Pubdate: Mon, 31 Dec 2012
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2012 The Washington Post Company
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/mUgeOPdZ
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Joe Mozingo, Los Angeles Times

POT IN NATIONAL FORESTS TIED TO MEXICANS - BUT NOT CARTELS

U.S. Crackdown On Growers Fails To Lead To Big Players

Weldon, calif. - A few minutes after 4 a.m., agents in camouflage
cluster in a dusty field in Kern County, Calif. "Movement needs to be
slow, deliberate and quiet," the team leader whispers. "Lock and load
now."

They check their rifles and ammunition, not exactly sure who they
might meet in the dark: heavily armed Mexican drug traffickers, or
just poorly paid fieldworkers camping miserably in the brush.

Twenty minutes later, after a lights-off drive for a mile, the agents
climb out of two pickup trucks and sift into the high-desert brush.

The granite faces of the southern Sierra Nevada are washed in the
light of a full moon. Two spotters with night-vision scopes take
positions on the ridge to monitor the marijuana grow, tucked deep in a
canyon cleft.

The rest of the agents hunker down in some sumac waiting for the call
to move in. The action has to be precisely timed with raids in
Bakersfield, where they hope to capture the leaders of the
organization.

They have no idea how many people are up here. Thermal-imaging
aircraft circling high above were not detecting anyone on the ground.
And trail cameras hadn't captured images of men delivering supplies
for more than a week. Maybe the growers have already harvested and
cleared out.

Word comes on the radio to go into the site. The agents fan out in the
gray of dawn. A U.S. Forest Service agent unleashes a German shepherd
and follows it up a piney slope. After several minutes, the dog begins
barking furiously.

"We have movement," shouts the Forest Service officer. "Hands
up."

Such raids have become commonplace in California, part of a costly,
frustrating campaign to eradicate ever-bigger, more destructive
marijuana farms and dismantle the shadowy groups that are creating
them.

Pot cultivation on public lands surged in the past decade, a side
effect of the medical cannabis boom. In 2001, several hundred thousand
plants were seized in the state. By 2010, authorities pulled up a
record 7.4 million plants, mostly on public land.

Law enforcement long called these grows on public land "cartel grows"
and hoped to work from the busts in the forest up the drug hierarchy,
maybe all the way to the Sinaloa Cartel or the Zetas.

Is the forest safe?

But after years of raids and work with informants and wiretaps, agents
realize the operations seemed to be run by independent groups of
Mexican nationals, often using undocumented fieldworkers from their
home regions.

Tommy Lanier, director of the National Marijuana Initiative, part of
the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said there was scant
evidence that the cartels exerted much control over marijuana growing
in the national forests.

"Based on our intelligence, which includes thousands of cellphone
numbers and wiretaps, we haven't been able to connect anyone to a
major cartel," he said.

Lanier said authorities have long mislabeled marijuana grown on public
land as "cartel grows" because Mexican nationals are arrested in the
majority of cases, and the narrative of fighting drug cartels helps
them secure federal funding.

Roy Giorgi is the commander of the Mountain and Valley Marijuana
Investigation Team, a multiagency organization headquartered in
Sacramento. In his jurisdiction, most of the people arrested or
investigated are from the state of Michoacan, where marijuana growing
and immigration to the United States are entrenched.

In their home towns, growers have to sell their marijuana to cartels
for a fraction of what they could make in California. When they come
north, they see opportunity in the vast wilderness. They have the
know-how and perseverance to set up clandestine farms and live for
months in extremely rugged spots. Loncheros - lunch men - often make
weekly supply runs in the middle of the night, bringing food, beer and
fertilizer. The workers wear camouflage, often sleep in the
brush-covered tents, cook on propane stoves in crude kitchens, and
supplement their food by poaching deer and other wildlife.

Giorgi says these organizations can still be well financed, heavily
armed and dangerous.

Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman realized at a community meeting in
2010 how bad the situation was in the Mendocino National Forest when
five of the eight people who went to the microphone said: "I was out
in the national forest . . . herding cows or sheep or hiking or
fishing. And someone shot at me. So I'm not going into the national
forest."

The following summer, Allman helped lead a task force on a threeweek
purge of pot. They pulled out 632,000 plants, 42 miles of irrigation
line and 52 tons of garbage. Agents arrested 132 people and
confiscated 38 guns.

Is the forest safe today? "I'll put it this way," Allman said. "I'd go
camping in the national forest, but I wouldn't let my sister go."

Would he camp unarmed? "No."

Costly operation

The investigation into the Kern County grow, just south of the Sequoia
National Forest, began when a game warden spotted spilled fertilizer
at a road turnout that had been a drop-off spot for marijuana growers
four years before.

The warden set up surveillance and saw a Jeep Cherokee dropping off
supplies several times. Two wardens pulled over the driver, Francisco
Barrazarivas, for speeding one night in July. While one officer
conducted a field sobriety test, the other placed a GPS device on his
car, according to an affidavit filed with the search warrant.

Barrazarivas drove to a house in Bakersfield and was seen transferring
two dark bags to a sedan, which was unloaded five houses up the block.

That second house was associated with a man named Ignacio Gomez, an
illegal immigrant from Michoacan suspected to be the leader of a group
that grows marijuana on public lands in Kern and Tulare counties,
according to a Forest Service report included in the affidavit.

The raids come in the early morning Aug. 3.

In all, two aircraft, 43 agents, seven scientists and land managers
and eight volunteers would take part in the operation - at a cost of
$35,000 to $40,000.

Two young fieldworkers in camouflage are pulled out of a brushcovered
tent. A Glock pistol is found in one of their sleeping bags, but
neither mantried to grab it.

Word comes on the radio that no one at the Bakersfield houses was
arrested in relation to the grows. Gomez and Barrazarivas were gone.

The two men arrested in the woods are Cruz Soria, 27, of Bakersfield,
and Mairo Correa-Garcia, an 18-year-old illegal immigrant from Michoacan.

Correa-Garcia said he was recruited to work for $100 a day - great pay
for farm labor - and had been up on the site for a month.

Soria is now awaiting trial. Correa-Garcia pleaded guilty and was
sentenced to five years in federal prison.

Neither one told investigators who they were working for. They said
they didn't know. 
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D