| | |  Americas & Beyond | June 2009 
Tunnel Network Sends Border Patrol Underground
 William Booth & Travis Fox - Washington Post
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| | Tom Pittman, a Border Patrol supervisor, exits the massive drainage tunnels that are located directly under the Nogales port-of-entry. Border Patrol agent Mario Escalante looks on. | |
Nogales, Arizona - Tom Pittman lifts a manhole cover open, turns on his flashlight and climbs down a ladder into a dangerous warren of drains and tunnels, a literal underworld where spooky bandits and illegal migrants and drug smugglers move around in the dark. "Hold on a second," Pittman says. "Let me see if anybody's down here first."
They call themselves the Tunnel Rats. Trained in close-quarter combat, certified to work in confined spaces and armed to the teeth, these four-person teams of Border Patrol agents have been busy lately.
In the last nine months, they discovered 16 new tunnels dug by smugglers under Nogales. The number of tunnels sets a new record. "It's swiss cheese under there," said Brooke Howells, a Border Patrol supervisor.
The digging has become so extensive beneath the streets of Nogales that the southbound traffic lane through the international port of entry recently collapsed.
The latest tunnel, found two weeks ago, was 83 feet long, had ventilation tubes, wooden beams and plywood ceilings. It traveled from a house in Mexico to a warehouse in the United States. It was located at the busiest intersection in downtown Nogales, at East International Street and North Nelson Avenue, just down the block from the port of entry manned by hundreds of U.S. agents.
"You never know what you'll find," Pittman said. One time, he stumbled upon a teenager with an AK-47 guarding a bale of marijuana. He has encountered bandits who lurk in the tunnels, armed with knives, to rob migrants who are trying to sneak into the United States.
During the monsoon rains, Mexicans have been trapped and have drowned in the drains and tunnels. Beside the storm water system is the sewage system. Drug smugglers have packaged kilos of cocaine in plastic milk crates, added some buoyancy, and sent them flushing through the raw sewage from Mexico to the United States.
"They're digging another one someplace right now," Pittman said. "I can almost guarantee it."
About this Project
The border between United States and Mexico is the land where straight lines blur, and where two national cultures collide and collude. The writer Alan Weisman, author of "La Frontera", called the borderlands "the most dramatic intersection of first and third world realities anywhere on the globe." There is a lot of good on the border, and these days, plenty of bad. The border is a militarized hot zone, where tens of thousands of Mexican soldiers are fighting a vicious drug war against well-armed, rich and powerful drug traffickers, who smuggle across these desert highways 90 percent of the cocaine so voraciously consumed in the United States. On the U.S. side, the federal government is pouring taxpayer money into border, promising to stem the flow of cash and guns heading south, while the border patrol continues its ceaseless cat-and-mouse search for Mexican migrants sneaking north.
We're setting out to drive the borderlands from Ciudad Juarez, across the river from El Paso, to San Diego's sister city Tijuana. Along the way, we're going to tell the stories of overwhelmed small town sheriffs, of drug smugglers and drug czars, of the Mexicans who struggle to survive in dusty villages and the Americans who fear that the drug war is getting way too close for comfort. We're going to talk to cops and mayors, some scientists and singers, and lots of regular folks, too. We've got a map, an ice chest, a video camera, and the laptops. We've got some stories planned but we also would like to hear from you. What do you think about the drug fight along the border, and what it is doing to the people What dots on the map should we make sure to hit Please let us know in the comments section below. You can also join the conversation on Twitter by using the #mexborder hashtag.
William Booth and Travis Fox |
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