Much of those drugs come across our border in the “traditional” way—in the trunks or hidden compartments of cars and trucks at the ports of entry, on the backs of human mules traversing the desert in between the checkpoints, etc. Smugglers still use Miami Vice–style boats and planes, but they are much less common these days. What are becoming more common, however, are border tunnels, drug submarines, and ultralight planes.
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Diversifying Their Portfolio
The cartels’ business portfolios don’t end with drug smuggling. Believe it or not, Mexican and U.S. enforcement efforts are actually having an impact on drug trafficking, so some cartels—most notably Los Zetas and La Familia Michoacana—have diversified into other fun extracurricular activities, like kidnapping and ransom, extortion, fuel theft, piracy of DVDs, CDs, and software.
According to the Motion Picture Association of America, movie piracy in Mexico costs Hollywood at least $590 million annually. Within the countries that make up the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Mexico has the third-highest rate of pirated software at 60 percent, after Chile and Turkey. Microsoft’s associate general counsel for antipiracy, David Finn, wrote that La Familia alone could have as many as 180,000 points of sale, with profits reaching $2.2 million a day.
Another profitable expansion of their business has been cattle rusting. Yes, drug traffickers are now stealing Mexican cows.
Livestock organizations in eleven Mexican states have said that cattle rustling has significantly increased in the last three years. Why? Why else: money. It seems that cattle rustling can raise a decent chunk of change. A bull can sell for $10,000, a cow for $12,000, a horse for up to $30,000, and a calf for up to $20,000.
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If necessity is the mother of invention then drug cartels are modern-day Benjamin Franklins.
The Tunnels
More than one hundred cross-border tunnels have been discovered in the past decade, including seven major tunnels along the San Diego border with Mexico in the past five years alone, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Some of these tunnels are engineering wonders, with concrete-reinforced walls, ventilation systems, wired-in lighting, and track systems for transporting drugs quickly. Other tunnels are more like rabbit holes, where one person can barely squeeze through on his belly with a rope tied to his ankle and several bales of dope. But no matter their size or complexity, these tunnels can be extremely difficult to detect. Human intelligence is crucial, but some Border Patrol agents will tell you that the best way to find a border tunnel is to run over it with your truck.
The Drug Subs
Drug subs, which are more formally known as “self-propelled semi-submersible vessels” (see why they just call them “drug subs”?), because they don’t fully submerge, can be total marvels of construction—multimillion-dollar affairs built by Russian engineers in the Colombian jungle that look like they were just pulled out of the Finding Nemo ride at Disneyland. Others . . . not so much. The cheaper versions appear to have been cobbled together with cardboard, PVC pipe, and a few rolls of duct tape. But all of the drug subs have one thing in common: an enormous capacity for holding illegal narcotics. Many can haul up to six tons at a time and, if intercepted, can be completely scuttled in less than two minutes.
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If Only Amtrak Ran This Well . . .
In November 2011, ICE discovered thirty-two tons of marijuana in a major cross-border tunnel linking warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana. The six-hundred-yard passage was equipped with a hydraulic lift, electric railcars, a wooden staircase, and wood floors from one end to the other. It was also lighted and ventilated.
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Working on one of these things is not exactly like spending a week on the Queen Mary 2. Drug subs are almost always bare-bones deals, with no midnight buffet or rock-climbing wall. The navigators have to endure a one-to-two-week journey with no air-conditioning, no showers, minimal food and water, and no functioning toilet. But they get the job done. And they’re paid handsomely for their sacrifice.
The Ultralights
Depending on the model, an ultralight can carry one person and roughly 250 pounds of drug cargo. They fly below the radar, so they’re very difficult to detect, but occasionally they have the pesky problem of running into power lines. Some pilots land in the United States to drop off their load with a courier, then take off again and head home. Others are getting better at releasing their drug loads while in flight, although this can mean disaster if they’re dropped unevenly. Ultralight pilots who aren’t trained properly can easily meet a grisly fate in some Arizona lettuce field.
There is nothing quite like drugs and money to bring out maximum creativity in criminals. For example, there was the load of Jesus statues in one woman’s trunk, which were made of a plaster and cocaine mixture (yes, that cocaine-doll-dissolved-in-water scene in the movie Traffic is entirely realistic). Then there was the shipment of frozen sharks that had been hollowed out and filled with packages of cocaine. And there are plenty of people who are happy to use their own bodies as vehicles, swallowing dozens of little drug-filled balloons until their insides are close to bursting. Of course, what goes in must come out, and I’d hate to be the smuggler or CBP agent on the receiving end of that delivery.
This drug tunnel connected Tijuana and San Diego. It was 600 yards long and was equipped with lighting and ventilation.
YES, IN YOUR BACKYARD
To really understand the nature of Mexico’s drug war today, it’s important to know how new criminal entities like Los Zetas differ from the other “old school” cartels. Remember, Los Zetas didn’t start out the way the other cartels did; they began as a private army for the Gulf cartel—essentially very well-trained professional killers. Their boss, Cárdenas Guillén, was arrested in 2003 and extradited to the United States in 2007. And, well, when the cat is away, the mice will play.
Los Zetas grew in confidence and drug trafficking expertise during this time. Finally, by 2008, they’d had enough of being under the Gulf cartel’s control. They took advantage of Guillén’s extradition to the States the prior year and officially broke away to become their own cartel.
If you take a look at an organizational chart for a Fortune 500 company, you’re likely to see many similarities with a chart for the Tijuana or Juárez cartels. There is a CEO at the top, several layers of top managers underneath, and so forth, with each level of management reporting directly to the layer above.
But Los Zetas is run more like a franchise. They do have a boss at the top, but each Zetas cell more or less operates independently and gets to make its own decisions. Unfortunately, those decisions usually involve various ways to kill people.
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You Look Familiar
After Osiel Cárdenas Guillén was convicted for various drug-related crimes he was sentenced to serve twenty-five years and transferred to the top-security federal prison in Florence, Colorado. And how’s this for irony? The original leader of the Gulf cartel that Osiel once controlled, Juan García Ábrego, is also serving multiple life sentences there.
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In August 2010, seventy-three migrants from Central and South America were making their way north through Mexico when members of Los Zetas intercepted them roughly 120 miles from the Texas border. They were taken to a farmhouse in a remote area near the town of San Fernando, bound and blindfolded, and summarily executed. One man from Ecuador played dead until the Zetas left and then escaped, which is the only reason we know what happened.
What we still don’t know is exactly why Los Zetas committed one of the largest atrocities ever recorded in the drug war against so many innocent people. Did they want to recruit the immigrants? Use them as drug mules? Or were they just feeling extra sociopathic that day? To make matters worse, the Mexican government kept many details surrounding the massacre to themselves. Gee, might the murder of seventy-two innocent people make Calderón and his drug-war strategy loo
k bad?
But the Zetas weren’t done.
Almost one year later at least twelve men in several vehicles arrived at the luxury Casino Royale in Monterrey, Mexico. In less than three minutes, the men had set the entire casino on fire and left. There were varying reports that claimed the men started shooting, threw grenades, and yelled at people to leave. Even if the latter were true, many (if not all) of the emergency exits were locked, and fifty-two innocent people died—many from smoke inhalation in the bathrooms, where they had holed up trying to survive. Unlike the massacre of the seventy-two immigrants, we know why the perpetrators (believed to be Zetas) targeted the Casino Royale: the owner hadn’t yet paid his monthly cuota, or “tax” to the cartel.
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Typical Politician
Unfortunately, after labeling this a terrorist act, Calderón kept talking, eventually going on to partly blame the United States for the attack, citing our insatiable drug demand and lax gun laws as contributing factors. I guess by that logic we should blame Mexico every time a Hollywood star overdoses.
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Between the chain-saw beheadings (remind anyone of Nicholas Berg’s decapitation in Iraq?), the San Fernando massacre, the casino attack, and many other examples of innocents being targeted or killed, this whole mess is starting to sound a lot like . . . terrorism. In fact, President Calderón labeled the Casino Royale attack exactly that, calling it an “aberrant act of terror and barbarity.” His national security spokesman, Alejandro Poiré Romero, put it even more bluntly, stating, “an act of terrorism has been committed.”
HEZBOLLAH IS HERE
As a result of the Casino Royale attack there was a lot of debate about whether the U.S. government should label cartels as terrorist organizations. But who needs cartels to be terrorists when we have actual terrorists who are terrorists? Many experts are concerned that members of “traditional” terrorist groups, meaning Islamist fundamentalist groups like al-Qaeda, are entering the United States from Mexico in order to do bad things here. The group whose name has been popping up over and over again in that regard is Hezbollah.
In September 2010, the Tucson, Arizona, police department issued a confidential memo that became known to the public only when it was leaked by the hacker group LulzSec. The memo stated, “. . . obvious concerns have arisen concerning Hezbollah’s presence in Mexico and possible ties to Mexican drug trafficking organizations [DTO’s] operating along the US–Mexico border.” While the report said that no official connection had been made, the author cited two specific incidents: the arrest of Jameel Nasr in Tijuana, who was alleged to be tasked with establishing the Hezbollah network in Mexico and throughout South America, and the arrest of Jamal Yousef in New York City. Yousef owned a pretty decent weapons cache, including 100 M-16 assault rifles, 100 AR-15 rifles, 2,500 hand grenades, C4 explosives, and antitank munitions. He told police that the weapons, which were being stored in Mexico, had been stolen from Iraq with the help of his cousin, who was a member of Hezbollah.
In another incident, from May 2011, a local news station in San Diego interviewed a former U.S. intelligence agent (his name and agency were never mentioned) who said, “We are looking at 15 or 20 years that Hezbollah has been setting up shop in Mexico.” He also told the news station that Hezbollah is partnering with unidentified drug organizations, and that the group receives cartel cash and protection in exchange for Hezbollah expertise, “from money laundering to firearms training and explosives training.”
That is certainly alarming, but many people may have overlooked another part of the statement: “If they really wanted to start blowing stuff up, they could do it . . . but the organization [Hezbollah] sees the U.S. as their ‘cash cow,’ with illegal drug and immigration operations . . . The money they are sending back to Lebanon is too important right now to jeopardize those operations.”
That, to me, is a really important point to consider: cartels don’t have a religious or political ideology unless you consider power and money to be religion. Terrorists, on the other hand, generally only have a religious or political ideology. To mix those two groups together is not as easy as it might seem given that cartels are interested in keeping Americans alive (and using their product), not killing millions of them or doing something that might force the border to be sealed off.
Here’s a fun little fact that may surprise you: thousands of people associated in some way with Hezbollah are living here in the United States right now, and have been for quite some time.
What?!? How is that possible??? How can the FBI not know about this, or not have warned us in some way? Why haven’t all the major news outlets been telling us about this terrorist threat?
Wait . . . it gets even better.
We are willingly giving these terrorists our money, which they are then sending back to their terrorist buddies in the Middle East. And when I say “our money,” I’m not talking about government funding (although that wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility), I’m talking about the money of normal, everyday Americans.
You know all those fake designer-label purses, hats, and shoes you see being sold on sidewalks and out of street carts in major U.S. cities? There’s a good chance that the proceeds from those items are going to Hezbollah. In an April 2008 raid on a Queens, New York, warehouse—the largest such raid in New York City history—police confiscated 75,000 pairs of fake Nike sneakers, 75,000 knockoff handbags, and 5,000 pieces of fake name-brand clothing. The street value of these products was estimated at $4.5 million. New York authorities strongly believed the proceeds from the sale of these goods were headed to Middle Eastern terrorist organizations.
So, we have strong evidence that Hezbollah has a significant number of members and associates in Mexico. We also have strong evidence that members and associates of Hezbollah (and perhaps other Islamist terrorist groups) have entered the United States from Mexico, either on their own or by using human smugglers who specialize in moving other-than-Mexicans, or “OTMs,” across the border. None of that is good news, but it’s important to remember that there’s a big difference between members of terrorist groups who come here to raise money and members who come here to blow things up.
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ADULT CONTENT
What do you think might happen if a nuclear weapon went off in a U.S. city and it became clear that the bomb was brought in over the Mexican border with the help of a drug cartel? Do you think maybe that our lack of border security might lead the news every night? Do you think the president might give an address to the nation in which he says something about how the “debate over our border has gone on too long, it’s time for action” before he sends the military to shut it down? Do you think a border fence might magically be erected in a year?
We’ve seen how this stuff works before: politicians generally don’t act until Americans die or a close call is narrowly averted. Then, once they do, they overreact, or put knee-jerk policies into place that do nothing to solve the actual problem (yes, I’m looking at you, TSA, and your stupid three-ounces-of-liquid rule).
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First, let’s state the obvious: the acceptable number of terrorists who should be able to slip through the (often wide) border (in both our north and south), or be allowed to go undetected in our communities is zero. I am not at all trying to downplay the risk or pretend that it’s not an issue. I’m simply trying to separate fact from conjecture and hyperbole so that we can focus on solving the actual problem. (You may have noticed that we haven’t made much progress in that regard in a while.)
So, here is the truth: there is no evidence that an operational member of a terrorist group—meaning someone toting a bomb, or actively planning to kill lots of Americans—has gotten into the United States via Mexico, yet. And that is great news. But, unlike a lot of politicians, I’m not someone who likes to wait until catastrophe strikes before deciding that something needs to be done. (I was playing bin Laden’s words on my radio program years before 9/11, warning that we mus
t take him seriously.) I know it’s crazy, but I actually prefer to prepare for disaster and worst-case scenarios, rather than panic once they do occur.
A MATCH MADE IN HELL?
We know Hezbollah is working along our southern border. We know the drug cartels are working there as well. So, that begs the question: Are they working together?
Anything’s possible, but at least so far, the evidence is just not there to support it. And, as I said earlier, the cartels and terrorists keeping their distance from each other actually makes a lot of sense.
In October 2011 the weirdest assassination plot in years came to light and started a minor international crisis. Iranian officials were accused of plotting to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States at a Washington, D.C., restaurant. Sounds typical enough for Iran, but the odd part was that they reportedly intended to use a Mexican drug cartel to pull it off.
The two men spearheading this plot were an Iranian-American used car salesmen and a reported member of the elite Iranian Quds Force. They thought they were meeting with a man in Mexico who was a member of a violent cartel (widely reported to be Los Zetas, but that was never confirmed by U.S. authorities) willing to accept $1.5 million for the job: to blow up the D.C. restaurant where the ambassador would be dining.