Thread: U.S.-Mexico Border Tunnel Nets 40 Tons Of Pot

U.S. Mexico Border Tunnel Nets 40 Tons Of Pot
By ELLIOT SPAGAT and JACQUES BILLEAUD
07/13/12 04:42 AM ET

TIJUANA, Mexico -- Three drug smuggling tunnels equipped with lighting and ventilation – including one with a railcar system – have been discovered along the U.S.-Mexico border in less than a week, the latest signs that cartels are building sophisticated passages to escape heightened detection above ground.

Two of the tunnels were incomplete, including one that the Mexican army found in a Tijuana warehouse Thursday with more than 40 tons of marijuana at the entry. The passage extended nearly 400 yards, including more than 100 yards into the United States.

Soldiers found the Tijuana warehouse with four moving trucks full of marijuana, a trailer full of dirt, pickaxes, wheelbarrows, drills and other excavation equipment. The tunnel was equipped with a railcar system.

The Mexican army said three people were detained.

It was the second, major incomplete tunnel discovered in the San Diego-Tijuana area in two days and the third along the U.S.-Mexico border since Saturday, when a completed passage was found in a vacant strip mall storefront in the southwestern Arizona city of San Luis.

The 240-yard tunnel in Arizona showed a level of sophistication not typically associated with other crude smuggling passageways that tie into storm drains in the state.

"When you see what is there and the way they designed it, it wasn't something that your average miner could put together," said Douglas Coleman, special agent in charge of the Phoenix division of the Drug Enforcement Administration. "You would need someone with some engineering expertise to put something together like this."

As Thursday's massive pot seizure in Tijuana demonstrates, tunnels have become an increasingly common way to smuggle enormous loads of heroin, marijuana and other drugs into the country. More than 70 passages have been found on the border since October 2008, surpassing the number of discoveries in the previous six years.

More than 150 secret tunnels have been found along the border since 1990, the vast majority of them incomplete, according to U.S.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Raids last November on two tunnels linking San Diego and Tijuana netted a combined 52 tons of marijuana on both sides of the border.

The latest Arizona tunnel was discovered after state police pulled over a man who had 39 pounds of methamphetamine in his vehicle and mentioned the strip mall.

The tunnel was found beneath a water tank in a storage room and stretched across the border to an ice-plant business in the Mexican city of San Luis Rio Colorado. It was reinforced with four-by-six beams and lined with plywood.

Investigators believe the tunnel wasn't in operation for long because there was little wear on its floor, and 55-gallon drums containing extracted dirt hadn't been removed from the property.

Coleman said investigators can't yet say for sure if the tunnel, estimated to cost $1.5 million to build, was operated by the powerful Sinaloa cartel. Still, authorities suspect cartel involvement because the group from Sinaloa controls smuggling routes into Arizona.

"Another cartel wasn't going to roll into that area and put down that kind of money in Sinaloa territory," Coleman said. "Nobody is going to construct this tunnel without significant cartel leadership knowing what's going on."

On Wednesday, the Mexican army found an incomplete tunnel in Tijuana estimated to be more than 150 yards long, beginning inside a building that advertised as a recycling plant. .

The Mexican army said two tractor-trailers were found inside the building, along with shovels, drills, pickaxes, buckets and other excavation tools. The walls were lined with dirt and wide enough for one person to get through comfortably.

U.S. authorities were investigating the tunnel discovered Wednesday for three months, said ICE spokeswoman Lauren Mack.

It takes six months to a year to build a tunnel, authorities say. Workers use shovels and pickaxes to slowly dig through the soil, sleeping in buildings where the tunnels begin until the job is done. Sometimes they use pneumatic tools.

The tunnels are concentrated along the border in California and Arizona. San Diego is popular because its clay-like soil is easy to dig. In Nogales, Ariz., smugglers tap into vast underground drainage canals.

San Diego's Otay Mesa area has the added draw that there are plenty of nondescript warehouses on both sides of the border to conceal trucks getting loaded with drugs. Its streets hum with semitrailers by day and fall silent on nights and weekends.

U.S.-Mexico Border Tunnel Nets 40 Tons Of Pot

Border drug tunnel has shrine to "patron saint" of Mexican narcos

Published July 13, 2012
EFE

A shrine dedicated to a possibly mythical outlaw venerated by drug traffickers as a saint was found by Mexican soldiers as they were showing reporters one of two cross-border drug tunnels discovered this week.

The small, makeshift altar honoring Jesus Malverde and also containing images of the Virgin of Guadalupe (Mexico's patron saint) and Jesus Christ, as well as some Mexican coins, was located inside a "narcotunnel" discovered Thursday night on the northeast side of Tijuana, just across the border from San Diego.

The regional military commander, Gen. Gilberto Landeros Briseño, said Friday it was still too early to say who owned the passageway with the shrine, located near the spot where a large drug tunnel used by Joaquin "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzman's Sinaloa cartel had been found years ago.

The first of the tunnels was discovered Wednesday night some 200 meters (655 feet) from the border, Landeros said.

He said a small recycling business occupied the building where the tunnel began.

The general said Thursday that the tunnel was discovered thanks to ground reconnaissance operations in the area, noting that one person seen exiting the fake business fled upon noticing the soldiers' arrival and left the door open.

The troops proceeded to enter the building to search the premises and discovered in the bathroom the unfinished tunnel, which presumably was to be used to smuggle drugs, weapons and undocumented migrants across the border.

Landeros said the tunnel had been constructed to a point approximately 60 meters (200 feet) from the border.

The tunnel was one meter in width, 1.7 meters in height and as much as 10 meters deep and had lighting and an unsophisticated ventilation system.

Authorities confiscated two tractor-trailers as well as different excavation tools such as shovels, picks and wheelbarrows.

On Thursday night, military officials in that region said in a statement that a second narcotunnel had been found at a property also located on the northeast side of the city, where 50 tons of marijuana were seized.

That 350-meter-long (1,150-foot-long) tunnel was discovered thanks to ongoing military operations in the area, the statement said.

Since the mid-1990s, authorities have discovered many clandestine passageways along the U.S.-Mexico border, with dozens of narcotunnels having been found in the past four years.

People traffickers and drug cartels often use tunnels to cross the vast U.S.-Mexican border, which runs 3,200 kilometers (1,988 miles). EFE

Border drug tunnel has shrine to "patron saint" of Mexican narcos | Fox News Latino