SirBlazinBowl
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For years, the Mexican state of Sinaloa and its capital Culiacan have been the administrative headquarters for many of the country's most fearsome drug cartels. But like most things in Mexico for which there is a demand farther north, the drug trade has migrated, too. It has come here, to the state of Sonora, and the teeming, dusty border cities like Nogales and Agua Prieta that fan out into the desert just across the fence from Arizona.
"It's become a war zone," said Ruben Ruiz, whose family has been ranching in Sonora for generations. "This place is a manifestation of the social problems of both countries." With the unremitting poverty of Southern Mexico pushing from below and the insatiable American appetite for cheap labor, cheap goods and cheap drugs pulling from above, the population of Sonora's border cities has ballooned in the past 15 years, and crime rates have also soared.
"When I was a kid, A.P. ( Agua Prieta ) was just a cow town, the kind of place where everybody knew everybody else and people rode horses through the streets," said Ruiz, who grew up in Tucson, Ariz., but spent summers on his father's cattle ranch east of Agua Prieta. "Now it's a staging area for drug runners, smugglers, and the U.S. companies who built the maquiladoras ( or manufacturing plants ). It's a place for people from elsewhere to come to make money." Ruiz's father was a life-long ganadero, or rancher, but he died nearly broke - ruined by chronically depressed cattle prices and the collapse of the Mexican peso in the early 1990s.
"You could buy ranches around here for nothing then," said Ruiz, "so a lot of ranches just ended up going to the drug dealers." Ruiz and his siblings held on to their father's land, but on a drive out to the family's old El Gallardo ranch, he noted the sprawling villas and posh compounds along the border that now belong to los narcos, or drug lords, Sonora's powerful new class of landowners. "There's another one right there," he said, pointing to a fortress-like cluster of new buildings set less than 100 yards south of the U.S. border fence, a rusting panel of sheet metal amid a sea of creosote bush and windblown garbage.
Today, the land surrounding his family's other ranch high in the Sierra Madre range, Ruiz said, is controlled by drug growers, who run vast marijuana-cultivating operations to supply the U.S. market. Mulos, or "mules," or smugglers, carry dried, compacted bricks of marijuana in 40- or 50-pound bales, hiking them over the border in backpacks. While U.S. Border Patrol agents play a game of cat-and-mouse with illegal migrants and their coyote guides in the low-lying areas closest to the roads and highways, the mountains are now crisscrossed by the foot trails of these drug runners, who move at night and continually improvise new ways of evading U.S. authorities. Increasingly, they use cell phones and radios to coordinate drop-off points with traffickers already inside the United States.
A successful delivery can earn a smuggler a thousand dollars or more, and some frustrated Arizona residents say the criminals have even taken to calling the Border Patrol for a free ride back to Mexico once the job is complete. All they have to do is pretend they're illegal migrants, then accept the voluntary deportation proceedings that promptly return them to Mexican territory.
But the drug trafficking operations also frequently erupt in violence. On rancher Ross Humphreys' land in Arizona's San Rafael Valley, 7 miles north of the border, drug gangs from Agua Prieta and Nogales have waged open gun battles to assert control over smuggling corridors. "They've got armor-plated pickups," said Humphreys, "Ford F350's with quarter-inch steel plates in the door panels." Humphreys has witnessed high-speed chases on his land between drug runners and the U.S. Border Patrol, whose officials confirmed the use of armored vehicles by Sonora drug traffickers. The Border Patrol has also registered a sharp increase in assaults on their agents in the Tucson sector so far this year, with 229 to date, as compared to only 118 for the entire 2003-2004 fiscal year.
They've had an increase in shooting attempts during the same period, as well as vehicle rammings, in which smugglers attempt to run over law enforcement officials or deliberately smash their patrol vehicles. "All of these things are becoming more prevalent as we're starting to gain greater control of the border," said Border Patrol spokesperson Andrea Zortman, who maintained that the escalating violence is a sign of desperation among drug traffickers.
While Mafia-style drug cartels aren't commonly associated with marijuana, the numbers alone are an indication of the amount of money at stake. Since Oct. 1, 2004, U.S. Border Patrol agents have seized some 463,000 pounds of pot in the Tucson sector, a record. Along the entire U.S. border with Mexico, more than 1.1 million pounds have been confiscated during the same period by the Border Patrol, and U.S. Customs agents have seized an additional 419,000 pounds at southern ports of entry. That totals more than 1.5 million pounds of pot seized in less than a year, with a street value in excess of $1 billion.
"It's a simple question of supply and demand," said Roger Maier, a spokesman for U.S. Customs. "There's a significant supply in Mexico and a significant demand in the U.S. and that's what's driving the economics of it." Both Border Patrol and Customs have also intercepted large quantities of heroin and cocaine, though not on the same scale as their marijuana seizures.
Stretching across vast, remote sections of the Arizona border, the smuggling operations are extensive. Cowboy Jason Cathcart said he's seen groups of men with backpacks and AK-47 rifles marching through the Baboquivari Mountains on the western edge of the Arizona's Altar Valley, more than 40 miles north of Mexico. On a recent afternoon, after returning from a long day on horseback, Cathcart held out a handful of Mexican pesos he'd scooped up from a religious shrine along a smuggling route in the mountains. He said the trails and canyons are now strewn with garbage left behind by the drug runners, who also frighten cattle and destroy ranch property.
"I don't feel bad about taking the money, with all the trouble they cause," he said. Other Arizona residents have found far more lucrative ways of tapping into the regional drug trade. Recent FBI sting operations have uncovered crooked officers within the ranks of the U.S. Border Patrol itself. A Nogales Border Patrol agent named Juan L. Sanchez was charged earlier this summer with using his government-issued Border Patrol vehicle to ferry thousands of pounds of marijuana into the United States over a two-year period, in addition to accepting bribes and other favors.
Neither the Border Patrol nor the U.S. District Attorney's Arizona office could confirm the exact number of federal agents who have been indicted or convicted of drug trafficking in recent years. But a May 29 report in the Arizona Daily Star noted at least 55 government employees in southern Arizona have been arrested, indicted or have pled guilty on various corruption-related charges in the past year alone, court records show.
For the southern Arizona residents who have seen their region become a doormat for drug trafficking and illegal immigration, the result is a climate of frustration and fear. What was formerly one of the area's greatest assets - its vast open spaces and relative isolation - has been twisted into a source of gnawing vulnerability, said rancher Mary Winkler, 63, a life-long resident of Rodeo, N.M.
"I'm afraid to be by myself now," she said. The solitary remoteness also creates insecurity for rural landowners on the Mexican side like Ruben Ruiz. Now whenever he drives up to his family's Pan Duro ranch in the mountains, he has to take a roundabout route in order to avoid land held by drug growers.
"The border is kind of like a living fence," he said. "It changes with the people themselves, and it changes with their morality."
Newshawk: SirBlazinBowl - 420Times.com
Source: Oakland Tribune, The (CA)
Copyright: 2005 MediaNews Group, Inc. and ANG Newspapers
Contact: triblet@angnewspapers.com
Website: https://www.oaklandtribune.com/
Author: Nick Miroff
"It's become a war zone," said Ruben Ruiz, whose family has been ranching in Sonora for generations. "This place is a manifestation of the social problems of both countries." With the unremitting poverty of Southern Mexico pushing from below and the insatiable American appetite for cheap labor, cheap goods and cheap drugs pulling from above, the population of Sonora's border cities has ballooned in the past 15 years, and crime rates have also soared.
"When I was a kid, A.P. ( Agua Prieta ) was just a cow town, the kind of place where everybody knew everybody else and people rode horses through the streets," said Ruiz, who grew up in Tucson, Ariz., but spent summers on his father's cattle ranch east of Agua Prieta. "Now it's a staging area for drug runners, smugglers, and the U.S. companies who built the maquiladoras ( or manufacturing plants ). It's a place for people from elsewhere to come to make money." Ruiz's father was a life-long ganadero, or rancher, but he died nearly broke - ruined by chronically depressed cattle prices and the collapse of the Mexican peso in the early 1990s.
"You could buy ranches around here for nothing then," said Ruiz, "so a lot of ranches just ended up going to the drug dealers." Ruiz and his siblings held on to their father's land, but on a drive out to the family's old El Gallardo ranch, he noted the sprawling villas and posh compounds along the border that now belong to los narcos, or drug lords, Sonora's powerful new class of landowners. "There's another one right there," he said, pointing to a fortress-like cluster of new buildings set less than 100 yards south of the U.S. border fence, a rusting panel of sheet metal amid a sea of creosote bush and windblown garbage.
Today, the land surrounding his family's other ranch high in the Sierra Madre range, Ruiz said, is controlled by drug growers, who run vast marijuana-cultivating operations to supply the U.S. market. Mulos, or "mules," or smugglers, carry dried, compacted bricks of marijuana in 40- or 50-pound bales, hiking them over the border in backpacks. While U.S. Border Patrol agents play a game of cat-and-mouse with illegal migrants and their coyote guides in the low-lying areas closest to the roads and highways, the mountains are now crisscrossed by the foot trails of these drug runners, who move at night and continually improvise new ways of evading U.S. authorities. Increasingly, they use cell phones and radios to coordinate drop-off points with traffickers already inside the United States.
A successful delivery can earn a smuggler a thousand dollars or more, and some frustrated Arizona residents say the criminals have even taken to calling the Border Patrol for a free ride back to Mexico once the job is complete. All they have to do is pretend they're illegal migrants, then accept the voluntary deportation proceedings that promptly return them to Mexican territory.
But the drug trafficking operations also frequently erupt in violence. On rancher Ross Humphreys' land in Arizona's San Rafael Valley, 7 miles north of the border, drug gangs from Agua Prieta and Nogales have waged open gun battles to assert control over smuggling corridors. "They've got armor-plated pickups," said Humphreys, "Ford F350's with quarter-inch steel plates in the door panels." Humphreys has witnessed high-speed chases on his land between drug runners and the U.S. Border Patrol, whose officials confirmed the use of armored vehicles by Sonora drug traffickers. The Border Patrol has also registered a sharp increase in assaults on their agents in the Tucson sector so far this year, with 229 to date, as compared to only 118 for the entire 2003-2004 fiscal year.
They've had an increase in shooting attempts during the same period, as well as vehicle rammings, in which smugglers attempt to run over law enforcement officials or deliberately smash their patrol vehicles. "All of these things are becoming more prevalent as we're starting to gain greater control of the border," said Border Patrol spokesperson Andrea Zortman, who maintained that the escalating violence is a sign of desperation among drug traffickers.
While Mafia-style drug cartels aren't commonly associated with marijuana, the numbers alone are an indication of the amount of money at stake. Since Oct. 1, 2004, U.S. Border Patrol agents have seized some 463,000 pounds of pot in the Tucson sector, a record. Along the entire U.S. border with Mexico, more than 1.1 million pounds have been confiscated during the same period by the Border Patrol, and U.S. Customs agents have seized an additional 419,000 pounds at southern ports of entry. That totals more than 1.5 million pounds of pot seized in less than a year, with a street value in excess of $1 billion.
"It's a simple question of supply and demand," said Roger Maier, a spokesman for U.S. Customs. "There's a significant supply in Mexico and a significant demand in the U.S. and that's what's driving the economics of it." Both Border Patrol and Customs have also intercepted large quantities of heroin and cocaine, though not on the same scale as their marijuana seizures.
Stretching across vast, remote sections of the Arizona border, the smuggling operations are extensive. Cowboy Jason Cathcart said he's seen groups of men with backpacks and AK-47 rifles marching through the Baboquivari Mountains on the western edge of the Arizona's Altar Valley, more than 40 miles north of Mexico. On a recent afternoon, after returning from a long day on horseback, Cathcart held out a handful of Mexican pesos he'd scooped up from a religious shrine along a smuggling route in the mountains. He said the trails and canyons are now strewn with garbage left behind by the drug runners, who also frighten cattle and destroy ranch property.
"I don't feel bad about taking the money, with all the trouble they cause," he said. Other Arizona residents have found far more lucrative ways of tapping into the regional drug trade. Recent FBI sting operations have uncovered crooked officers within the ranks of the U.S. Border Patrol itself. A Nogales Border Patrol agent named Juan L. Sanchez was charged earlier this summer with using his government-issued Border Patrol vehicle to ferry thousands of pounds of marijuana into the United States over a two-year period, in addition to accepting bribes and other favors.
Neither the Border Patrol nor the U.S. District Attorney's Arizona office could confirm the exact number of federal agents who have been indicted or convicted of drug trafficking in recent years. But a May 29 report in the Arizona Daily Star noted at least 55 government employees in southern Arizona have been arrested, indicted or have pled guilty on various corruption-related charges in the past year alone, court records show.
For the southern Arizona residents who have seen their region become a doormat for drug trafficking and illegal immigration, the result is a climate of frustration and fear. What was formerly one of the area's greatest assets - its vast open spaces and relative isolation - has been twisted into a source of gnawing vulnerability, said rancher Mary Winkler, 63, a life-long resident of Rodeo, N.M.
"I'm afraid to be by myself now," she said. The solitary remoteness also creates insecurity for rural landowners on the Mexican side like Ruben Ruiz. Now whenever he drives up to his family's Pan Duro ranch in the mountains, he has to take a roundabout route in order to avoid land held by drug growers.
"The border is kind of like a living fence," he said. "It changes with the people themselves, and it changes with their morality."
Newshawk: SirBlazinBowl - 420Times.com
Source: Oakland Tribune, The (CA)
Copyright: 2005 MediaNews Group, Inc. and ANG Newspapers
Contact: triblet@angnewspapers.com
Website: https://www.oaklandtribune.com/
Author: Nick Miroff
