Meeting the Smugglers

On a sweltering early morning in Douglas I found myself standing outside the Border Mart convenience store with its owner, Sr Montano, watching a column of grayish-white smoke billowing skyward from a corner of the border patrol building. As it turns out, it was the previous day’s catch of marijuana. Sr Montano found this delightful, musing that all the marijuana smoke ended up blowing back into Mexico at any rate.

Drug smuggling tunnels extend from Agua Prieta to Douglas. Border patrol had discovered one of the largest of these “narco-tunnels” in the late 1990s, its walls, ceiling and floor lined with support structures and fans to keep the air circulating. These tunnels, however, are off limits to civilians, but Sr Montano managed to sneak a peak before they closed it off to most people except city workers. It was an elaborate work of engineering to prevent collapse, yet still one of the simplest smuggling methods.  

Unable to visit the tunnels ourselves, Sr Montano and I climbed into his Yukon SUV and began the slow roll to Mexico, following the border wall to Agua Prieta’s crime-ridden poverty district.

The wall extended as far as the eye could see - rusted metal fused with welded patches here and there, where industrious migrants had used a hack saw to cut through the metal. There were a couple spots where it looked as if someone had tried – or was still trying – to dig a hole under the wall.

Not 300 meters from the border crossing, there was even a makeshift stepladder made of broken concrete blocks, stone and old wooden planks. It extended at least a meter and a half up the side of the wall: just high enough to climb up, throw a pack over the top, and scramble over.

Freelance border hoppers, who take backpacks of marijuana into the US for a flat fee, take advantage of the gap in darkness to hop the fence into Cochise County, drop off their wares and then saunter back across the border with a cold Coca Cola in hand, perhaps from the Border Mart.

Sometimes when the Border Patrol spotlights go out, or when there is a change of guard along the wall, dozens of people gather on both sides. From Mexico, they toss packages of marijuana and cocaine over to the US, which are then gathered and dispatched by swift feet into the night. Border Patrol catch a few, but suspect that most get away.  

Deeper into Mexico

When we turned away from the wall to head deeper into Mexico, the Sierras, the origin of so many infamous drug traffickers and the death route of so many other desperate people, loomed ominously.

Today, the most famous son of the Sierras is by far Joaquin “Shorty” Guzman. Known simply as “El Chapo,” the Mexican translation for “shorty”, Guzman is the de facto head of arguably the most powerful drug-trafficking organization in Mexico.

The Sinaloa Cartel controls untold amounts of drugs – marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines. Hundreds of men, women and children smuggle the illicit product into the US every day – from the individual freelancers who hop the fence when the lights go out, to more sophisticated schemes that employ truck drivers and fleets of passenger vehicles.

El Chapo takes a piece of it all. His earnings are reportedly so high that Forbes magazine listed him as one of the richest men in the world in 2009, with an amassed fortune of a billion dollars.

Today, El Chapo is more a figure of myth than reality. The Mexican government cannot catch him, and only a few old pictures endlessly passed around the internet remind us that he does, or did, exist.

In Agua Prieta, a small border town that remains peaceful due to El Chapo’s uncontested rule, everyone knows his name, from the toothless old ladies selling tamales by the border to mechanics, school children and respected businessmen. When asked, many of the same people couldn’t tell me anything about Felipe Calderon. They didn’t recognize the name. One person even suggested that he might have heard the name once when he was shopping in Douglas.

El Chapo is a legend from the Sierras; Felipe Calderon is the president of Mexico, and one of the few people who recognized the name said he felt closer to US President Barack Obama in Washington than he did to Calderon in Mexico City.

I briefly chatted with this man, this rare specimen who could identify Calderon. As it turned out, he wasn’t your typical mechanic.

“We make hidden compartments here,” he told me, pointing to an old Toyota Camry that he had just finished working on.

For a few hundred pesos, they can make a couple of hidden compartments in the seats, or maybe in the side paneling. More money afforded more creative compartments. They even added suspension to the car so that a vehicle loaded down with “dozens of kilos of marijuana” didn’t lend the appearance that it was overburdened with illegal wares.

At the crossing, Border Patrol guards keep a close watch on the wheel wells of the cars as they pass north into the US. The cars riding heavy are always stopped for a detailed inspection.

For three generations, the mechanic’s shop had maintained a small turnover of cars that actually needed some engine work, maybe a little transmission tuning. But his core business was definitely outfitting cars, trucks, vans or anything with hidden compartments for smuggling.

The mechanic said there were more than a dozen such shops working in Agua Prieta.

Crossing over

While it took little more than a minute to enter Mexico, returning to the US took over an hour. We had to turn east to find the back of the line, before turning north to pick up the small, two-lane road that ran along the border fence.

As we got closer to the border crossing, the fence improved. It changed from rusted and patched to painted and perfect. Funding for cosmetics appeared plentiful, so long as we were near the US side of a border crossing.

Once we finally reached the guard post, one for each of the 16 lanes across the Mexico-US border crossing, the guard took a quick glance at our passports and waved us through.

So much for stepped-upsecurity.

The idea that the Merida Initiative, the $400 million US aid package passed last year, can provide enough money and training to increase security at border crossings like Douglas is feasible. But when considering El Paso, or Laredo, Texas, the largest inland shipping lanes in the Americas, it indeed seems an insurmountable challenge.

On the other hand, most of the security we see is at border crossings, with thousands of miles of fence left up to the Border Patrol to guard. Their budget is staggering, but manpower falters.

The best control of the border is likely in Mexico, where men like El Chapo determine who can cross by allowing only those who pay the fee to pass.

Then again, this was Douglas, Arizona – one of the quietest slices of the border. And El Chapo likely wants to keep it that way.

With hundreds, maybe even thousands of freelance smugglers peacefully hopping the fence or rolling through the border with hidden compartments and extra suspension, it pays to keep things quiet.