http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/border/103439

Drug-smuggling planes still flying Sonora skies
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 11.21.2005

PHOENIX - Drug smugglers are still using aircraft to ply their trade, and nowhere is the problem as great as it is in the Mexican state of Sonora.

The smugglers in the sky never cross the border, where increased airborne and ground security has cut off the flow of airborne drugs pervasive in the 1980s.

Now, they're using small planes to ferry drugs like marijuana and cocaine north, stopping at border airstrips to transfer their loads to staging areas just south of the international line.

Once there, the drugs are loaded into cars, trucks, backpacks or saddlebags for the home stretch into the United States.

Last year, some 697,000 pounds of marijuana, cocaine, meth, heroin and Ecstasy were confiscated by U.S. authorities along the border, up from 395,000 pounds in 1999.

But despite those seizures, the U.S. Department of Justice found the availability of every drug except heroin and Ecstasy has increased in

Southwestern cities.

Mexican authorities are trying to chip away at airborne smuggling.

That's been hard because, with hundreds of tiny airstrips, Sonora sees more drug-smuggling flights than any other place in Mexico.

The pilots know they're in view of U.S. radar, so they don't bother trying to make it into the U.S. Instead, they take over small town airports and use country roads as makeshift landing strips.

Of the 340 suspicious landings detected by U.S. radar along the U.S.-Mexican border last year, 157 occurred in Sonora, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The state accounts for about 60 percent of the 265 drug flights intercepted in Mexico since 2000, with neighboring Sinaloa accounting for another 25 percent, according to the Mexican Attorney General's Office. A majority of the 1,094 clandestine airstrips destroyed by the Mexican army since 2000 were in Sonora.

No plane has been detected crossing the U.S. border in recent years, according to Customs' Air and Marine Operations Center.

But drug agents say Sonora is the last vestige of the 1980s, when aerial smuggling was at its peak and drug runs were made with near impunity.

Since then, the game has become much harder. Mexican authorities have more radar systems, pilots and planes like Cessna Citation jets, which can outrun most any smuggler.