Pubdate: Thu, 07 Aug 2003 Source: USA Today (US) Copyright: 2003 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc Contact: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nfront.htm Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/466 Page: 1 Author: Kevin Johnson DRUGS INVADE VIA INDIAN LAND Lightly Patrolled Reservations Make Inviting Entry Points For Smugglers TOHONO O'ODHAM INDIAN RESERVATION, Ariz. -- The old yellow school bus looked out of place as it rumbled along a remote dirt road near the U.S.-Mexico border. Its markings said Tucson, which is more than 50 miles away, and it wasn't anywhere near a school. When a tribal police officer and U.S. Border Patrol agents stopped the northbound bus, the driver's intentions became clear: In every seat, there was a large, vacuum-packed bale of marijuana. The 1,867-pound load, worth about $1.8 million on the street, was one of the largest drug seizures on the Tohono O'odham reservation this year. The smuggling effort -- on a clear, early spring afternoon in the open desert - -- reflected the increasingly brazen tactics being used by Mexican drug traffickers who have overrun parts of this desolate, 2.8 million-acre reservation. Driven from well-traveled border crossings in the Southwest by the tight security that followed the Sept. 11. 2001, terrorist attacks, some drug traffickers have turned to America's lightly patrolled Indian reservations. By car, by foot and by plane, traffickers are sending unprecedented waves of marijuana, methamphetamine and other drugs through the Tohono O'odham reservation. The villages that are home to about 14,000 Tohono O'odham ranchers, potters and weavers are among the first stops in a smuggling pipeline that also has used reservations in New York and Montana as staging areas for distributing drugs across the USA. Drug traffickers' use of reservations, often with the help of tribe members paid by the smugglers, has frightened many other reservation residents and has led to calls for the U.S. government to beef up patrols on Indian lands. The ease with which traffickers move drugs through reservations -- Tohono O'odham officials estimate they and the Border Patrol stop only about 25% of the loads that pass through here -- also has led state and U.S. authorities to see Indian lands as potentially dangerous gaps in America's national security plan. Reservations ''are serving as a (drug) pipeline to major (cities) like Chicago, New York, Miami and Seattle,'' says Tom Heffelfinger, the U.S. attorney in Minneapolis. He recently led a meeting in South Dakota at which a dozen federal prosecutors and officials from the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) discussed increasing problems with drugs on reservations. ''The common thread here is that Indian country suffers from a significant shortage of law enforcement manpower,'' he says. Along the 70-mile border that separates the Tohono O'odham reservation from Mexico -- a rusty ribbon of sagging barbed wire -- two tribal drug officers and some of the 70 Border Patrol agents assigned to the reservation are the only obstacles for the daily convoys of drug shipments from Mexico. Border Patrol agents spend much of their time chasing hundreds of illegal immigrants who also cross the border each day. ''The smugglers have found the path of least resistance,'' says Tohono O'odham Police Chief Richard Saunders, whose department has 69 officers. ''They know it. They take advantage of it every day.'' Last year, Tohono O'odham police intercepted a record 65,000 pounds of illegal drugs, up more than 10,000 pounds from 2001. The record is likely to fall again this year; through July, authorities had seized 58,000 pounds. The seizures last year represented a tiny fraction of the more than 1.2 million pounds of marijuana, methamphetamine and cocaine confiscated along the 2,000-mile Southwest border, U.S. officials say. But the rate at which trafficking is increasing on Tohono O'odham land has made the reservation a hot spot for smuggling. Meanwhile, the increasing number of poverty-stricken Mexicans who are coming here illegally -- about 1,500 a day, Tohono O'odham officials estimate -- has created another crisis: The reservation's rugged, sweltering landscape has become a killing field. A record 85 illegal immigrants died last year while crossing Tohono O'odham land; 50 have died so far this year. ''We have a major problem here,'' says Ned Norris, vice chairman of the Tohono O'odham Nation. ''And we've had enough.'' Tribes infiltrated Norris and other Tohono O'odham officials say that in some cases, drug smugglers have set up operations in reservation communities by paying members of the tribe as much as $5,000 each time they store or transport drugs headed north. That's big money on a reservation where the unemployment rate is nearly 60% and about a third of the residents make less than $10,000 a year. In 2002, Tohono O'odham police filed 138 drug-smuggling cases against tribal members, up 10% from 2001. In a few cases, smugglers have infiltrated the Tohono O'odham and other tribes by marrying tribal members. The smugglers then established safe houses and transfer points in homes on the reservation, says Robert Ecoffey, director of law enforcement services for the BIA. The bureau manages nearly 56 million acres of Indian lands scattered throughout 35 states. During the past two years, the sudden availability of marijuana and methamphetamine has fueled a dramatic jump in drug charges against residents of reservations. In 2001, there were 4,259 drug-possession cases reported on Indian lands across the USA, up from 1,159 cases in 2000. Last year, the number of such cases was roughly the same as in 2001. The sudden rise in 2001, BIA officials say, reflected how deeply the drug trade had infiltrated Indian communities, and authorities' increased attention to the problem. BIA officials say the drug trade's influence on reservations has accelerated a corrosion of Native American culture for communities that have long struggled with unemployment and alcohol abuse. Tohono O'odham officials say traffickers have corrupted their people and polluted their land. Smugglers have left a stream of garbage and abandoned vehicles across the reservation. Since January, tribal police say they have recovered more than 2,500 cars or trucks left by smugglers. 'They know when to move' The tire tracks and footprints are fresh, perhaps eight hours old. As usual, Tohono O'odham police Sgt. Dave Cray says, the smugglers or illegal immigrants who left them have eluded authorities. The northbound tracks are spread over a moonscape of hard-packed dirt on the Mexican side of the border before they form a single, well-worn path through a simple gate on a barbed-wire fence that marks the U.S. line. The ''Itak Gate,'' 15 miles southwest of the tribe's headquarters in Sells, Ariz., is more a symbol of futility than security. Tohono O'odham tribe members installed it this year, weary of repairing sections of fence that routinely were crushed by sport-utility vehicles, trucks and cars carrying drugs and illegal immigrants. The gate, less than 4 feet high, is wide enough for most vehicles. ''The hope was that the smugglers would use the gate and close it when they passed,'' Cray says. ''The tribal members got tired of having to chase their cattle wandering into Mexico.'' Saunders says authorities have tried to monitor smugglers who pass through the gate, ''but when we put pressure on one area, they just go to another'' and start knocking down fences again. ''Smugglers know the Border Patrol shift changes,'' Cray says. ''They know when to move and when to stay low.'' Based on previous seizure totals in the area and the network of trails heading north from the Mexican border, Cray estimates that 3,000 pounds of marijuana passes through the Itak Gate each week. On a given night, he says, at least 30 backpackers carrying up to 100 pounds of drugs each pass through the area and walk about 15 miles through razor-sharp choia cactus toward the Tohono O'odham villages south of Sells: Topawa, Cowlic and Vamori. The lights of Sells and the villages guide vehicles and foot traffic moving north. When a smuggler reaches a village, Cray says, he usually is met by another link in the drug chain. Loads rarely are stored for more than a few hours before they are on the road to Tucson or Phoenix. Authorities didn't fully realize the sophistication of the smuggling efforts until earlier this year, when tribal police found campsites on 11 nearby mountaintops leading away from the Mexican border. At the sites, investigators found solar-powered cellphones and walkie-talkies that apparently had been used by lookouts to guide smugglers around police checkpoints and across the harsh terrain. Not all smuggling operations involve such covert tactics. Saunders and Cray say that convoys of trucks loaded with drugs often blast across the border ''kamikaze-style,'' knowing that police or Border Patrol agents will not be able to stop them all at once. Last year, four trucks carrying a combined 4 tons of marijuana blew through a border fence. One of the trucks was stopped by authorities, but not before a U.S. Customs agent was knocked down by one of the suspects' trucks. ''Most of the time, there is only me and another guy,'' Cray says of the Tohono O'odham police department's anti-drug team. 'We were overwhelmed' Scott Burns, a deputy director in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, says the Tohono O'odham nation's problem with smugglers is a ''disturbing hole'' in the U.S. government's efforts to keep drugs from flowing into the USA from Mexico. ''I would characterize the situation as terrible,'' Burns says. ''It's going to take substantial resources to deal with it.'' Burns says that by the end of the year, his office aims to offer a plan to provide more federal help to the tribe. One possibility is to designate parts of Indian country as ''high intensity drug trafficking areas,'' a move that would focus more federal agents on such areas. Along the Canadian border in Montana, the Blackfeet Nation is still reeling from more than 30 convictions for cocaine trafficking nearly three years ago. A federal probe found that several tribe members had worked with drug traffickers. Two tribal police officers were indicted, but the charges were dropped. Still, the cases led the BIA to take over the tribe's police department in February. The explosion in drug cases on reservations also has led the BIA to appoint its own anti-drug czar, Duwayne Honahni Sr., a Hopi from Arizona. Honahni is developing a plan for dealing with drug problems throughout Indian country. Meanwhile, the BIA, which has only 10 anti-drug agents to cover all reservations, is asking Congress for 10 more agents. ''Any additional help would be significant,'' Honahni says. ''Foreign drug organizations are targeting Indian country for a simple reason: a lack of law enforcement presence.'' In the Arizona desert, all the talk from Washington, D.C., about increased homeland security can seem a million miles away. During a five-day period in June, tribal officers stopped about 50 vehicles suspected of carrying drugs from Mexico and began investigating the deaths of six illegal immigrants who collapsed on Tohono O'odham land. Saunders asked the Border Patrol for more help. ''We just couldn't keep up,'' he says. ''We were overwhelmed, pure and simple.'' The Border Patrol quickly sent in 150 more agents. One day shortly after the agents arrived, convoys of green-and-white Border Patrol trucks looked like an invading army as they cruised along state Highway 86, the major artery leading into and out of the reservation. The Border Patrol has erected portable towers to survey parts of the desert that extend into Mexico. Saunders welcomes the help, but he knows it's temporary. ''People just don't feel safe in their own community any more,'' says Vivian Juan-Saunders, the Tohono O'odham Nation's chairwoman and the police chief's wife. ''They talk a lot about homeland security. But if I were living anywhere else in the country and saw this situation on our border, I would be horrified.'' - --- MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart