides with the increase in inventory in Mexico due to the harvest season,” said Derek Benner, special agent in charge of
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Diego.
Benner said the investigation of the latest tunnel began in May, when authorities first learned of a tunnel possibly under construction in an Otay
Mesa warehouse. The passageway was barely completed when law enforcement closed in this week, he said.
The tunnel “took massive resources and massive amounts of time to construct and plan and build, and we were able to shut it down before it became
operational,” Benner said at a news conference.
This week’s 32.4-ton marijuana seizure was the largest confiscation associated with a single tunnel, Benner said. Its estimated street value is $65
million.
Most of the marijuana — about 20 tons — was found at the unmarked Hernandez Produce Warehouse, inside what appears to be a largely unoccupied
industrial building on Calle de Linea near the international border fence.
In Tijuana, Mexican soldiers seized nearly four tons at the tunnel’s entrance beneath the tiled floor of an unmarked warehouse near the A.L. Rodríguez
International Airport. More than 10 tons were seized from a tractor-trailer driven from the Otay Mesa warehouse to the City of Industry outside Los
Angeles.
Agents with the Tunnel Task Force received information that Hernandez Produce Warehouse “possibly contained a subterranean, cross-border tunnel,”
according to a complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego.
U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy said her office is pressing charges against two suspects, Salvador Zuniga and Laureano Gonzalez, who were arrested Tuesday
after allegedly driving the truck to the City of Industry. If found guilty of conspiracy and distribution charges, both would face at least 10 years
in prison, Duffy said.
Four other suspects connected to the seizure were arrested at the City of Industry warehouse, and they face similar charges in California’s Central
District. They were identified as Saul Perez, Adrian Escobedo, Samuel Treto Jr. and Miguel Angel Felix Echavarria.
Authorities said drug tunnels have become more common in recent years along the San Diego-Tijuana border because traffickers have found it harder to
smuggle drugs amid greater U.S. enforcement. “If they can’t cross the border above ground, they attempt to tunnel underneath it,” Duffy said.
Mexican military authorities and Tijuana municipal police worked closely this week with members of the San Diego Tunnel Task Force in locating the
Mexican entrance, said Mario Palmerin, regional attache for the federal Attorney General’s Office, which is conducting the investigation on the
Mexican side. No arrests have been made in Mexico.
Neither U.S. nor Mexican officials would say which drug-trafficking organization was behind this latest tunnel and marijuana cache.
On Nov. 15, Mexican military authorities linked a marijuana tunnel to the Sinaloa cartel, acknowledged as the dominant drug-trafficking group in Baja
California.
Without addressing specific seizures, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s San Diego office, William R. Sherman, linked the
discovery of large amounts of marijuana in the area during the past two years to the growing power of the Sinaloa cartel, known for its large
marijuana smuggling operations in other regions.
“That certainly accounts for the large quantities we’ve been getting here in the last two years,” Sherman said.
The tunnel found this week was about four feet wide and four feet, seven inches tall, said Gen. Gilberto Landeros of Baja California’s Second Military
Zone. Soldiers on Wednesday allowed journalists to ride inside the hydraulic-controlled elevator, which led from the floor of the Tijuana warehouse
into a wide shaft and storage area at the tunnel’s entrance. The tunnel appears to have been dug beneath a runway of the A.L. Rodríguez International
Airport.
The San Diego Tunnel Task Force, created in 2003, is made up of agents from ICE, DEA, the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection.
During the past five years, seven major drug tunnels have been found in the San Diego-Tijuana region, according to the task force. Most of the
passageways lead to the Otay Mesa warehouse area, with “plenty of infrastructure and plenty of opportunity to operate without being detected in
nondescript warehouses that are fairly close together,” Benner said.
Paul Beeson, chief Border Patrol agent for the San Diego sector, said the area’s clay soil makes it easier for tunnel construction. “You don’t have to
worry about cave-ins, like you do further east in the Yuma area, where it’s real sandy,” Beeson said. “Here, you can pretty much dig.”
The U.S. Border Patrol demolishes illicit tunnels and fills them with cement and other materials. On both sides of the border, authorities destroy
drugs that are seized and put confiscated cash into their governments’ asset-forfeiture funds.
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BajaNews
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Major US-Mexico border tunnel highlights seasonal trend in increasingly popular smuggling tack
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/major-us-mexico-borde...
By Associated Press
December 1
SAN DIEGO — The investigation into the largest marijuana bust at a cross-border tunnel followed a familiar timeline. It began in May and ended in
November.
The secret passage linking warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana — equipped with a hydraulic lift, electric rail carts and a wooden staircase —
highlights an emerging seasonal trend. For three years, authorities have found sophisticated tunnels on the U.S.-Mexico border shortly before the
winter holidays in what officials speculate is an attempt by drug smugglers to take advantage of Mexico’s fall marijuana harvest.
Two weeks ago, authorities seized 17 tons of marijuana in connection with a tunnel linking warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana. Authorities began
investigating that passage in June, according to court filings.
Tuesday’s find netted more than 32 tons of marijuana — nearly 17 tons at a warehouse in San Diego’s Otay Mesa area, about 11 tons inside a truck in
the Los Angeles area and 4 tons in Mexico. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, it ranks as the second-largest pot bust in U.S.
history if the drugs found on the Mexican side of the tunnel are counted and the third-largest without the Mexican stash.
As U.S. authorities heighten enforcement on land, tunnels have become an increasingly common way to smuggle enormous loads of marijuana. More than 70
passages have been found on the border since October 2008, surpassing the number of discoveries in the previous six years
Raids last November on two tunnels linking San Diego and Tijuana netted a combined 52 tons of marijuana on both sides of the border. In early December
2009, authorities found an incomplete tunnel that stretched nearly 900 feet into San Diego from Tijuana, equipped with an elevator at the Mexican
entrance.
Authorities say central Mexico’s marijuana harvest in early October presents drug cartels with a familiar challenge for any farmer: how to quickly get
products to consumers.
“It’s a significant amount of inventory that the cartels need to move and they need to move it in the most expeditious and efficient way,” said Derek
Benner, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s special agent in charge of investigations in San Diego. “It’s like any other business. You’ve got a
pile of inventory that you need to get moving and generate profits.”
William Sherman, the DEA’s acting special agent in charge in San Diego, said drug traffickers also may go on a pre-Christmas smuggling push to give
themselves a “little bit of hiatus” over the holidays to visit family in Mexico. DEA wiretaps tend to go quiet during the holidays, he said.
It’s unclear whether cartels are building the tunnels in time for the winter holidays or if that’s when authorities just happen to find them.
Some U.S. authorities are inclined to think the cartels are timing construction for the fall harvest, based on their belief that this year’s two major
finds in San Diego and one last year in San Diego were discovered shortly after they were completed. Heightened activity around building and operating
the tunnels drew suspicion and exposed smugglers to getting caught.
It takes roughly six months to a year to build a tunnel, authorities say. Workers use shovels and pickaxes to slowly dig through the soil, sleeping in
the warehouse until the job is done. Sometimes they use pneumatic tools.
The tunnel discovered Tuesday was about 40 feet deep, 4 feet wide and 4 feet high. It featured a wooden staircase at the U.S. entrance, located inside
a large, white building with a long line of trucking docks.
The Mexican warehouse was on the same block as a federal police office and sits next to a runway at Tijuana’s main airport. It featured a hydraulic
lift at the tunnel entrance that dropped about 30 feet. Its carpeted floors were found littered with garbage and dirty linen. The kitchen was stocked
with tortillas and oranges, with a window painted black.
Six men were charged in federal courts in Southern California with conspiracy to distribute marijuana. No arrests were made in Mexico.
U.S. authorities linked last November’s find to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, that country’s most-wanted drug lord. U.S.
and Mexican authorities declined to link Tuesday’s discovery to a specific cartel.
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BajaNews
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Despite drug busts, Tijuana tunnel city keeps humming
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/world/americas/despite-rai...
http://www.bendbulletin.com/article/20111202/NEWS0107/112020...
By Damien Cave
December 02. 2011
TIJUANA, Mexico — Squatting and sweating inside the latest drug tunnel found here in this Pacific border city, it was easy to understand the amazement
expressed by Mexican and U.S. officials. This one was a stunner.
The tunnel ran for almost half a mile, with wooden planks holding off the earth on all sides. Energy-saving light bulbs illuminated the route. A
motorized sled on metal rails ensured quick passage, while a steel elevator hidden beneath the floor tiles in a warehouse made the 40-foot descent to
the tunnel’s entrance feel like the slow drop into an unregulated mine shaft.
And yet, here is the simple fact obscured by superlatives like “the most elaborate” and “the most sophisticated,” which officials seem to lather on
each new find.
Tunnels are Tijuana. They have become an inevitable, always-under-construction or always-operating part of city life, as entrenched as cheap
pharmacies and strip clubs.
Residents here now shrug them off.
“If you have a lot of money, you can do anything,” Blanca Samaniego, 36, said as she walked by the warehouse where Mexican officials unveiled the
tunnel Wednesday. “It will never change. It will never stop.”
The ground beneath her neighborhood in the hills — near the airport and the upgraded, shimmering border fence patrolled 24/7 by U.S. agents — has been
punched full of holes for years. Almost every kind of building has been used to hide a logistical operation that is as much about the American taste
for a high as it is about the low-down removal of dirt.
Just a few weeks ago, below a more rudimentary warehouse nearby, the authorities found a different tunnel with an elaborate ventilation system. A few
blocks from that, there sits an empty flophouse, where thick concrete now caps a passageway discovered by the authorities last year. Farther east,
residents note a tunnel found in 2008, and just past the next major intersection, there are two more: one under a small home and the other below a
bodega across from a factory.
Other tunnels have been found downtown, near the main border crossing. Wherever there is a border fence climbing high, there seems to have been an
attempt to burrow below, usually to a parking lot in California where drugs can be hauled through a manhole cover, or to a business that almost looks
legitimate.
In the latest case, the tunnel ran to Hernandez Produce Warehouse, a fruit and vegetable company in California whose only product seemed to be green
and best when smoked.
Luis Ituarte, 69, an artist who runs a gallery here called La Casa del Túnel — where a tunnel was found about decade ago — said that Tijuana officials
would be smart to move beyond publicizing their subterranean finds and then shutting them down. He argued that Tijuana should capitalize on its
historic identity as a city that has been serving up vice since 1907, when President Porfirio Díaz legalized gambling, or 1920, when the United States
made alcohol illegal.
“Las Vegas, Tijuana and Havana were all built by the same kind of people,” Mr. Ituarte said. “Only Vegas has taken on its bad reputation.”
Not that this is the direction things are heading. The mayor here recently rejected demands from cultural groups asking to take over La Ocho, a
notorious prison that had been decommissioned.
Mexican Army officials, during a tour of this week’s elaborate tunnel, mostly focused on the triumph of the discovery.
“These are achievements that increase public security,” said Gen. Gilberto Landeros, standing at the tunnel entrance as local reporters took snapshots
of one another in front of the long, dim hole. “We’re pounding at the economy of narcotrafficking.”
At the very least, he had a lot of marijuana to point to. Hefty bricks of the stuff, wrapped tightly in orange and green plastic, surrounded him when
he announced the discovery of the tunnel inside the empty warehouse here in Tijuana. The total haul, from both sides and a truck driven from the site
in San Diego, was 32.4 tons, with a street value of about $65 million — a new record for a tunnel-related seizure, according to American officials.
Harder to see, unmentioned, but easy to imagine: how many tons moved across before that load was found.
The evidence around the tunnel — worn-out soccer cleats, dusty oscillating fans, empty water bottles — suggested that the operation had been going for
months, a supposition Mexican officials did not deny. At that rate, hundreds of tons of marijuana worth hundreds of millions of dollars would have
moved through this one tunnel during its life span.
Most likely somewhere nearby, in another tunnel, the flow continues. The next announcement and news tour may be only weeks away.
Photo credit: Tony Cenicola
[Edited on 12-3-2011 by BajaNews]
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motoged
Elite Nomad
Posts: 6481
Registered: 7-31-2006
Location: Kamloops, BC
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Mood: Gettin' Better
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Ya know....it's hard to find a decent railway in Mexico these days...
[Edited on 12-4-2011 by motoged]
[Edited on 12-4-2011 by motoged]
Don't believe everything you think....
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