Pubdate: Fri, 02 Dec 2005
Source: Boston Globe (MA)
Copyright: 2005 Globe Newspaper Company
Contact:  http://www.boston.com/globe/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/52
Author: Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?115 (Cannabis - California)

INCURSIONS INTO PARADISE

SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, Calif. -- In this majestic, sprawling 
wilderness on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, hikers are 
being warned about more than black bears and rattlesnakes. Now, 
back-country visitors are being cautioned about armed guards, booby 
traps, and trip wires that protect a skyrocketing increase of 
marijuana cultivation on public land in California.

These illegal plantations, National Park Service officials say, are 
the product of sophisticated Latin American drug organizations, which 
have turned to remote sites in the West to avoid increased attention 
to cross-border traffic since the Sept. 11 attacks. Several national 
parks, including Yosemite, have discovered marijuana within their 
boundaries, but few have been as heavily infiltrated as Sequoia.

"We are sort of the poster child for this," said William Tweed, chief 
naturalist at Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. "We have 
demonstrated very clearly that this is tied to international drug cartels."

Last month, officials from Tulare County, gateway to Sequoia, pleaded 
with a House national parks subcommittee to create a $5.5 million 
task force to fight marijuana cultivation on park land and lobbied 
for the increased use of helicopters to find the fields.

The National Park Service has budgeted $764,000 to fight the drug 
cultivation in its parks, which was discovered in 2001 and has been 
increasing since.

Over the last three years, park officials in Sequoia have found 105 
marijuana "gardens," most planted about 1 to 2 miles off public roads 
in treacherous parts of the park. In 2004, rangers destroyed 44,000 
plants in the park with a street value pegged at $176 million by 
state narcotics officers. This year, 4,400 plants have been 
discovered. In the last three years, 27 people were charged in 
connection with the marijuana-growing operation in Sequoia alone.

About 10,000 plants were destroyed in Yosemite National Park last 
year. An unusually wet spring held down production in the park this 
year, park officials said, but 68,000 plants were confiscated from 
national forestland just outside Yosemite.

The Park Service has also discovered marijuana-growing operations in 
the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, a national 
recreation area in Shasta County, and two in the San Francisco area: 
Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Point Reyes National Seashore.

Tweed said it is unclear whether increased pressure has forced drug 
workers to reduce plantings in Sequoia, to relocate into more rugged 
parts of the Sequoia wilderness, or simply to move to other federal land.

So far, no violent confrontations between rangers or other law 
enforcement and marijuana growers have been recorded at Sequoia. But 
in September, in Santa Clara County, a state fish and game warden was 
shot in both legs in an exchange of gunfire that killed a suspect in 
a raid on a large marijuana garden. And in 2003, four suspects were 
killed in raids on California drug plantations, said Val Jimenez, 
special agent in charge of the Fresno office of the state's Bureau of 
Narcotics Enforcement.

Rangers say they were stunned when the marijuana camps -- already 
harvested -- were discovered in 2001 in Sequoia, which was founded in 
1890 as the country's second national park and was visited by 1.5 
million people in 2004.

Elaborate terraced gardens had been planted and harvested, miles of 
irrigation tubing installed, sleeping and cooking areas designated, 
huge trash pits dug, and even small altars built for religious 
services for the men assigned to each site, according to Athena 
Demetry, a restoration ecologist at Sequoia. Dozens of propane 
canisters and hundreds of pounds of ecologically damaging herbicides 
and pesticides were left behind.

At every location, ammunition was discovered, said Bob Wilson, a law 
enforcement officer for the park. Firearms had been discarded at many 
sites. State drug agents and federal rangers found AK-47s, 
semiautomatic handguns, revolvers, and a firearm attached to a trip 
wire to protect one garden.

At Sequoia, camouflaged rangers now receive military-style training 
in which they simulate firefights with an unseen enemy in dense, 
wilderness terrain. "There are evolving tactics on both sides," Tweed 
said. "This issue of people coming in and stealing our land and 
threatening us with guns is not something we anticipated."

Safety concerns at Sequoia have become so acute that Wilson said he 
routinely tells visitors to avoid the park's foothills, an area of 
100,000 acres, where brown, thick brushland offers ideal terrain for 
marijuana planting. If visitors venture off the foothill trails, 
Wilson said, "there's a chance that someone will be seriously harmed, 
or worse."

Each year, in February, workers sneak into parks like Sequoia and 
Yosemite to take advantage of the March-to-November growing season. 
Many are undocumented immigrants who were unaware of the job for 
which they were recruited, law enforcement officials said.

The creation and supply of the camps is made easier, park officials 
said, because the guards and the gardeners do not stand out in the 
agricultural mecca of the long, broad San Joaquin Valley, which 
borders Sequoia National Park to the west. In the valley approaches, 
where vast farms and migrant workers are plentiful, the sight of a 
truck hauling large quantities of pesticides, irrigation tubing, and 
any of the other materials needed at the marijuana sites does not 
automatically raise suspicions.

"Basically, these are poor, desperate, illegal immigrants trying to 
take money home to Mexico or Guatemala," Tweed said of the workers 
who spend weeks, maybe months, living at the sites.

Park officials said evidence indicates the supply work usually has 
been done at night, often via roadside drops at the head of a 
well-disguised trail that leads down steep slopes to the marijuana 
gardens. In remote areas of the park, where neither the public nor 
rangers might notice, such brazen work nearly always went undetected. 
Now, a gate has been installed at one of the roads most often used by 
marijuana growers.

A simple addition such as the gate, and the systematic dismantling of 
discovered camps, appear to be making a difference. But no one at the 
park is claiming victory.

"We are guardedly optimistic we may have made some progress," Tweed said.

The danger to typical Sequoia visitors, few of whom would hike near 
marijuana sites infested with rattlesnakes and poison oak, is small, 
Tweed said. However, he stressed that the peril for staff is 
significant. "If we're not careful," he said, "we're going to get a 
ranger shot."

Jimenez said the problem of illegal marijuana growth in California 
has exploded in the last three years. In 2003, a special unit created 
by the state attorney general's office seized 461,000 plants 
statewide, Jimenez said. In 2004, the figure was 621,000. And so far 
this year, the total has soared to 1.1 million. At an estimated value 
of $4,000 per plant, Jimenez said, the financial stakes are enormous 
for drug organizations, based primarily in Mexico, that bring 
businesslike precision to a system of hiring, supplying their 
workers, and retrieving the marijuana from hard-to-reach areas of public land.

The marijuana is shipped around the nation by the drug organizations 
using existing distribution channels in the United States, Jimenez 
said. "They're very dangerous," he added.

Laura Whitehouse, a Fresno-based program manager for the National 
Parks Conservation Association, appealed in Nov. 17 testimony before 
Congress for more money to eradicate marijuana cultivation in the 
parks. Instead of worrying about black bears, most of which are 
docile, families hiking through Sequoia are threatened with a more 
dangerous menace, she told the House Subcommittee on National Parks.

"We should do everything in our power to get these guys out of our 
parks," Whitehouse said in an interview. "For me, this is the number 
one issue. How can we have armed drug cartels with AK-47s in a 
national park? This is a place where I take my three children."

She estimated that $1.5 million to $2 million for at least two years 
is needed at a park where rangers are being diverted from traditional 
public duties such as interpretation for visitors.

Tweed insisted that the park has maintained its educational 
programming, but he acknowledged the anti-marijuana effort has 
created unexpected strains.

Tweed laments the cultivation's toll on the park's mission to 
preserve pristine wilderness for future generations. He also is 
thinking about protecting Sequoia's employees and visitors. "The 
potential is what scares me," he said.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman