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من طرف **بلبل حيران** السبت 23 أبريل 2016, 4:26 am

Drug-Smuggling Tunnel, Found in San Diego, Is Longest Yet CgsWgdqW4AAJtqZ

http://nyti.ms/1SAcCJ9
For all the talk about a wall between the United States and Mexico, the problem with border security continues to be as much below ground as above. On Wednesday, officials in San Diego announced the discovery of another cross-border tunnel built by drug smugglers — the longest one found yet, at about half a mile.

The tunnel had rails, lighting, ventilation and even a large elevator leading to a closet in a modest house in Tijuana, United States Attorney Laura E. Duffy said. On the San Diego side, where the tunnel emerged in an industrial park in the Otay Mesa neighborhood, the authorities arrested and charged six people last week and confiscated more than a ton of cocaine and seven tons of marijuana that they said had been smuggled through the passage — the largest drug seizure associated with a tunnel.

Despite the superlatives cited by officials, the cat-and-mole game between law enforcement and drug cartels shows no sign of abating. In the last five years, the authorities said, they have found more than 75 cross-border tunnels, mostly in areas of California and Arizona where there are enough buildings to disguise illicit activity, and the soil is conducive to digging. In Tijuana, in particular, the tunnels are considered an intractable fact of life.

Specialists on border control say no one has a clear idea how many tunnels are operating, or how much of a role they play in the drug trade, but they will be a factor for the foreseeable future. In just the last month, another long tunnel was found linking Calexico to Mexicali, and a shorter one near Calexico.

“They keep finding tunnels, they keep getting bigger and longer and more sophisticated,” said David A. Shirk, associate professor of political science and international relations at the University of San Diego. “It just seems like we haven’t reduced the capacity of people to make tunnels. I think this is a problem we have to manage, not a problem we can actually solve.”

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Law enforcement agencies have explored high-tech ways to detect tunnels using vibrations or magnetic fields, but those have not been effective. Most often, experts say, tunnels are found through old-fashioned police work, acting on tips or putting suspected traffickers under surveillance.

The tunnels demonstrate the persistence and resources of the cartels. Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Sinaloa cartel boss known as El Chapo, famously used tunnels to escape twice from prison, and to flee a hide-out shortly before his most recent capture.

Some experts say the tunnels are also a testament to the improved effectiveness of drug interdiction. Traffickers would not resort to digging, which is slow and expensive, unless they thought it was necessary, said Jayson Ahern, a former acting commissioner of United States Customs and Border Protection, who is now a principal at the Chertoff Group, a security firm.

“You still are dealing with a very adaptable adversary, who will try to get their drugs into the U.S. by any means necessary,” Mr. Ahern said. “Every time you go ahead and displace a smuggling route, you make it more difficult for yourself to detect the next route.”

The tunnels have not been known to be used for large-scale smuggling of people, which would increase the number of people who could be caught and disclose a tunnel’s location. And despite fears raised in Congress, experts say there is no evidence that the cartels are helping terrorists enter the country.

“A package of cocaine or heroin is much easier to move and hide than a person, and the profit it represents is far greater,” said Christopher Wilson, deputy director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a policy research group. “Working with terrorists would bring a huge amount heat on the cartels, and that’s bad for business.”

The latest tunnel discovered, in an investigation involving several federal agencies, was almost 900 yards long. At about 10 feet deep and three feet wide, it was narrower and shallower than some others that have been found. The northern opening was in a fenced commercial lot with stacks of wooden pallets.

“I think it fair to say that few would suspect that traffickers were moving multiton quantities of cocaine and marijuana in this very unassuming way, in full view of the world around them,” Ms. Duffy said.

من طرف **بلبل حيران** السبت 23 أبريل 2016, 4:27 am

http://nyti.ms/1SwneZs

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Drug-Smuggling Tunnel, Found in San Diego, Is Longest Yet

Drug-Smuggling Tunnel, Found in San Diego, Is Longest Yet

رد: Drug-Smuggling Tunnel, Found in San Diego, Is Longest Yet