Pubdate: Sat, 02 Mar 2002
Source: Register-Guard, The (OR)
Copyright: 2002 The Register-Guard
Contact:  http://www.registerguard.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/362
Author: Kevin Sullivan, The Washington Post

TUNNEL USED TO SMUGGLE 'BILLIONS' IN ILLEGAL DRUGS

TIERRA DEL SOL, Calif. - Down the dust-blown driveway, past a chain-link 
fence and the Keep Out sign, past the beefy Rottweiler and the tire swing, 
in a closet under the staircase in a little two-story bungalow, Mexico's 
most violent drug lords kept a secret at Johnson's pig farm.

When U.S. drug agents broke into the closet on Wednesday, they found a 
large safe. They opened it and found nothing. Then they spotted the false 
floor. And when they pried it up, they found the entrance to a 1,200-foot 
tunnel - complete with electric lights, ventilation ducts and wooden walls 
- - that ended in a fireplace in a house just beyond the metal wall that 
separates the United States from Mexico.

Investigators are calling the tunnel in this remote section of rocky border 
scrubland, 70 miles east of San Diego near a small town called Tecate, one 
of most lucrative drug-smuggling mechanisms ever discovered along the 
U.S.-Mexico frontier.

'It's one of the most significant finds ever along the southwestern 
border," said Errol Chavez, special agent in charge of the San Diego office 
of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. "They used this tunnel to 
smuggle billions of dollars worth of cocaine, marijuana and other drugs 
into the United States for several years."

Chavez, speaking to reporters in San Diego, said investigators believe that 
the tunnel was built at least two or three years ago by the notorious 
Tijuana cartel, headed by several brothers in the Arellano Felix family.

He said the Arellano Felixes moved tons of drugs in carts that rolled on 
railroad-style tracks through the tunnel, which is about 20 feet below ground.

The drugs were then likely loaded into pickups and other small trucks, 
which were used to deliver the drugs to Los Angeles and beyond.

Chavez said investigators have learned that the Arellano Felixes charged 
other smuggling rings a fee to use the tunnel. He said that the tunnel 
seems to have been used exclusively for drugs and that there was no 
evidence that illegal immigrants were also moved through it.

The tunnel, which is four feet square, offers further evidence of the 
difficulty of sealing the 2,000-mile border despite efforts to cut off drug 
smuggling and illegal immigration. Since Sept. 11, border security has been 
sharply increased and drug seizures are way up. But Vincent Bond, a 
spokesman for the Customs Service in San Diego, said the tunnel shows that 
when one route is closed to smugglers, they find a new one.

The discovery came just days before a visit to Mexico by Tom Ridge, the 
U.S. director of homeland security, who will discuss border security with 
top Mexican officials.

Tunnels are nothing new along the border. Several have been discovered 
since 1990. The largest one, found in 1993, stretched about 1,452 feet 
under the border at Tijuana, Mexico. That tunnel was never used because it 
was discovered just before it was completed. Chavez said it belonged to 
drug lord Joaquin Guzman, known as "El Chapo," who tried to keep the tunnel 
secret by murdering the workers who dug it.

No arrests have been made on the U.S. side in the tunnel case. Chavez said 
investigators from the DEA and the Customs Service, which assisted in 
Wednesday's raid, are seeking several suspects, including a man who leased 
the house and was living there.

Mexican police said they have detained for questioning two people who were 
found in the house at the Mexican end of the tunnel during the raid.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager