- American anti-narcotics agents have discovered an intricate
network of tunnels providing traffickers with a cocaine supply route into
the United States. Hand-dug tunnels connect underground sewerage and water
canals between the Arizona town of Nogales and its Mexican twin town of
the same name in Sonora state.
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- The canals, which run under a dry stream bed along the
border, have provided drug suppliers with secret corridors into the United
States. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents discovered one 25ft-long
tunnel this week that connected the sewerage canals underneath the cellars
of an abandoned house on the outskirts of the Arizona Nogales, less than
a mile from the frontier.
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- They came across the tunnel after raiding the house to
seize more than 900lb of cocaine, worth at least $10 million (£6.9
million), from its cellars. There they found a covered hole that proved
to be the opening into the tunnel.
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- Traffickers are said to have transported drugs through
the network of canals and tunnels that eventually led to a pipe inside
the abandoned house.
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- Another tunnel was discovered leading to a car wash,
only 400 yards from the border. Anti-narcotics agents said that they also
seized 300lb of marijuana that had been hidden inside the passage.
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- ìMexican traffickers have been digging underground
tunnels to find ways of getting into the US through water and sewerage
canals,î Jim Molleses, a spokesman for the DEA in Arizona, said.
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- ìWe have identified these underground passages
as the main new routes for much of the cocaine coming into the United States,
but there are many more tunnels out there. We will now continue to look
until we find what we believe is an intricate system of underground links
between the Mexican and United States borders used to traffic drugs, and
maybe even illegal immigrants.î
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- Since 1995 anti-narcotics officers have found seven tunnels
that connect to the underground sewerage and water supply system that serves
Arizonaís Nogales and its Mexican neighbour. The first to be uncovered
linked various underground canals and tunnels that ran from Mexico across
the border into a Methodist Church in the centre of Nogales.
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- A tall, barbed-wire fence divides this stretch of the
1,500-mile Mexico-US border and there has been a recent clampdown on drug
traffickers attempting to smuggle cocaine on lorries or by human ìmulesî
crossing the border.
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- DEA officers say, however, that the tougher controls
of traditional overland and air routes used to bring cocaine into the United
States have forced the Mexican cocaine dealers underground.
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- ìWe think that the tunnels we have found so far
are only a part of a much wider network of underground channels used to
bring cocaine across the vast frontier,î one DEA spokesman said.
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- The enforcement organisation estimates that at least
two thirds of the 350 tonnes of cocaine that enter the United States every
year come via Mexico, which serves as a transit country for drugs produced
in Colombia.
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- The US-funded clampdown on Colombian organised crime
in the past decade, which dismantled notorious groups such as the Cali
and MedellÌn cartels, has opened the way for Mexican traffickers
to take over the supply and distribution of South American cocaine to the
United States. US federal investigators are still hunting JorgÈ
RamÌrez, a Mexican businessman from Tijuana, who apparently owns
land on the border with the American state of California, where cross-border
tunnels were first discovered in the mid-1990s.
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- A suspected money-launderer for Joaquin Guzm·n
ó the Mexican drug baron known to be a kingpin of the Tijuana cartel
ó he is said to have constructed warehouse buildings on his Tijuana
land that were to be used to house cocaine before it was moved into the
United States via the tunnels. Guzm·n escaped from prison in January
and is still on the run.
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- The high-risk stakes and trafficking methods of the Tijuana
cartel are featured in the Oscar-nominated film Traffic, directed by Steven
Soderbergh. Based on the 1980s British mini-series Traffik, the film highlights
the role of Mexicans as leading suppliers of cocaine to the US.
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