Pubdate: Thu, 01 Mar 2001
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2001 The New York Times Company
Contact:  229 West 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036
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Author: Michael Janofsky

DRUG RUNNERS' TUNNELS TEST THE AGENTS IN A BORDER TOWN

NOGALES, Ariz., Feb. 28 - The authorities in this border town today 
discovered a cache of illegal drugs inside yet another hand-dug 
tunnel connected to a sewer line that smugglers had used to get drugs 
out of Mexico and into the United States.

About 350 pounds of marijuana was pulled out of a hole in the 
concrete floor of a commercial garage less than a mile from the 
Mexican border. It was a modest discovery by any measure, worth only 
$300,000 or so on the street, said James A. Woolley, assistant 
special agent at the Drug Enforcement Administration's offices in 
Tucson.

But this was the second such tunnel found here in three days - and 
the seventh in the last six years - evidence that smugglers were 
still using the hilly landscape of Nogales to their advantage. In 
each case, the tunnel was connected to a city sewer line that was 
connected in turn to underground culverts that carry water and debris 
from Mexico into southern Arizona.

Typically, smugglers walk or crawl the drugs through the culverts and 
the sewer lines before leaving the contraband for someone else to 
fish out from the floor of the hand-dug tunnels here and load onto 
vehicles for transport northward.

Ingenious? Not especially, said Kyle E. Barnette, associate special 
agent in charge of the Customs Service office in Tucson, whose agents 
scored big on Monday, intercepting 840 pounds of cocaine at a house 
to which one 25-foot tunnel led not far from the garage. He said 
agents believed the cocaine to be 95 percent pure, with a street 
value well above $6 million.

"If you can imagine it, the smugglers can, too," Agent Barnette said 
of the various means of drug transport that border agents have 
encountered over the years. "And just because we catch them doesn't 
mean they won't try again."

Agent Barnette said some of the tunnel discoveries had led to 
arrests. But the drug business has become so sophisticated, he said, 
that most people involved in it perform only one task, like dropping 
the drugs at the mouth of a culvert, moving them through or pulling 
them out of the tunnel for delivery to a driver.

"It has become a very specialized operation," said Matthew C. Allen, 
group supervisor for the Nogales office of the Customs Service. 
"There's the grower, the marketer, the transporter, and that creates 
an insulating factor. Most of these people involved don't know each 
other."

For that reason, he said, American and Mexican authorities often 
cannot easily identify others involved in the trafficking through 
arrest of someone who might have dug the tunnel.

In both cases this week, the authorities said, there have been no 
arrests, and the property owners are still being sought.

Nogales has always been a busy spot for drug running, as well as the 
smuggling of illegal immigrants, on the Mexican border. Michael 
Unzueta, the Customs Service's deputy executive director, Operations 
West, said the town generally ranked among the most active places for 
drug smuggling and interdiction, along with San Ysidro, Calif., Yuma, 
Ariz., and El Paso.

Already this year, the Customs Service has recorded 50 arrests, 30 
indictments and 18 convictions related to drugs in the Nogales area. 
The tallies are slightly behind those for the corresponding period 
last year, but numbers alone rarely measure effectiveness, Agent 
Barnette said, adding: "Imagine squeezing a water balloon. You 
increase pressure one place, the water goes somewhere else. Same with 
smugglers."

The lure of Nogales, a high-desert town of about 22,000 across from a 
Mexican city of the same name with nearly 20 times the population, 
has been the rugged terrain. Well below the single-family homes that 
dot the hills on both sides of the border, underground culverts 
connect the two countries and open several miles inside Arizona, 
providing smugglers a cozy means of conveyance. By cutting through 
the sewer lines to which the culverts connect, the smugglers gain 
access to drop points at the end of the hand-dug tunnels.

Most of the tunnels, elbowing from horizontal to vertical, have been 
dug through concrete on the floors of houses, although in 1999 
investigators found one connected to Sacred Heart Roman Catholic 
Church, a majestic old building on a bluff about a half-mile from the 
border.

The commercial garage where the latest tunnel discovery was made 
today sits across from a busy shopping center and offices of the 
state's Economic Security Department. Pointing to it, Agent Woolley 
said: "The novelty of this is that it's an operational business. 
Nobody would have thought anything of it."

As investigators pulled bundles of marijuana out of the tunnel and 
gathered other evidence, Agent Woolley turned to Mr. Unzueta, the 
Customs Service official, who was visiting the area from Washington. 
"It's been a good week for Nogales," Agent Woolley said. "We ain't 
winning, but at least we're making dents."
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