Pubdate: Sun, 28 Jan 2001
Source: Chicago Sun-Times (IL)
Copyright: 2001 The Sun-Times Co.
Contact:  401 N. Wabash, Chicago IL 60611
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Website: http://www.suntimes.com/
Author: Dan Gardner

BORDER'S GROWING ARMY FIGHTS A LOSING BATTLE

SAN YSIDRO, Calif.--The broad sidewalk is filled with pedestrians 
streaming north. Alongside, across 16 lanes, hundreds of cars are 
lined up to drive in the same direction.

Uniformed agents pick their way through the idling vehicles, their 
dogs sniffing for the drugs that are certainly here, somewhere, in 
this river of machines and people.

It's midmorning on a sunny Tuesday. This is as slow as it ever gets 
at the San Ysidro port of entry on the Mexican-American border--the 
busiest border crossing in the world.

Today, around 43,000 vehicles will drive up to U.S. Immigration and 
Naturalization Service agents, who will have about 30 seconds to ask 
questions and decide which of the 43,000 drivers is hiding something. 
If this were a busier day, another eight lanes of traffic, 24 in all, 
would be open, and 65,000 vehicles would pass by for inspection.

In a typical day, around 35,000 pedestrians will cross at the same 
checkpoint. These numbers don't include commercial truck traffic, 
which uses a separate crossing nearby. Located between San Diego and 
Tijuana, Mexico, the San Ysidro border crossing overflows with cars, 
people and symbolism. It's a pulsing demonstration of globalization.

It's also a symbol of the growing futility of fighting drug smuggling 
with police and fences in a world where goods and people flow across 
borders in swelling floods.

It's hard to think of two cities that look more different than San 
Diego and Tijuana. In the heart of the economic marvel that is 
Southern California, San Diego is the bustling, shiny embodiment of a 
city planner's dreams.

Just across the border, Tijuana is the planner's nightmare, a 
sprawling mass of shanty neighborhoods, massive factories and 
fortified haciendas, spiced with raucous nightclubs, bars and 
establishments that would make a sailor blush.

Still, San Diego and Tijuana are conjoined twins sharing one economic 
heart. Both are growing up to and along the border, producing a 
merged metropolis with a fortified fence running through its middle. 
The liberalization of Mexico's economy, culminating in the North 
American Free Trade Agreement, is hastening the day when the twins 
will share more. Migrants flock to Tijuana.

They come for work in the maquiladoras--factories run by American and 
Asian companies to take advantage of cheap labor. Workers typically 
earn about $75 a week, an excellent wage by Mexican standards. The 
management offices of these factories are usually in San Diego. The 
result is a torrent of daily border traffic. And the flow of people 
is growing stronger every year.

In 1995, 28 million vehicles crossed from Mexico into California. In 
1999, it was 31 million. In the same time, commercial truck traffic 
grew by more than one-quarter. Anything that restricts quick travel 
across the border is a major economic threat to the region. Efforts 
to fight drug smuggling are one such restriction.

The more time border agents are given to inspect travelers, the more 
likely they are to stop drugs--and the more economic damage they will 
do.

"No one wants drugs to come into the United States," says W.B. Ward, 
deputy port director at San Ysidro, "but I think the San Diego and 
Tijuana communities would be up in arms if we started to do intensive 
searches on every car down there. I mean, we're talking four-, five-, 
six-hour waits. That's just intolerable."

Indeed, in the era of NAFTA, the push is on to make crossing ever 
faster. Caught between the contrary demands of globalization and the 
war on drugs, the agencies handling San Ysidro compromise. They keep 
the flow of traffic quick by requiring agents to get 90 to 120 cars 
through every hour, giving the agents just 30 to 45 seconds to size 
up a vehicle and its driver and decide whether to do a more thorough 
search.

San Ysidro has expanded its workforce from 48 inspectors 14 years ago 
to 370 now. There are also sniffer dogs, X-ray machines, a national 
database and other bits of technological wizardry to help. Raw 
numbers suggest the agents have great success in stopping smugglers.

"We get around 15 drug loads in a 24-hour period," says Ward. "I 
think our record is 27 drug loads in a 24-hour period. Most of those 
are marijuana, but we also get cocaine, heroin and precursors for 
methamphetamines."

Last year at the California crossings alone, almost 9,900 pounds of 
cocaine were seized and 1,089 pounds of methamphetamines. A small 
mountain of marijuana--376,200 pounds--was stopped.

But these numbers mean little in isolation. Does seizing all of these 
drugs make a difference to the availability and price of heroin, 
cocaine and marijuana in the United States?

No. Throughout the 1980s and '90s, the war on drugs caused American 
seizures of all drugs to rocket up. At the same time, every one of 
the major illegal drugs became more widely available, and most became 
cheaper. In 1980, according to the U.S. government, a gram of pure 
heroin cost $1,194 wholesale; in 1998, it cost $317.

Estimates vary, but 60 percent or more of the cocaine that enters the 
United States each year--about 353 tons in 1998, according to the 
U.S. government--gets in via Mexico. Over the last 15 years, the 
General Accounting Office, the research arm of Congress, has 
documented the spectacular failure of the United States to stop drugs 
at its borders.

"Despite long-standing efforts and expenditures in the billions of 
dollars," a typical GAO report concluded in 1998, "illegal drugs 
still flood the United States."

Even headline-grabbing arrests and the seizure of huge drug shipments 
"have not materially reduced the availability of drugs in the United 
States." The reason is as clear as the fence between San Diego and 
Tijuana.

"The border is alchemy," explains Eric Sterling, president of the 
Criminal Justice Policy Foundation in Washington, D.C. "Over there, 
it's cheap. Here, it's worth more than gold."

Banning drugs makes them hugely profitable. Even a "mule," the 
lowest-level person carrying a small amount of drugs, can make 
thousands of dollars just by taking a package across the border. Any 
one of the 100,000 people who cross at San Ysidro every day could be 
a smuggler.

"We'll get 70-year-old ladies strapped around the waist with four or 
five pounds of heroin," Ward says.

"There's no profile for it."

Without a profile, customs agents must trust intuition.

"It's not what people tell you, it's how they tell you," says Miguel 
Partida, the assistant port director at San Ysidro.

Inevitably, amateurs and small-timers are caught more often than 
professionals because they are more likely to betray themselves with 
a shaky voice, twitchy eyes or other signs of nervousness.

So confident are many professional smugglers that a decent appearance 
and calm voice will do the job that many don't bother with elaborate 
efforts to hide drugs. They simply pile millions of dollars worth of 
drugs in the car trunk, as if they were golf bags or suitcases.

Smugglers also use spotters, who watch the lanes from a distance and 
direct cars to agents who seem lax or ineffective. In his office on 
the second floor at San Ysidro, Ward points a telescope toward the 
Mexican side of the border and immediately picks out a man watching 
the crossing while speaking into a cell phone.

Somewhere in the hundreds of cars awaiting inspection, there's at 
least one heavy with drugs. And it probably got through, just one of 
43,000 cars that day. If stopping drugs at San Ysidro seems hopeless, 
consider that at least the border crossing is a bottleneck, where 
traffic is forced to file past inspectors. Outside San Ysidro and 
other crossings, there are 1,240 miles of land border stretching from 
the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

Sometimes the border runs straight through cities; more often, it 
winds across some of the most rugged desert terrain in North America.

It's the job of the Border Patrol to hold this thin line. The 
resources at the patrol's disposal are impressive. In the San Diego 
sector alone, which covers more than 62 miles of land border from the 
Pacific eastward, the Border Patrol has 2,180 agents and 1,800 
vehicles.

There are 10 helicopters equipped with infrared cameras developed by 
the military and another 60 infrared scopes mounted on vehicles and 
poles. Buried in the ground are 1,200 sensors that detect the heat of 
human bodies, or the magnetic patterns of passing vehicles, or even 
the footsteps of a hiker. Six miles of the border are illuminated at 
night by stadium lighting. More than 46 miles are blocked by a fence 
designed to be unclimbable. Night-vision goggles, computer databases, 
the best communications equipment: the Border Patrol is better 
equipped than many modern armies.

The main focus is the fight against illegal aliens and 
people-smuggling, but, as Border Patrol Agent Merv Mason explains, 
the people and organizations who smuggle aliens are "very much 
related" to those smuggling drugs. Backed by good intelligence, the 
smugglers constantly devise new methods to get their goods over the 
border.

The only restriction is human ingenuity--and that seems limitless. 
Mason cites smugglers who tunneled under the border into the sewer 
system on the American side. There they surfaced through a manhole 
cover--directly into a parked van with a hole cut in its floor.

In urban areas where homes are built right up to the border fence, 
smugglers simply toss softball-size packages of heroin or cocaine 
into American backyards, where colleagues snatch them up and walk on.

Last year, a Border Patrol truck traveling on a remote dirt road 
suddenly dropped into a sinkhole. The truck had fallen into a tunnel 
complete with concrete walls, a railway track and a cart to shuttle 
drug loads back and forth.

"You figure, how many tunnels like that are operating?" asks an 
agent. At another barren spot in the desert, smugglers were 
found--also just by the accident of an agent happening by at the 
right time--to have cut a gate in the fence. The gate was discreetly 
hinged on the Mexican side, and tire tracks from trucks using the 
gate were carefully swept away after each use, so nothing looked 
amiss.

"It's kind of cat-and-mouse," says Mason. "They're as intuitive and 
creative as we are at coming up with ways to solve a problem. Every 
time we come up with a new method of dealing with something, they 
come up with a new way to smuggle."

Smugglers stuffing vehicle tires with cocaine gave agents the idea of 
tapping tires; those that didn't have a hollow vibration contained 
drugs. Smugglers responded with compartments within the tires so 
tapping would hit hollow sections. This sort of evolution never 
stops. It has been going on since the patrol was founded in 1924, in 
part to fight liquor smugglers violating Prohibition.

Back at San Ysidro, the sun is sinking on a Tuesday evening. Through 
the day, tens of thousands of people, cars and trucks crossed from 
Mexico into the United States under the watch of hundreds of agents, 
sniffer dogs, helicopters and an arsenal of high-tech gadgetry. So, 
too, had hundreds of pounds of drugs. Just another day at the border.
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MAP posted-by: Kirk Bauer