http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepubli ... ing28.html

Smugglers' ploys get more elaborate

Fake business trucks, other tricks used

Susan Carroll
Republic Tucson Bureau
Nov. 28, 2005 12:00 AM

TUCSON - U.S. Border Patrol Agent Louis Chavez watched the white "FedEx" van go by in the opposite direction on a road north of Nogales and couldn't help but feel a little insulted.

The van's windshield was cracked. The FedEx decal was lopsided. The driver, an undocumented immigrant, wasn't even wearing a uniform.

"Do you think I'm a dummy or what?" Chavez thought to himself as he put on his lights and pulled out behind the suspected smuggler's van.

Each day along the Southwest border, federal agents and smugglers play the same game, one as old as the border itself. Smugglers cook up plots to run their cargo, trying to outsmart federal inspectors at the ports of entry or Border Patrol agents patrolling highways and back roads, particularly in Arizona, the most popular gateway in the nation for illegal immigration and marijuana smuggling.

Border Patrol agents in Arizona confiscated more marijuana in between the ports of entry than Texas, California and New Mexico combined during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30: about 1.2 million pounds. During the same time, inspectors at Arizona's six ports of entry intercepted record amounts of methamphetamines (1,781 pounds) and heroin (75 pounds), pulling packages from hidden compartments in all imaginable part of cars, from the drive shafts to the bumpers.


Creative hiding places


With increased enforcement along the Southwest border, smugglers are becoming more and more creative. Smugglers have also found millions of variations to the game: hiding people in dashboards, sewing a man into a seat and even stashing a little girl inside a piñata.

Over the years, agents have busted bogus Arizona Diamondbacks, Arrowhead Water, city of Douglas and Channel 12 News (KPNX) vehicles that were carrying marijuana or undocumented immigrants.

"The type of concealment is limited only by the smugglers' imagination," said Vince Bond, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman in San Diego. "It varies from something as simple as a person hidden under a blanket in the back of a car to a youngster hidden inside a dashboard of a vehicle or inside the gas tank of a flatbed pickup truck."

Since the federal government started adding thousands of agents along the border a decade ago, smugglers have done crazy and cruel things to people, said Roger Maier, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman in Texas. They've tried to transport loads of undocumented immigrants in fake Border Patrol vehicles, in dump trucks and inside the side panels of a truck.

Inspectors found one woman under the hood of a truck, screaming, because she was being "cooked alive" by the radiator, Maier said.

The Border Patrol counted 473 deaths of undocumented immigrants last fiscal year, a record, including 267 in the Tucson and Yuma sectors.

The majority were skeletal remains or deaths from exposure. Arizona's 389-mile border with Mexico continues to be the weakest spot in the Southwest, officials acknowledge, exploited by smugglers avoiding more fortified areas like California and Texas.


Elaborate measures


In Arizona, drug smugglers will sometimes simultaneously run large multiple loads of marijuana through the desert, risking the cargo in the hopes that some will get through, officials said. When it comes to harder drugs, such as cocaine and heroin, they tend to take more elaborate precautions, said Brian Levin, a Customs spokesman in Tucson.

With some hidden compartments, he said, "there's a series of steps you have to do to get it to open electronically," he said. "You've got to push a button, push another pedal and pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time to get it open," he joked.

Agents don't want to glamorize the business of smuggling, which can be ruthless, but candidly admit that some attempts are simply better than others.

Roy Pierce, a Border Patrol agent in Nogales for more than 13 years, remembers a case last November when agents pulled over a truck that looked like it was stacked high with plywood. When they got the truck back to the station, they found the center of the planks of plywood were cut out to make a hidden compartment for 995 pounds of marijuana.

"It was a lot of work," Pierce said.

"Whoever did it, they really took their time and did it right."