Thread: Smugglers intrude on Arizona reservation

Smugglers intrude on Arizona reservation

Posted 8m ago
By Rick Jervis, USA TODAY

TOHONO O'ODHAM INDIAN RESERVATION, Ariz. — The southern border of this sprawling desert tribal land is fenced in by 75 miles of steel and cable, erected to keep out drug runners, cartel operatives and bandidos that wander up from Mexico.

Keeping the bad element off the reservation is often like trying to hold water with an open hand, says Sgt. Vincent Garcia of the Tohono O'odham Nation Police Department.

In one recent week, tribal police investigated a fatal car accident, a body found on a mountain trail and an alleged rape. All were linked to the illicit human and drug smuggling routes slicing through their land, says Garcia, 46.

"It's constant," he says during a border inspection. "It's never going to stop."

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The cycle of bloody clashes between rival Mexican drug cartels and against Mexican law enforcement agents taking place just south of the U.S. border has had an unforeseen side effect: Cartels increasingly are using U.S. tribal lands to move or grow their illicit crop. The federally protected Indian reservations are an attractive lure to drug gangs because they're often vast, sparsely populated and off limits to local law enforcement, says Elizabeth Kempshall, special agent in charge of the DEA Phoenix Division.

Some recent incidents:

• Federal agents and tribal police in August seized $5 million worth of marijuana plants linked to Mexican drug gangs in Oregon's Warm Springs Indian Reservation.

• In the past three years, tribal police at the Colville Reservation in Washington state identified at least 19 drug cultivation operations on the reservation and seized more than 45,000 marijuana plants.

• A shootout last year on Tohono O'odham territory resulted in two suspected Mexican smugglers being hospitalized with wounds from AK-47 assault rifle rounds.

In response, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs added 30 agents last year. The amount of narcotics on tribal lands seized by bureau investigators soared from 25 pounds in 2008 to 5,400 pounds last year, says Jason Thompson, acting director of law enforcement for the bureau.

Few places are more attractive to drug gangs than the Tohono O'odham reservation, a 450,000-acre expanse of sparsely populated, arid land that shares a 75-mile border with Mexico. The gangs have carted their illicit goods through Tohono O'odham for years, tribal leaders say. But pressure put on the cartels by Mexican President Felipe Caldero´n in recent years, coupled with increased security on the rest of the border by U.S. agents, has led cartel leaders to step up their encroachment into tribal lands, Kempshall says.

Last year, U.S. Border Patrol agents seized a record-high 319,000 pounds of marijuana on Tohono O'odham grounds, up from 201,000 pounds the previous year, according to Border Patrol figures.

Tribal members lock their doors and go out in groups at night, fearful of running into an armed drug gang, tribal chairman Ned Norris says. Things got so bad that the Tohono O'odham tribal council took the unusual step of asking for more federal help — a measure strongly criticized by other tribes, which are often wary of U.S. presence on their land, Norris says.

Today, Border Patrol outposts and a processing center dot the reservation, and Border Patrol trucks case the dirt roads along the border.

"We're between a rock and a hard place," Norris says. "But you get to a point where something needed to be done."

On a recent patrol, Sgt. Garcia drove his SUV along a road running along the border fence. The 4-foot-high fence was erected with U.S. help to prevent cars from driving through the reservation, he says. Smugglers often lean ramps against the fence and drive over it. Smugglers on foot — known as "backpackers" — climb over the fence carrying 60-pound burlap sacks filled with drugs, Garcia says.

To avoid detection, they hike over the 7,000-foot-high peaks of the Baboquivari mountain range, where tribal members believe their creator, I'itoi, lives, Garcia says. Often along the mountain trail, police find the bodies of smugglers who were killed by bandits or died from exposure, he says. The nation collects the bodies of about 70 immigrants a year from its reservation.

Garcia spies two people about a quarter-mile down the road near the fence, not far from where two agents man a U.S. Border Patrol outpost. Garcia guns his SUV to the spot. By the time he gets there, the people have vanished, probably squatting out of sight in a nearby ravine or back on the Mexico side, he says.

"You have a lot of wide-open space out here," Garcia says, pointing his truck back up the road. "They just keep coming."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/201 ... rder_N.htm

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