Pubdate: Sun, 09 Jul 2000
Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA)
Copyright: 2000 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
Contact:  PO Box 120191, San Diego, CA, 92112-0191
Fax: (619) 293-1440
Website: http://www.uniontrib.com/
Forum: http://www.uniontrib.com/cgi-bin/WebX
Author: Robert Caldwell, Insight Editor
Note: Part 3 of a 6 part special report on the Arellano Felix Cartel

THE PLAZA

Tijuana Cartel Dominates Choice Route For Smugglers

SAN YSIDRO -- "It's a boy," exults the U.S. Customs Service mechanic in 
mock celebration.

The tire he has just pulled off a 1988 Isuzu Trooper II trying to enter the 
United States from Mexico at the San Ysidro Port of Entry yields hefty 
bundles of marijuana. The other three tires are all similarly stuffed with 
about 47 pounds each of large marijuana bricks.

Estimated street value for this 189 pounds of dope -- about $114,000. 
Customs has the load, the vehicle and the driver all in custody.

It's a small victory in the ceaseless campaign waged against drug smuggling 
all along the Southwest border, in the air above it and the seas beyond it.

Drug traffickers call it the "Plaza." U.S. government officials say it is 
currently the most heavily used drug corridor into the United States. "This 
is the focus of drug trafficking now," says Rudy M. Camacho, the Customs 
Service's director of field operations for San Diego and Imperial Counties.

The Arellano Felix Organization sits aside the Plaza and dominates this 
choice smugglers route from the cartel's base area in the 
Tijuana-Mexicali-Ensenada triangle.

If the Arellanos owned the Isuzu load (ownership is always difficult to 
determine), its loss is no doubt considered an acceptable cost of doing 
business. Vehicles for smuggling are cheap, the drivers ("mules" in drug 
jargon) are expendable and $100,000 lost in a confiscated load is a 
comparative trifle for a cartel grossing perhaps $1 billion or more a year.

No one knows for certain what percentage of the drugs entering the United 
States is detected and seized by the government. But few estimates run more 
than perhaps 15 percent, and many are much lower.

In one recent period of 21 hours stretched over three different days spent 
with Customs Service inspectors at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, about a 
dozen drug loads were seized. All consisted of marijuana. Total estimated 
street value might have reached $1 million. A safe guess is that as much as 
10 times that amount got through, although not necessarily at San Ysidro.

"I personally think we are barely touching them," says one agent with years 
of experience in the Southwest border drug wars.

The truest test is probably the street value of a given narcotic. If 
interdiction were catching, say, a third or a half of all drug shipments, 
street prices would be rising. But they are not. Instead, street prices for 
cocaine and marijuana have actually declined since the 1980s. That clearly 
suggests that interdiction is more a holding action than any sort of cure 
for America's drug habit.

The odds against the Customs Service, which is responsible for drug 
interdiction at all border crossings, seaports and airports, are especially 
formidable at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. San Ysidro is the busiest land 
border crossing in the world. Daily vehicle traffic entering from Mexico 
typically averages between 42,000 and 60,000 cars. Commercial trucks from 
Mexico enter at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry, on average more than 2,000 a 
day. Pedestrian crossers at San Ysidro total roughly another 20,000 on a 
typical day.

In recent congressional testimony, Edward W. Logan, who runs Customs' 
Office of Investigations in San Diego, cited the even bigger numbers from 
the Southern California region in 1999:

"We encountered over 30 million passenger vehicles, 95 million persons, 
almost a million trucks, thousands of pleasure craft and cleared for entry 
into U.S. commerce over $12 billion of trade-related merchandise from Mexico.

"Culled from this enormous haystack of people and conveyances, the Customs 
Service seized 192 tons of marijuana, 5 tons of cocaine, 1,164 pounds of 
methamphetamine and 226 pounds of heroin along with arresting over 4,000 
drug smugglers."

Logan notes that drug smuggling through the Plaza is definitely a growth 
industry, a point he also made in his testimony to a congressional 
subcommittee last March:

"In eight short years, we have witnessed drug seizures rise at our 
California Ports of Entry from 370 in 1991 to over 4,000 in 1998. Last 
year, over 58 percent of all detected drug smuggling events at U.S. Ports 
of Entry along the Mexican border occurred in California."

To combat this flood of drugs, 75 percent of the approximately 800 
uniformed Customs inspectors and agents in the San Diego region have an 
anti-narcotics mission.

Customs operates an air-interdiction force of several twin-engine jets plus 
helicopters based at North Island Naval Air Station. The daily missions 
flown by these intercept aircraft along the U.S.-Mexico border are 
controlled from a continent-scanning radar surveillance center at March Air 
Reserve Base in Riverside. The center's giant display screens cover the 
entire southern tier of the United States and can track virtually every 
aircraft flying from the Pacific coast to the Caribbean.

Air intercept operations flown by Customs with help from the U.S. military 
have diminished airborne drug smuggling from a daily occurrence to a 
relative rarity. Mexican drug traffickers now typically fly loads of 
cocaine and marijuana to locations just south of the border and then move 
the drugs across by land, or around the border by sea.

The latter option has prompted Customs to build a maritime interdiction 
capability with several fast patrol boats based in San Diego.

"It is an hourly battle of wits between us and the smugglers," Camacho says.

Customs inspectors like to say that "the smugglers must be lucky every time 
they cross and we only have to get lucky once."

In fact, however, the sheer volume of traffic puts the odds mostly with the 
smugglers.

Kirk Patterson, the assistant port director for passenger operations, 
explains what his inspectors are up against.

"This is a tremendous haystack here and the smugglers know that. Their 
spotters watch us constantly from the Mexican side. Narcotics is our top 
priority but we're also enforcing more than 400 laws from over 40 federal 
agencies.

"We have less than 30 seconds per car to make decisions about whether 
something just doesn't look right. We look for something that doesn't match."

Glancing out at the lines of cars waiting to cross the border, Patterson 
then refers to the obvious -- "that fine line between traffic facilitation 
and narcotics interdiction."

Logan makes the same point.

"I'd like to get every gram of narcotics, but that would be wholly 
inconsistent with a functioning border," he says.
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