Pursuing smugglers, border agents become trackers

Bill Fraley knelt to examine the brown, pebbled soil, like an art professor studying a familiar drawing.

"See those two fine-lines?" he said, passing a finger over two shoe prints, each with washboard rows of ridges. His hand moved to another heel print a few inches away. "And there's a doper lug," the heel imprint of a boot sometimes worn by drug smugglers.

A few steps away, a 5-foot barbed-wire fence cut through the cactus and greasewood, separating the United States from Mexico. The Border Patrol agent stood and tipped back the brim of his Stratton cowboy hat, eyes hidden behind aviator sunglasses. A satisfied expression hung on his chiseled face.

There were at least three of them, he figured. "It rained all day yesterday and these signs are on top of the rain," he said. "So I'd say they crossed yesterday, between 6 and 7. And it looks like they've got heavy loads of dope on them."

Their drop point would probably be on Interstate 10, near the exit for Steins Ghost Town and the New Mexico-Arizona state line. To get there, they would have to traverse 75 miles of rocky mountain ranges and tumbleweed-choked valleys, avoiding rattlesnakes and federal agents -- and do it on foot, with 45 pounds of marijuana on each of their backs.

It would take five to seven days.

Unless the Border Patrol caught them first.

Drug cartels in Mexico are in a deadly battle over smuggling routes into the United States. At the same time, more border agents, hundreds of miles of new fencing and a growing arsenal of high-tech devices have made it harder than ever for drug traffickers to cross much of the 2,000-mile border with Mexico. Over the last six months, the U.S. Border Patrol has seized 1.3 million pounds of marijuana -- an amount nearly equal to the total for all of last year.

The crackdown has driven waves of ever more daring smugglers to the most remote and rugged parts of the border, areas that are difficult for federal agents to patrol, where fancy electronic surveillance is often useless.

The southwestern corner of New Mexico, with its 81 miles of border, is one of those prime corridors, a forbidding area the size of Los Angeles County where drug traffickers find plenty of places to hide. To outwit their adversaries, Border Patrol agents here rely on tracking skills borrowed a century ago from Native Americans: "cutting for sign," detecting where someone has crossed the Earth's surface, and "pushing sign," tracking that person down.

So far this year, Border Patrol agents in this area have hauled in 35,500 pounds of marijuana, more than all of the year before, with a street value of nearly $30 million.

Radar units, infrared scopes and other technological marvels "are damn good machines," said Eddie Parra, a supervisor in the Lordsburg Border Patrol station. "But they can't see everything here. It's still up to us."

Tuesday, 10 a.m.

Fraley cut the sign a mile from the nearest dirt road. He got on his radio to relay the details to other agents, who work as a team, in four overlapping shifts, 24 hours a day.

To Fraley, 50, sign-cutting is both art and science. He looks for footprints, though he usually finds just fragments. He looks for disturbances: turned-over rocks, broken twigs, bent barbed wire. He looks for chewed gum, a cigarette butt, the residue of a line of cocaine snorted on a rock. He looks for clues to fix the time: Prints that seem to run right into a tree, for example, were made before the moon rose.

It is, Fraley explained, "the ultimate hunt. They may not be able to read and write their name, but they are very, very good at what they do."

On this morning, the smugglers had left behind plenty of evidence. They had knocked over rocks and Fraley and Parra noticed that the soil beneath was slightly dark and still moist.

"What I really love," Fraley said, "is when you come across an ant pile that's been stepped in. Ants will rebuild an anthill in an hour, so if you see a footprint in an anthill you'd better look up -- because you're likely to be looking right at your adversaries."

Drug smugglers are nocturnal creatures. They spend their days hunkered down in the latticework of rock caves in mountains on the Continental Divide, crossing the valleys and open countryside by night.

Fraley's calculation: If the smugglers crossed the border at dusk, they had traveled much of the night. That likely put them near Red Hill, 15 miles north in the Animas Mountains.