border
Has the North American Free Trade Agreement merely ushered in looser restrictions for the drug trade? John Ward Anderson reports from San Ysidro
United States customs inspector Robert Bickers — the “linebacker” who tackles drug dealers trying to run back to Mexico when their cars are nabbed in surprise inspections — pointed to a white Honda Accord and ordered the driver to open the trunk.
The well-dressed man stepped out of his car. That was his first mistake. “He has a latch inside that he could have used to open the trunk, but he got out real slow, and you could tell he didn’t want to do it,” Bickers said.
The car was just inside the US. The driver popped the lid. There, neatly stacked to the brim, were 262kg of marijuana in white, brick-sized packages. The man tried to bolt, but Bickers quickly subdued him, shoving him down against his illegal cargo.
Just a routine bust on a typical day at San Ysidro, the world’s busiest border crossing, where 4 500 people per hour test the nation’s front-line defences against drug trafficking and illegal immigration.
A day at this massive, hectic, 24-lane border crossing illustrates the challenge of opening the border to greater trade with a partner in the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), while closing it against the growing flood of illegal drugs and immigrants.
“It’s a balancing act between the free flow of commerce and the ability of the government to interdict contraband — aliens or narcotics,” said Rudy Camacho, head of the US Customs Service’s San Diego District, adding that the dual goals need not collide. “Better targeting [of smugglers] gives better traffic management. We don’t want to shut the border down. We want to shut down the wilful violators.”
These competing goals co-exist along the entire 3 200km US-Mexico border, crossed by 84-million cars and 232-million people a year — and by 70% of the cocaine, 80% of the methamphetamine and foreign-grown marijuana and 30% of the heroin that wind up on US streets.
San Ysidro has attracted its share of controversy recently, with allegations that customs employees have helped Mexicans smuggle drugs into the US.
Customs officials deny the charges. The crossing point also figures in a broader investigation of whether Immigration and Naturalisation Services officials falsified arrest reports to inflate the success of a programme to stop illegal immigration.
San Ysidro is an intense microcosm of the border.
The day began early for inspector Gus Reynoso. At about 7am, while patrolling the massive blacktop area where hundreds of cars line up and wait to enter the US, Reynoso noticed a light-blue Volkswagen with a suspiciously shallow well behind the back seat and ordered the car to undergo a second, more detailed inspection. A drug-sniffing dog hopped into the car and scratched at the back well, where investigators found a hidden compartment containing 8kg of marijuana.
About 60% of all drugs seized at San Ysidro are first detected in the long lines of cars that stack up in the area between the actual border and the US inspection station. Computers in customs booths spit out information about suspicious cars, while teams of inspectors roam the lines of traffic.
Fewer than 3% of the cars that use the crossing are inspected, so the unpredictable trunk-pop is designed to raise the stakes on smugglers.
The huge, congested area where cars line up is a centre of activity 24 hours a day, every day of the year. There are drug busts, car fires and fights between motorists. Pregnant women run into the area to give birth, winning US citizenship for their babies. Drug-smugglers screech their cars into U-turns to race back to Mexico.
Adjacent to the traffic lanes are a sidewalk and tunnel leading to an area where pedestrians, mostly US tourists returning from a day or night in Tijuana, re-enter the US.
Bickers said he doesn’t have much use for border politics and the loosening restrictions that Nafta ushered in. “We’ve made a treaty with a country that’s so corrupt they can’t even trust their police officers,” he said.
Early in the evening, border-crossing workers launched a special operation to search for weapons, runaways, parole violators and cash in cars being driven south. Officials say the most common way for Mexico’s drug kingpins to bring their illegal proceeds home is to load cars with cash and simply drive across the border.
Few cars are stopped by Mexican border police, and if bundles of money are found, the poorly paid guards often can be bribed to look the other way. The extent of the problem can be measured by a simple comparison: Mexican officials value their country’s illegal drug trade at $30- billion a year, but in 1995 only $1,7- million in returning drug money was seized by Mexican authorities.
As part of the operation, a combined force of local police and border inspectors funnelled all southbound traffic into a two-lane bottleneck, creating a one-hour back-up.
Between 4pm and 10pm, inspectors popped 900 trunks — the drug hauls of the afternoon followed at night by arrests of undocumented aliens trying to sneak into the US in secret car compartments.
The night shift illustrates another set of problems created by waves of young Americans returning drunk and belligerent from Tijuana, where the legal drinking age is 18, three years younger than in California.
“Just another Friday night,” said K-9 officer Eric Nelson, scratching his dog behind the ear. “Nothing special.”