Pubdate: Sun, 29 Dec 2002
Source: News & Observer (NC)
Copyright: 2002 The News and Observer Publishing Company
Contact:  http://www.news-observer.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/304
Author: THOMASI MCDONALD
Note: Toby Lyles, Lucy Reid and David Raynor contributed to this report.

DRUG TRAFFIC'S NEWEST WAVE

Mexicans Getting Control, Agents Say

RALEIGH -- Eduardo Ambario Barrera left a $30 a week job in Mexico and 
illegally crossed the United States border five years ago in search of work 
and better opportunities for his young, growing family. He had been in the 
country just two weeks, picking oranges in Florida, when a casual 
acquaintance offered him $500, a new suit of clothes and a suitcase to 
smuggle cocaine to North Carolina. He was arrested a few months later as he 
arrived at Raleigh-Durham International Airport. Now serving time at 
Harnett Correctional Institution in Lillington, the stocky 31-year-old is 
part of a new wave of immigrant drug traffickers flooding local and state 
criminal systems. When Barrera was sentenced, he was one of about two dozen 
Hispanics in state prisons for drug-trafficking.

Today, there are hundreds like him in North Carolina, as more and more of 
the drugs -- and the traffickers -- come from South America, and especially 
Mexico.

"Mexican drug trade organizations [in North Carolina] have essentially 
taken over the drug trafficking business from other groups," said Kerri 
Pepoy, an intelligence analyst for the National Drug Intelligence Center. 
Pepoy covers North Carolina for the Johnstown, Pa.-based agency, a 
component of the U.S. Department of Justice. At the end of 1995, just 10 
Hispanics were serving time in state prisons for drug trafficking 
convictions. As of October, that number had risen to 400, according to the 
N.C. Department of Correction.

In Wake County, where Hispanics make up 5.4 percent of the total 
population, they accounted for nearly half -- 46 percent -- of drug 
trafficking arrests in 2002, the Wake County Sheriff's Office reported.

"We're investigating high-level Mexican drug trafficking groups in the 
area," said Matt Addington, special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug 
Enforcement Administration's Raleigh office. "Mexican drug trade 
organizations are here, that's for sure."

Federal and state authorities say Mexico's drug trade dominance is in 
direct correlation with the immigration wave to North Carolina during the 
1990s.

The state's Hispanic population has soared 394 percent since 1990, with 
about 65 percent arriving from Mexico, according to Census reports. The 
number of Hispanic drug traffickers sentenced to North Carolina prisons 
also skyrocketed over roughly the same period, authorities reported.

Hispanic drug dealers are not only targeting the Triangle, which is 
geographically appealing because it is close to I-95. Nationally, nearly 
half of all people charged with federal drug offenses between 1984 and 1999 
were Hispanic, according to a 1999 U.S. Department of Justice report.

According to the DEA. about 65 percent of all the cocaine that enters this 
country and the majority of marijuana comes in from Mexico. The majority of 
marijuana available in North Carolina is smuggled from Mexico, the DEA also 
says.

Hispanic leaders in the Triangle say drug dealers take advantage of poor 
immigrants who are lured by the money. They worry that the increase in drug 
arrests could paint an unfair picture of the growing immigrant community.

"To my knowledge, the majority of people coming here are just hard-working 
individuals trying to support their families," said Andrea Bazan-Manson, 
executive director of El Pueblo, Inc., a Hispanic advocacy group in 
Raleigh. "Drug trafficking is not a part of that equation. Any community 
has a criminal element, and I think it's important to separate the 
immigrants that are here working from that element."

North Carolina lures immigrants with diverse blue-collar industries that 
include agriculture, chicken processing and furniture manufacturing. While 
those jobs are attractive to immigrants, many of whom live below the 
poverty line in their own countries, the lure of drug money is powerful, 
said Pepoy of the National Drug Intelligence Center.

"A courier can go from North Carolina to Texas, pick up or drop off a drug 
shipment and make $2,000 to $3,000 in cash," Pepoy said. "They aren't going 
to make that kind of money picking apples or plucking chickens."

Barrera said pressing financial needs motivated him to accept the $500 to 
transport the cocaine.

The money from picking oranges in Florida was more than he had made in 
Mexico, but it still wasn't enough. "My wife was pregnant and she needed a 
Caesarean," said Barrera, who is serving 14 to 18 years for felony 
trafficking in cocaine. "That's mucho dinero. A lot of money."

Jose Javier Solis Rodriguez, a fellow prisoner at the Harnett Correctional 
Institute, said he also was lured by the drug business although he had a 
steady job here. Solis, 31, left Mexico at age 16. He moved to North 
Carolina in the 1980s after working a series of migrant and manual labor 
jobs in Texas and Louisiana.

He had lived in Smithfield for six years, helping to build homes during the 
Triangle's building boom, before he was arrested in 1997 for selling 
cocaine to an undercover officer. Sol's is serving a 10- to 12-year 
sentence for felony trafficking in cocaine.

"I was making good money," Solis said. "But I watched him [the drug dealer] 
with his new truck and all the women. Pretty soon he convinced me."

Solis and Barrera shrugged off the notion that they were making a lot of 
money in drugs.

"I feel like I've been used," said Solis, who added that there were about 
100 Hispanics, mostly Mexican, doing time in Harnett County -- many for 
drug trafficking. "I've met a lot of guys here that have been used. We're 
the small fish. If we were the big drug dealers, we'd be doing federal 
time, but we're not."

2 keys to strategy

Mexican traffickers have gained control of the state's cocaine and 
marijuana distribution by increasing their volume while undercutting 
competing groups' prices, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center.

The North American Free Trade Agreement, which led to the loss of thousands 
of textile jobs in North Carolina, has also played a role in the drug 
trade, said David Gaddis, assistant special agent in charge of the DEA's 
North Carolina operations.

"The free trade agreement made it possible for the movement of thousands of 
containers across the U.S.-Mexican border," Gaddis said. "It's common for 
drugs to be woven into those legitimate cargoes."

Mexican drug lords work in tandem with Colombian cocaine suppliers to 
transport the drug into the country as powder, Pepoy said. Once the powder 
cocaine reaches the retailers, it's cooked and sold on the streets as crack.

Crack cocaine has long been associated with violent crime. Authorities say 
the Mexicans' incursion in the drug trade has added another layer of violence.

"The other groups have retaliated," Pepoy said. "They are going into homes 
and stealing kilograms of drugs and money. We're seeing that across the state."

Police think that's what happened earlier this year in Robbins, a small 
town in Moore County in central North Carolina, where three men were killed 
and a fourth was wounded during a robbery in which home invaders stole 
cocaine. All four victims were from Mexico, police reported.

DEA officials say the emergence of methamphetamine poses even greater dangers.

The methamphetamine seized annually in transit from Mexico to the United 
States has increased dramatically since 1992. Authorities seized 1,370 
kilograms of methamphetamine in 2001, compared with only 6.5 kilograms in 
1992, according to the National Clandestine Laboratories Database at the El 
Paso, Texas, Intelligence Center.

Local DEA agents say they are seeing a lot of meth activity across the 
state, particularly in Raleigh. In 1997, the DEA seized one meth lab in 
this state. Last year, authorities seized 33. "The trends indicate that 
it's filtering into the western part of the state, moving eastward and 
extending outward," Addington said.

The DEA's task of identifying and dismantling Mexican drug trade 
organizations is difficult, said Addington, who noted that the traffickers 
are becoming increasingly sophisticated.

DEA officials said they were reluctant to discuss their strategies for 
targeting traffickers. But officials did point to an interagency drug task 
force involving a number of federal, state and local agencies, including 
the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Internal Revenue Service, 
the N.C. State Highway Patrol, Raleigh police and the Wake County sheriff's 
office.

Agencies such as Immigration and the IRS are involved because major 
traffickers often go beyond dealing drugs to laundering money through real 
estate and other means.

The drug organizations are also successful because they are close-knit, 
familial and distrustful of outsiders. "It's difficult to get a suspect to 
roll over," said Eugenia Pedley, a Drug Intelligence Center unit 
supervisor. "Even the victims of a crime are reluctant to talk to law 
enforcement, especially if they're here illegally."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens