Source: Los Angeles Times Author: Richard A. Serrano, Los Angeles Times Contact: Pubdate: Fri, 19 Dec 1997 MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS FIND MIDWEST MARKETS Trouble: BigCity Woes Flow To Heartland. CHEYENNE, Wyo. Here in the land of wide open spaces and clean living, as well as in other communities across the midsection of America, Mexican drug cartels are opening new and lucrative markets for contraband brought north past the Rio Grande. Eager to create ambitious distribution points, the cartels are successfully targeting communities like Cheyenne and Casper in Wyoming and other cities in Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa and are bringing with them the drugs that long have plagued larger urban centers across the country. Some years back, Los Angeles gangs brought driveby shootings and drug dealing to the American heartland. But ``our greatest problem today is illegal aliens and drugs,'' said Tom Pagel, director of the state Department of Criminal Investigation in Cheyenne. ``The vast majority of this is being transported up from Mexico, and we're getting our butts kicked over it.'' Smuggling vast quantities of methamphetamines and hustling their standard cocaine shipments, the Mexican drug criminals are aggressively trying to outmarket the old Colombia cartels they have replaced. In October, the U.S. government reported that more than 40 percent of the illegal immigrants who were deported to Mexico last year had first been convicted of drug charges in U.S. courts. Those numbers fit an overall pattern of an increase in crimes committed by illegal immigrants. The offenses are often occurring in cities and towns where, in the past, the worst crime was likely to be transporting stolen cattle. The situation has fueled a sharp increase in teenage narcotics use, and the courts and drug treatment centers are seeing more kids more strung out than ever before. Kathleen Sloan, an antidrug treatment specialist in Cheyenne, is surprised at the number of kids and how young they are, some just 14 who pass through her doors these days. ``It began about two years ago,'' she said. ``What was really noticeable was that it wasn't experimental drug use any more. In the last eight months it's gotten to where it seems out of control.'' The upsurge in drugs also has prompted a keen awareness in places like Cheyenne that law enforcement must act decisively to reverse the trend. Already, police here are taking Spanishlanguage training, and federal prosecutors have recently put away a Mexican national working as a major drug ``primo'' in Wyoming. In Washington, officials have been saying for some months that the center of America is no longer an outpost garrisoned off from the drug menace. They warn that as long as there is a demand, even in places as small and distant as Cheyenne, there someday will come a supplier. White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey said recently, ``Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, the Rocky Mountain heartland of America, are increasingly becoming populated with Mexican drug trafficking organizations and violent gangs using this major transportation crossroads as a transshipment center.'' Federal drug enforcement officials say Interstate 25 is a historic smuggling route north out of El Paso, Texas, and that Interstates 70 and 80, the nation's main eastwest corridors, are increasingly becoming drug pipelines. Judge Carol Egly of Des Moines, Iowa, has noticed in the past four years an increase in the number of drug users. ``We're getting many that are totally whacked out and crazy,'' she said. She also has seen a growing number of Mexican nationals appearing on drugpushing charges in her courtroom, unable to speak English or understand the charges against them. And yet, she said, they realize that even if they go to prison and then are deported to Mexico, it will not keep them from returning. ``Why Des Moines? Why Iowa?'' Egly asks herself. ``I still don't know the answer.''