When I was 9 years old, a few older playmates from my fourth-through-sixth grade class started disappearing at lunchtime recesses. It took a long time before I found out what they were doing, somewhere off school grounds. They were smoking pot. This came to mind last week when proponents of Arizona's main marijuana-legalization effort pledged to provide $40 million per year in marijuana tax revenue for education if their initiative passes. Even though I'm an instinctive advocate of legalization, I agreed when Arizona's Republican Party chairman, Robert Graham, called the pro-legalization event a "pathetic display." What's pathetic is the suggestion that $40 million means anything significant to a state public school system that spends around $4.7 billion of state money every year. [continues 969 words]
Dennis Bohlke insists there's no time to wait. Many people in the anti-prohibition movement are looking toward 2016 as the year Arizona voters should consider an initiative to legalize marijuana for personal, nonmedical use. But Bohlke, of Phoenix, is pushing for a vote in 2014. He took out petitions June 11 and filed a seven-page proposed constitutional amendment with the secretary of state. That leaves him and a loosely organized band of volunteers with a huge challenge: collecting 259,213 valid signatures by July 3, 2014, to put the initiative on next year's general-election ballot. [continues 659 words]
Top targets, in reality, were FBI informants, but ATF didn't know Even before hundreds of guns went across the border as part of Operation Fast and Furious, an interagency communication gap had left the investigation doomed, recently released information suggests. Unknown to the ATF agents leading the probe, the top possible targets of their investigation were working as FBI informants and were essentially "unindictable," according to congressional investigators and documents connected to the case. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives launched the investigation planning to go beyond arresting "straw buyers" and take down a whole cross-border gun-running ring. But it could never have reached its top targets, two brothers named Miramontes from the El Paso area, because they were protected "national security assets," says a Feb. 1 memo by U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. [continues 1002 words]
LOCHIEL, Ariz. - Members of an armed citizens patrol seized about 280 pounds of marijuana Tuesday and Wednesday from smugglers crossing a ranch owned by The Nature Conservancy. About 13 volunteers for the group, called Ranch Rescue, have been working near Lochiel since Saturday in their first mission aimed at surveillance, rather than cleanups at border-area ranches. An official of The Nature Conservancy said Wednesday night the group was unaware Ranch Rescue members had been operating on the San Antonio Ranch, about 65 miles south of Tucson. Tom Collazo, the director of conservation for the conservancy's Arizona branch, said the ranch manager would ask the group to stop today. [continues 760 words]
Smugglers Pathway Clandestine Movement Of Drugs, People Engulfs Area Smugglers are endangering this border village and much of the Tohono O'odham Nation by tempting residents with cash for helping move people and drugs, residents say. The creeping corruption has even overcome some children, who have dropped out of school to join the smugglers' payroll as spies, said resident Ray Mattia. "These kids get paid a lot of money to watch the roads for them. They sit on the mountains over here," Mattia said, waving to a range east of this village, which is about 100 miles southwest of Tucson. [continues 1707 words]
A U.S. Border Patrol agent exchanged fire with a gunman Saturday in the same area where an agent was fired upon two months ago. A Border Patrol spokesman, Ryan Scudder, confirmed the Saturday incident but provided few details, deferring to the investigating agencies. Scudder said the agent fired on someone during the incident and that the agent was fired upon. No one was hit during the exchange, which took place near Papago Farms, a village in the southwestern Tohono O'odham Nation. [continues 110 words]
Federal agents seized a ton of marijuana in the southwestern Tohono O'odham Nation just a few hours before a U.S. Border Patrol agent in the same area reported being shot at by Mexican soldiers. The coincidence of the smuggling attempt and the shooting has convinced some Border Patrol agents that the soldiers were involved in moving drug loads that afternoon. Edward "Bud" Tuffly, the president of the Border Patrol agents union in Southern Arizona, called the coincidence "highly suspicious." [continues 538 words]
A multistate narcotics investigation led to the seizure last Thursday of more than $1 million from a location on the Southwest Side, according to a complaint filed in Pima County Superior Court. Investigators also seized $7,000 from a pickup truck as part of the investigation, the complaint states. The seizures were made by the Arizona Department of Public Safety. Investigators declined to give details of the case, saying that the Tucson action was just a branch of a broader investigation that has not concluded. [continues 188 words]
Drug Combatants Diverge On Strategy As a crossroads of marijuana commerce and conspiracy, Tucson has more at stake than most communities in how to deal with the trafficking. Arizona voters showed a willingness twice before to voice their opinions on marijuana: They voted in 1996, and reaffirmed in 1998, to allow doctors to prescribe otherwise illegal drugs, letting patients with serious or life-threatening diseases possess them without fear of being arrested for violating state law. In 1996, voters also called for diverting first-time drug offenders to probation and treatment. [continues 1410 words]
How A Chain Is Broken When a pair of local marijuana traffickers suspected a snitch in their midst, they sent for her in Georgia and arranged to meet at a Tucson hotel - the Smuggler's Inn. It was the spring of 1998. The top agenda item was determining whether Nancy Phillips had ratted out a Kentucky customer of the two traffickers, Jose Luis Arevalo and Raul Bess. "I convinced them that I was not talking to anyone," Phillips testified last year, when she was finally called as a witness against Arevalo. [continues 3092 words]
NOGALES, Sonora - Advance scouts from Hollywood chose this border city as a safer alternative to Tijuana for the filming of "Traffic," the drug-war movie that opens today. But in the two weeks leading up to the opening, real-world crimes apparently related to drug trafficking have proliferated, turning Nogales into a city like the Tijuana pictured in the movie. The local tally: 11,000 pounds of marijuana seized, one near-execution foiled, three murders including one by torture, and one state police officer arrested. [continues 703 words]
Truckers can wait for hours at the official checkpoint at Benjamin Hill where authorities routinely stop vehicles to look for illegal drugs. A truck filled with chickens pulls into the X-ray inspection system at Benjamin Hill, about 90 miles south of Nogales, Sonora. The checkpoint is one of many inspection or toll stops along Highway 15. Annoyed travelers, truckers and legislators call for a more efficient process of inspecting vehicles along Mexico's stop-and-go Highway 15. BENJAMIN HILL, Sonora - They're a symbol of travel in developing countries: Young men in uniform, carrying rifles almost as long as the men are tall, manning checkpoints. [continues 848 words]
If Mexico's military withdraws from fighting drugs, as suggested by President-elect Vicente Fox, that country's anti-drug efforts will suffer, said Barry McCaffrey, the U.S. drug-control director. In an interview with the Arizona Daily Star, McCaffrey said Mexico's military has played an indispensable role in fighting drug trafficking. "The Mexican armed forces, both the maritime service and the army, have been vital to both interdiction and eradication. It's hard to imagine in the coming years anything replacing that capability," McCaffrey said. [continues 511 words]
Shots fired by Mexican soldiers while in New Mexico on March 14 shook a delicate diplomatic balance among the people who patrol both sides of the border - and could have upset that balance altogether. But a U.S. Border Patrol administrator followed what has become tradition along the line and released detained soldiers. Although many agents opposed the decision to release the soldiers, it helped preserve relative peace in a tense border zone, officials argue. "If the soldiers had been detained longer, these tensions would have increased along the border, not only in El Paso, but also throughout the United States" side of the border, Border Patrol official Paul M. Berg said in a written statement. [continues 978 words]
A Border Patrol agent shot and killed a suspected marijuana smuggler yesterday on the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation, agency spokesman Rob Daniels said. About 9 a.m., the agent began following a pickup on Federal Route 34, about 40 miles northwest of Sells. Pulling off that paved road, the pickup drove about 100 yards into the desert, losing bales of marijuana from the bed, then stopped, said Daniels and Tohono O'odham police chief Larry Seligman. The two men in the truck ran off, but the agent caught one of them, Daniels said. A struggle ensued, and the agent shot the man. [continues 251 words]
FBI agents arrested a former Tohono O'odham police officer yesterday for allegedly trying to traffic in marijuana while he was on the force. Enrique Romero, 30, was arrested about 7:30 a.m. while driving near Vail, said FBI spokesman Ed Hall. His alleged crime occurred last March 26. Neither Hall nor Cathy Colbert, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office, would explain what Romero is accused of doing. Tohono O'odham Police Chief Larry Seligman also declined to elaborate on Romero's alleged crime. [continues 138 words]
An autopsy revealed yesterday that a man killed Tuesday by a Border Patrol agent was shot in the back. The shooting victim, David Maldonado Quijada, 29, of Nogales, Sonora, died after a bullet grazed his heart and lung, then exited through his chest, said Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada. Maldonado, who had been driving a van with about 200 pounds of marijuana inside, reportedly led agents on a chase about five miles northeast of the downtown Nogales port of entry before the shooting. [continues 503 words]
For the third time this year, law-enforcement officers have found a tunnel used to move drugs from Mexico to Arizona. Officers of the Santa Cruz County Metro Task Force discovered a hand-dug tunnel under a Nogales, Ariz., house last night. Like a tunnel found in Nogales in January, this one goes from the house into a storm drain that empties into Nogales Wash. The wash, which is covered as it runs from Nogales, Sonora, to Nogales, Ariz., serves as a thoroughfare for drug traffickers. Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada said officers began suspecting a tunnel at 160 W. Loma St. in February, when they began seizing drugs from people leaving the house. Officers ultimately seized more than 1,000 pounds each of marijuana and cocaine from people as they left the house. [continues 262 words]
The battles over undocumented immigration and illegal drugs flare hottest along the U.S.-Mexican border. Now the governors of neighboring border states are pushing proposals to retreat from both wars. Arizona Gov. Jane Hull and New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson both want to legalize common, if underground, practices - especially near the border. Hull wants to legalize some of the millions of illegal border crossings that take place each year. She would do so through a guest-worker program that permits increased numbers of Mexican laborers to cross the border legally for temporary work in selected industries. Instead of scurrying across the desert under cover of darkness, the participants could cross legally at a port of entry. [continues 961 words]
The inspectors in the booths at Nogales aren't tense just because of traffic jams. Temptation also troubles them, Immigration and Naturalization Service official Stephen Fickett said. ``There is constant pressure on our employees to take bribes. They are always being subjected to the possibility of being blackmailed,'' said Fickett, deputy director of the INS' Phoenix office. While Fickett insists the vast majority of INS employees are law-abiding, he and others acknowledge the temptation is great. One drug trafficker on the California border offered an INS employee $45,000 for a permanent residency card last year, said T.J. Bondurant, the assistant inspector general for investigations. For an inspector who makes a base salary of $23,000 the first year, that's a huge temptation. [continues 776 words]
