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 News from Around the Americas | January 2006 
Smuggling Tunnel Details Come to Light
 Tony Manolatos - Union-Tribune
The floor is layered concrete and ceramic tile 2 inches thick. You can't tell there's anything different with the four large tan tiles in the corner.
But it's a secret door, one that could be opened only from below.
It's this passageway that federal authorities said was the exit point for drug smugglers who built a massive underground tunnel to bring tons of marijuana into the United States from Tijuana.
Agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement discovered the tunnel last week. It runs 2,400 feet, or the length of about eight football fields, and is equipped with lighting, ventilation and groundwater drainage.
When asked yesterday whether any arrests have been made, Special Agent Michael Unzueta only would say the investigation is “moving swiftly.”
Media attention has been intense. When given the chance last week, reporters from across the United States and Mexico peered inside the Mexican end of the shaft, located below a small warehouse about 175 yards south of the border.
Federal officials are expected to begin allowing general media access to the opening on the U.S. side today. The San Diego Union-Tribune got an early look at the opening.
From the outside, the site is unremarkable. The tunnel starts in the floor of a plain white office attached to a large warehouse in Otay Mesa.
Other than some scattered papers, trash and fingerprint dust, the den-sized office is empty, the walls blank.
The 9-square-foot tunnel door is on wheels so smugglers could roll it across the floor on their way up. A hole about 8 feet deep gapes beneath the door. At the bottom is a kitchen stool smugglers used to boost themselves into the office.
Also at the bottom is a pickax, a pair of black rubber boots, a plastic grocery bag and a tunnel to Mexico.
A few feet into the tunnel, slightly wider than a doorway, is a steep drop. There is a bend to the left, then the right. A little farther down, the tunnel straightens out.
“You can see as far as the eye will let you,” said Unzueta, who runs the San Diego office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is leading the investigation.
Parts of the shaft are about 70 feet deep. The walls are sandstone and compacted sand, but look more like a mix of rock and dark clay. Wood supports were used, but only sporadically because the earth is extremely dense. Agents called it “pliable earth.”
Unzueta said whoever dug the hole initially missed the warehouse because an underground artery veers off about 100 yards from the U.S. opening. After noticing their mistake, Unzueta suspects the workers probably dug backward from the office to connect with the Mexican side.
The tunnel diggers used a cement cutter and a jackhammer to get through the 2-inch cement and tile floor, immigration agents said.
It took two agents and a harness to lift the concrete slab, which sits flush with the floor and closely resembles the rest of the ceramic tile in the room. As investigators dusted for prints, agents installed a motion alarm, just in case someone came through.
Waist-high standing water in some parts of the tunnel is an ongoing problem, Unzueta said. Authorities haven't figured out how to use the pumps in the shaft and two portable systems have broken down.
Investigators called out-of-state miners to help them determine how the tunnel was built and how long it took. The miners are expected to arrive later this week.
Authorities started receiving tips about the tunnel two years ago. When they discovered it last week, they found 2 tons of marijuana on the Mexican side and 200 pounds on the U.S. end.
Once the marijuana was in the United States, it probably was loaded onto vehicles disguised as produce trucks, Unzueta said.
Agents believe the tunnel, one of the largest and most sophisticated ever found along the California-Mexico border, is the work of a drug cartel. They haven't said which one.
The warehouse owner, Helen Park, has declined to discuss the tunnel or her tenant. V & F Distributors leased the space from Park, authorities said.
Tony Manolatos: (619) 542-4559; tony.manolatos@uniontrib.com |
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