Pubdate: Mon, 19 Sep 2005
Source: Oakland Tribune, The (CA)
Copyright: 2005 MediaNews Group, Inc. and ANG Newspapers
Contact:  http://www.oaklandtribune.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/314
Author: Nick Miroff, Correspondent
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?420 (Cannabis - Popular)

BROKEN BORDERS: POT DEALERS BLAMED FOR VIOLENCE

AGUA PRIETA, Mexico - 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."
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake