Drug Tunnel to Mexico
Drug tunnel from Tijuana to San Diego (Photo: BBC)
Host Lisa Mullins talks with Richard Marosi, staff writer for the L.A. Times, about an elaborate tunnel discovered between Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego earlier this week.
The tunnel was used to smuggle marijuana into the United States; more than 32 tons of marijuana were seized.
Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.
Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World, a coproduction of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston. This is the time of year in southern California when authorities discovered the latest illegal tunnels built by drug traffickers to bring their goods across the US-Mexico border. The timing is apparently tied to the marijuana harvest in Mexico. But the tunnel uncovered this week between warehouses in Tijuana and San Diego really stands out. For one thing, its discovery lead to the seizure of more than 32 tons of pot. That’s one of the biggest drug busts in US history. Richard Marosi in on the story for the Los Angeles Times and has been reporting on the discovery of this tunnel and a lot of others over the years. Is this one, Richard, any different?
Richard Marosi: It is in many ways more elaborate than previous tunnels. It’s not as long as some of the other tunnels, but it did have a electric cart system that’s new. It had wooden floors and wooden walls, and a about 30′ drop of a hydraulic powered elevator.
Mullins: So this is kind of a freight elevator. Exactly how would the operation work?
Marosi: Well, they would load up the drugs onto the freight elevator and then lower it into a staging area where the dope was then put on these carts and they were electric. And they would just motor them across 600 yards into a warehouse in San Diego’s Otay Mesa district.
Mullins: So basically it would go about a third of a mile from Tijuana’s international airport. The tunnel actually stretched under a runway and then came out on the other end on the California side under a warehouse there. Is that unusual?
Marosi: No, there have been several sophisticated tunnels found in this particular area. It’s a light industrial area where there’s a lot of warehouses on both sides of the border, so the tunnels are easily concealed in this area. So is the construction of the tunnels. This one appears to have gone directly underneath the runway of the Tijuana airport. And gone yeah, like you said, a third of a mile north into a produce warehouse in San Diego. They think that the produce warehouse was actually just a front. From the the dope would be loaded onto tractor trailers and then driven north into the Los Angeles area.
Mullins: So who owned the tunnel?
Marosi: They’re not sure right now, but historically the Sinaloa drug cartel has constructed tunnels under the border. They’re Mexico’s wealthiest, most powerful organized crime group and it certainly has the resources to build these elaborate tunnels. They cost a lot of money, they take a lot of time and they require a lot of engineering.
Mullins: And how did they even find it?
Marosi: Probably through informants, that’s how most of these tunnels are being found these days. They’ll followup on leads. They’ll infiltrate some of these cells and then they’ll do surveillance on the suspected buildings. And then they’ll follow the drug loads, bust the drug loads, then get a search warrant to search the actual warehouses. And then from there they’ll search. The tricky part comes when they found, after they found the tunnel on the US side they had to find where it goes in Mexico. So basically they have to go in there, a highly trained group of usually US and Mexican special forces agents, go down, they’re trying to confine space work and they’ll traverse the length of the tunnel and then come up on the Mexican side. Now, they don’t know where they’re going. They don’t know what they’re going to encounter along the way, so it’s very dangerous.
Mullins: Do you know what happened in this case when they came out in Tijuana?
Marosi: There were no arrests on the Mexican side, so presumably there was nobody there, just three tons of dope.
Mullins: You know, seems like for every one tunnel found you wonder how many others are down there. Does anybody know?
Marosi: Nobody knows and they don’t rule out that there’s probably right now operational as we speak. It’s impossible to know, but given the fact that these tunnels appear quite regularly, it’s a pretty good assumption that they’re working you know, right now underground as we speak.
Mullins: Richard Marosi, L.A. Times staff writer, thanks a lot.
Marosi: Thanks.
Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.
Additional funding for PRI's The World is provided by:
Discussion
18 comments for “Drug Tunnel to Mexico”