On The Border

Chapter 18

Chapter Eighteen

      There is an old saying about the wisdom of not putting all of one's eggs in the same basket. Or, in terms of modern investing, diversify your holdings. However you care to phrase it, this concept is one the cartels are well aware of. The coyotes and other border runners are only one way they get their illegal products into the United States. Some of the cartels have even shown the combination of wealth and imagination to invest in privately owned submarines, and these "narco-subs" remain an ongoing problem for enforcement efforts. In the past, a good bit of drugs were smuggled in by small plane, but with the tightening of air security after the tragic events of 9/11, this avenue has become increasingly difficult. Another method of transit across the border, which occasionally makes the news when something particularly impressive is discovered, are the infamous tunnels.

      Early efforts were simple, small, hand-dug affairs that were incredibly uncomfortable, narrow, cramped, and dangerous. They have become increasingly elaborate with the passage of time and something of a Darwin-like learning curve. Experiments that worked made the cartels money, ones that failed tended to attract official attention and kill workers. Today, most of them tend to be large enough to walk through upright, and some even have electric lighting.

      As with every other aspect of the drug-dealers vs. enforcement agencies, there have been moves and counter-moves. When they first started learning about the tunnels, the various law enforcers started looking for openings, or freshly turned earth. Most tunnel entrances and exits now surface inside buildings. For a time, the tunnels were dug by various types of machines, but those make a fairly steady rhythm while in operation, so the government began deploying very sensitive seismic sensors to look for that kind of pattern. So, more recently, they have returned to digging by hand. Treasure hunters, and fans of shows about the same, as well as devotees of the numerous "crime scene/tech" shows, are familiar with a device called ground-penetrating radar, which shows gaps and voids beneath the surface. The cartels have learned to dig their tunnels along the paths of existing structures like sewer lines, gas pipes, and the like.

      The world-wide economic woes of the early twenty-first century have also done the cartels some good. Drug use in some areas has gone up as people seek escape from the pressures of unemployment, inflation, and the like. Further, there have been job losses in every sector, including specialized areas such as engineering. If you have the technical knowledge to build such things as large, safe tunnels, have a family to support, can't find a job, and then someone comes to you and offers you something like double what you used to earn... well, the cartels have not had a major difficulty in recruiting, especially not with the dual approaches of both carrot (high pay) and stick (we can find your family). The US/Mexico border is riddled with all manner of such complicated and illegal excavations, and, in some circles, for example, Nogales, Arizona has become known as the drug-tunnel capital of the world. There's a running joke among many that someday, the entire Nogales area will simply collapse into a giant sinkhole from all the digging in the area.

      The tunnels were multi-purpose, of course. Drug traffic was the driving force behind many of them originally, but they were equally handy for illegal border crossings as well, for those simply seeking to come to the US for jobs, those looking to join various criminal gangs, and those who were brought against their will as human trafficking, generally for sexual slavery or something similar. There have been many troubling rumors of a potential alliance between the cartels, who run the tunnels and are constantly expanding into new areas, such as, say, opium, and the various terrorist groups in the Middle East, who can certainly supply opium easily enough, and, in exchange, are very interested in unmonitored access to the US border. One can imagine the unease, if not outright terror, this thought fosters in the intelligence community.