Hiya,
So, by way of a brief recap, GUNS, DRUGS & ILLEGALS is a feature article I wrote for magazines, based on a leg of my research trip for the book STANDOFF that took in Colombia, Panama, and Texas. The focus of the trip was to follow the drugs trade and try to get some kind of a handle on the situation. The story never found a publication, mostly due to my obstinacy. It was written a while back, but the essence of it is still relevant.
Part II is the second and final part. Enjoy.
***
Next stop (El Paso PD) CSI. I look around the room and my first thought — there are no blue lights and cool dark shadows here. It’s cold, hard, fluoro-tube-lit reality. I’m introduced to Danny, 50, a soft-spoken guy with a polished bald head and sad alert eyes. Danny confirms pretty much everything Deputy Marquez has said while he shows me a bullet-riddled car with a heavily blood-stained footwell down in the garage lockup. He also tells me that he changes out of his Sheriff’s Office clothing before going home in the evening to avoid becoming a target. Danny doesn’t drive a black and white and would prefer that his neighbors not know what he does for a living. The job is dangerous enough, he says, adding that he’s been threatened often enough in the past. Bernadette, Danny’s partner in CSI, a compact, quiet-spoken woman of around 30, feels the same way and never goes home in uniform either.
And then in walks Alexandria – blonde, 25, with the sort of fresh face you could easily see on an advertising campaign for milk. She’s from North Carolina where she graduated from Marshall University in 2010 with a Master’s Degree in Forensic Science. Alexandria tells me she came to El Paso when her boyfriend landed a job at the university here. Now she’s CSI’s fingerprint expert. On her first day on the job, she had to lift the prints from a cadaver brought over from Mexico. The man had numerous broken bones, cuts, and burn marks and had been tortured to death. Alexandria says that was quite an eye-opener. Since then, she and the team have processed more than 250 cadavers, victims of cartel violence. All in a day's work.
Alexandria is interested to know why an author who has come from Australia might be in El Paso asking these questions. When she learns that it's research for a book, she insists that I give Jerry and Tricia a call (not their real names). Jerry and Tricia live where the fence comes to an end, just outside of town.
I blink. Did she just say the fence comes to an end just outside of town?
***
Later that day, after several phone calls have been made and my bona fides have been checked out by Jerry and Tricia, I drive 55 miles to a town called Fort Hancock that doesn’t even have a main street. There's no town or fort to speak of, just farms. I'm on a country road, one lane each way. Out to the right, I can see "the fence". It's quite close, around three hundred meters away, sitting there like that rusty freight train. And then suddenly, with no signs, no warnings, and certainly no fanfare, the fence comes to an end. It just...stops. This makes me double-take. After everything I now know about El Paso and Juarez and the cartels and the obvious security at the airport, seeing the fence abruptly come to an end in a dusty farm field borders on bizarre.
I keep going along the road, looking for a number on a letterbox. I find it, turn in and Jerry and Tricia walk out the front door to meet me.
At around 6-3, Jerry’s a big guy, not especially fit but if it came to a wrestle he could do some damage. He has dark hair and ruddy cheeks. It’d place him in his late 40s. His wife, Tricia, has intelligent eyes behind round-rimmed conservative glasses and she’s slight, built like a bird.
We introduce each other, shake hands.
"You know where Mexico is?’ asks Jerry, getting down to business pretty much immediately. Before I can answer he says, ‘Right there. See that raised dirt ridge? That’s Mexico, right there on my property line."
The ridge he's talking about is maybe two hundred meters away, across an open field. As I stand there, a Customs and Border Patrol 4x4 motors past, heading east, while up in the sky, a CBP Apache helicopter scuds along, flying in the opposite direction 150 meters off the deck, tracking the border. ‘It’s all for show,’ says Jerry. ‘You wanna walk to Mexico? Go right ahead. There's no one to stop you, except maybe the Sinaloa Cartel."
I look at him.
‘"Yeah, they’ve burned out all the farmers on the Mexican side — killed 'em or run 'em off their land. There's a 14-mile hole in the fence here and they mean to own it."
"Why have the authorities left a 14-mile hole?" I ask, incredulous.
"You tell me," says Jerry. "I can only think of one reason."
And the look on his face tells me the reason is that someone or some people want the hole nice and open so that the drugs, cash, and guns can go where they have to go. Honestly, at this point, I’m thinking that Jerry is a bit of a conspiracy nutter, but I’ve come all this way and I’m standing on his front porch, so I go along with it.
"Come on in," he says. "We got something to show you."
The first thing I see inside the door is an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle with scope. On the opposite side of the hall is a gun rack containing half a dozen well-used shotguns. There's also a desk on which boxes of ammunition are stacked high, ammo for those shotguns, and also for handguns. And on a bookcase, there's a brace of military spec rounds for the AR-15, including armor-piercing and expanding (explosive) rounds. I feel like I've stepped into the Alamo just before the attack.
"We often hear machine-gun fire at night," Jerry says.
"The things we hear...!" Tricia interrupts.
"You don't know what you're going find outside of that door at night," Jerry continues, nodding toward the front entrance. "You gotta be prepared." He motions at the rack of shotguns. "Now, I dunno whether you know this, but in Texas, you can shoot someone who trespasses on your land, or on your neighbor's land."
"Have you shot anyone?" I ask as politely as I can manage, cos, y’know, these are two people you really wanna be nice to.
"I've shot at people," Jerry replies obliquely, and with a bit of a lop-sided grin. Apparently, this is a joke I should be “in” on.
"We’re the first responders to illegals here — not the border patrol. We've made more than 600 citizens arrests," says Tricia quietly, almost meekly. "We hold them, call the CBP. They come and pick them up."
"Show him one of the tapes," says Jerry to his wife, who jumps almost like she’s his junior officer.
Tricia goes to a bookcase stacked with recorded VHS and DVDs and starts to rummage.
"We've got infrared cameras on our perimeter triggered by seismic and motion sensors," says Jerry. "Anyone comes across our land, we got it on tape."
About this time I notice that there are two computer screens set up on a table and one of them displays a view fixed on a familiar landscape — the one outside this home’s front door, looking south to Mexico. There’s a shimmer of static across one of the monitors and a TV frame appears as the DVD loads. It’s black and white footage. Jerry tells me it’s infrared. I can see a road, fields, a water pump beside the road, and several small moving hotspots.
"The small hotspots are rabbits," Jerry says. "And that's the road you just drove in on."
As I watch, other shapes appear in the video, white hotspots outlined in black. They are on the right-hand side of the frame, the Mexican side. They scurry across the grey field and dive into a grey ditch beside the grey water pump as a vehicle drives past them on the road, its headlights bathing the road in white. Some of those rabbits scurry out of the way.
"You can see these men are carrying backpacks," Jerry says, tapping the backpack shape on the screen with a pencil. There's probably around a hundred pounds of cocaine in each — or maybe methamphetamines. The vehicle you just saw drive past is a Customs and Border Patrol Vehicle."
Over the next fifteen minutes, I watch that CBP vehicle drive up and down the road 13 times, the couriers getting up and preparing to cross, only to dive for cover again and again when the vehicle’s headlights reappear.
"I was watching this happen (in real-time)," says Tricia. 'I got on the phone to the CBP and spoke directly to their dispatcher. I told him exactly where to go to find those couriers — behind the pump. See it?"
Yes, I can see it. The pump, a collection of pipes, is partly contained by a box. Alongside the pump, is the ditch. I can also see the infrared outline of the couriers huddled behind it. This time, the CBP vehicle stops. and two hot white infrared figures get out. They walk towards the pump, approach within three meters of it, but then for some reason, they just turn around, get back into their vehicle and drive off.
"You see?" says Jerry. "Explain that."
I can't — not without stating the obvious, that's there's a cozy relationship between law enforcement and the cartels.
"They do have night vision gear," says Tricia. "The CBP – we know they have."
"But they don't use it because they have to sign it out at the beginning of their shift," says Jerry, "which means they have to sign it back in at the end. And after a long midnight-to-dawn shift, who wants to add a half an hour to the end of it?’
Not many, I gather. "You've made 600 arrests," I return to. "How many couriers do you reckon have made it through lawsuits got hundreds of hours of recordings with many hundreds of movements. We’re only here physically monitoring our property 25 percent of the time. But the Mexican government still complained about us after an independent study revealed we’ve single-handedly lowered crossings across the whole 14-mile gap by up to 40 percent. They wanted us to end what we do. So they claimed we weren’t stopping trespassers but were doing immigration work. So the government here sent a Texas Ranger over to investigate us. If the Mexican government was right, we could go to jail, face all kinds of lawsuits and fines."
"What did the Ranger find?" I asked.
"Well, we're still here, right?" Jerry smiles. Up till now, I haven't seen him smile.
I do not doubt that the Ranger would have patted Jerry and Tricia on the back. Over the next ten minutes, Jerry tells me that he was formerly a law enforcement officer in the Municipal Department of Pennsylvania. I also hear that he’s a long-distance marksman, a National Rifle Association (NRA) champion with countless trophies to prove it, who these days teaches marksmanship to US Army snipers. Meanwhile, Tricia loads another DVD and I watch a military Hummvee vehicle driving about on the Mexican side of the border at night. It sports a roof-mounted .50 caliber machine gun and it appears to be protecting a school bus. Jerry believes, given the protective presence of the Hummvee, that the bus is full of not school kids but either guns, drugs, or cash.
"When they're over there on their side we can’t shoot at them, but they can sure as shit shoot at us. And they do," says Jerry.
"Why here?" I say to Jerry and Tricia. "I mean, I get that there’s a big gap in the fence and that it makes crossing easier. But why exactly here and not someplace else?" There's something missing for me, something not adding up that I can’t put my finger on.
Jerry smiles and fiddles with a joystick. The camera view blurs as it sweeps through a hundred and eighty degrees or so, coming to rest on another view: more desert, more bush, but there’s movement across the picture, like boxes shuffling along a horizontal conveyor belt. I'm not sure what I'm seeing. "What am I looking at?" I ask.
"The hole in the fence is just in the right place," Jerry says. "What you're looking at are trucks on the I-10. It’s only a mile and a half from the border, just up behind us. The border and the highway don't get any closer than they do here. The couriers come across and once they clear the road out front of our place, they get on their cell phones, rendezvous with a car or a truck up on the highway, hand over the drugs or whatever, and melt back across the border."
Jerry looks angry while Tricia shakes her head in disgust. "Napolitano (Janet Napolitano, current head of Homeland Security) claims the border with Mexico is secure," Jerry says. "Does it look secure to you?"
Another of those questions that don't require an answer. It's really difficult to know what to say, except to shake my head. Jerry and Tricia mount a convincing argument supported by evidence. Funny, I don't think they're crackpots anymore.
"You wanna walk across into Mexico?" Jerry asks me.
"Sure," I reply.
"Let's go."
Ten minutes later, I'm kicking up small clouds of dust as I walk towards the spot where the barrier fence comes to an end. There's a surveillance camera mounted on top of the fence aimed toward the open ground where the fence would be if it continued. I walk past the end of the fence, across a dry ditch five meters wide — the Rio Grande — and I'm in Mexico. I could keep on going, but I don't. Jerry says the Sinaloa cartel patrols the area and I have no desire to be kidnapped, ransomed, and whatever else. There's a column of conspicuous black smoke rising from a farm a kilometer or so further east — another Mexican farmer being burnt out of their land so that the cartel can take it over?
I have to agree with Jerry and Tricia. The 14-mile hole in the barrier really does make a joke of all the surveillance cameras and the patrols along the fence; the x-raying and the narco dogs at the airports. Is that all just a smokescreen to make people believe that border security between the US and Mexico is being achieved? That's the conclusion I reach. But is there another?
"This is a pretty dangerous situation for you," I suggest to Jerry. "You and Tricia being so effective at stopping the couriers — why wouldn't the cartel target you?"
"Let 'em try," Jerry replies with a grin.
There's no doubt in my mind that a showdown is something Jerry might relish. I also do not doubt that he and Trish would take plenty with them.
As I drive away, the sun setting, the opening in my book, which has a Mexican cartel wiping out a whole bunch of folks at the local airport, not only seems likely, I'm fast concluding that it's going to happen one day soon.
***
Two days later I receive an email from Deputy Marquez. It concerns the white Hummer. It's registered to a trucking company in Juarez, which is linked to a scrap yard. It's not the scrapyard owned by the Hummer's driver. He's suspicious about it. A future 'terry stop' is in the wind.
What’s the reaction when you suggest legalizing drugs as an alternative strategy?
Everyone in law enforcement I spoke with who has spent time on the front lines of the war on drugs believes that prohibition has failed, the evidence of that failure being impossible to deny with the rates of drug addiction and abuse in the US at an all-time high (no pun intended). However, contrary to what I expected, none of these same people consider legalizing drugs to be a valid alternative approach, imposing government controls and distribution that would remove the criminal element. Indeed, there’s a Sisyphus-like resignation that this is just a big ol' stone that has to be rolled to the top of the mountain over and over and over again even though everyone involved in the rolling knows full well that it's just going to tumble back down the hill every time (and in all probability squash them on the way through). The problem, everyone agrees, begins and ends with the demand that has its hooks in all demographics, from lawyers to schoolteachers to bus drivers to politicians. Half the people in the United States would have to be locked up.
One Texas Ranger eloquently put it this way: "You've got a country whose people can't afford to put food on the table butted up against another country whose people just want to feel good. What do folks expect is gonna happen?"
Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who came to power in 2006 and immediately announced that he would wage all-out war on the cartels and called out the army to fight it, is now talking to President Obama about what he calls "market strategies" to deal with the drugs problem. In other words, legalizing it. Calderon is talking about marijuana in this instance but, if it worked, drugs like cocaine and methamphetamines would doubtless follow.
Coincidentally, as I write this, back home Australia's Foreign Minister Bob Carr is also talking about legalizing drugs. Carr, who as NSW Premier introduced legalized shooting galleries for heroin addicts, has been swayed to this view after absorbing countless police reports on the failure of our own (and his government’s) war on drugs.
In Colombia, when I was there, I learned that a gram of cocaine is legal for personal use. That country has all manner of reasons to fear coke after the hell Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel put it through during the 80s and 90s but, if anything, Colombia is well on the way today to solving its drug problem (and, indeed, Mexico is today consulting with Bogota on how to deal with its cartels).
In 2001, Portugal legalized heroin, methamphetamines, cocaine, LSD, marijuana, and other drugs for personal use (though it is still illegal in Portugal to deal in drugs). Drug taking there is considered a health problem, not a criminal one. In Portugal now, deaths from overdoses and rates of HIV infection are down significantly. Marijuana consumption among young people has also declined. Cocaine use is up, but then it’s up right across Europe.
There aren't enough takers like Portugal on the legalization route to know whether this is the answer, though, if you want another parallel, an end to the prohibition of alcohol in the United States also ended years of violent gangster activity there. Maybe it's ultimately the same for the prohibition of drugs.
An interesting note of caution was raised by one US law enforcement officer who pointed out that the Mexican cartels are now wealthy organizations hooked on vast profits, which they're more than willing and able to continue making by illegal and violent means. If the source of this income was suddenly removed, what would they turn to in replacing it?
Author’s note: While in El Paso I met with several Texas Rangers as well as the Chief of the El Paso Police Department. While all politely declined to be quoted for this article, some of their views and opinions helped form the background for it.
So, a few final words about a subscription to this newsletter. Please get one. I can absolutely guarantee you that all the money won’t go to any charity.
But if you can’t afford to subscribe — and I know it’s a tough world out there due to pandemics and such — just ask me and I’ll sign you up for free. Don’t be shy. Seriously, just send me an email and I’ll get it happening. drollins1@mac.com
And for those of you who are flushed with cash and are all for supporting communications that are free from ads, free from pop-ups and banners, or cookies that spam you up to viagra and bitcoin offers, but are just unconvinced about subscribing to this newsletter, for another two weeks I’m offering trial 1 month subscriptions, free. Again, just email me and ask and, bingo!, you’re in.
Yikes. Driven along that stretch of Interstate 10 lots of times. Never realized how close we were such an active smuggling route.
Thanks David. Interesting read. Reminded me of the recent 2021 Liam Neeson movie “The Marksman” - Former United States Marine Corps Scout Sniper and Vietnam War veteran Jim Hanson, a widower and drunkard lives along the Arizona-Mexico border, reporting attempted illegal crossings. One day, while on patrol, he encounters Rosa and her son Miguel, Mexican citizens on the run from the cartel etc etc.