Border Drug Busts on the Rise With Reinforced Staff of Agents

The addition of 11 more anti-drug agents along the Mexican border in San Diego County has aided significantly in the effort to curb the flow of narcotics into the United States, federal officials said Friday.

The additional agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, reassigned to San Ysidro last Sept. 15 from other San Diego posts, work in tandem with officers of the U.S. Customs Service and other police units as part of a nationwide interagency effort known as Operation Alliance. Although officials concede that drugs continue to flow in large amounts through the notoriously porous border, they claim the bolstered federal presence has significantly improved interdiction efforts and led to a number of important cases.

“I think it’s critical to have agents right there at the scene,” said Peter Nunez, U.S. attorney in San Diego.

“It enables us to follow up and pursue things a lot quicker,” said Charles Hill, special agent in charge of the DEA office in San Diego. “It’s been a tremendous success so far.”

The U.S. law enforcement authorities spoke at National University in San Diego during a border conference sponsored by U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Coronado, who noted that interagency rivalries and a lack of coordination have often stymied border drug-interdiction efforts in the past.

“What you have here is a partnership that saves taxpayer money and expedites the process,” said Hunter, who represents part of the border area.

The reassignment of the 11 drug agents here is one of the most notable effects of Operation Alliance, which was launched amid considerable fanfare last August in an attempt to reduce drug trafficking along the entire 1,950-mile U.S.-Mexico border. Each day, authorities say, traffickers employ vehicles, aircraft, boats and pedestrians to bring huge amounts of narcotics into the United States from Mexico.

In another facet of Operation Alliance, noted federal prosecutor Nunez, the U.S. attorney’s office budget has been increased to allow the hiring of 13 new lawyers, a move that should bolster the number of drug-related and border cases filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego.

“In the next six months,” said Nunez, “I think we should see a surge of prosecutions.”

The additional DEA agents posted at the border are among 14 new DEA agents approved in San Diego as a result of recent funding increases, said the DEA’s Hill. Besides the DEA and Customs, Hill said, the border operation also includes representatives of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service; the Border Patrol; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; the Internal Revenue Service and, on occasion, various local police agencies, such as the San Diego Police Department and the California Highway Patrol.

The presence of the drug agents at the border, authorities explained, allows for much quicker responses--and brisker follow-up investigations--to the major drug seizures that have become fairly commonplace at the border. The change has also aided cooperation with Mexican authorities, with whom U.S. officials have had a checkered relationship.

“Having them (agents) on the scene puts us light years ahead,” Nunez said in an interview.

Information recently gathered by the border unit, said Hill, was passed on to Mexican authorities and figured in the seizure in Baja California earlier this month by Mexican Federal Judicial Police of 800 kilograms of cocaine and more than one ton of marijuana.

Since the new agents were transferred to the border last September, Hill said, U.S. authorities at the border have seized 811 kilograms of cocaine, 40 kilos of heroin and 8,000 tons of marijuana, as well as 54 automatic weapons and 70 vehicles. There have also been 167 drug-related arrests in 114 different cases. While conceding that most of the seizures would have occurred even without the new agents, Hill said that the added DEA presence assisted in the development of cases against the alleged traffickers and their accomplices.