‘Mules’ With Backpacks Full of Drugs Try to Sneak Across Reservation : Arizona Indian Scouts’ Sharp Eyes, Intuition Used to Track Smugglers

Several times a week, Lambert H. Cross throws a saddle onto a horse and rides for miles out among the coyotes and towering cacti of the starkly beautiful Arizona desert.

But before each trip, he and his family gather to pray. Then he straps a .357 magnum pistol to his hip and hopes that should the need arise he can reach it in time.

“They are resigned to the fact that one day I won’t be coming through the door again,” said Cross, a Papago Indian who has worked since 1973 as an anti-smuggling scout for the U.S. Customs Service.

2.8 Million Acres of Desert

The success of federal anti-smuggling efforts in Florida, Texas and eastern Arizona has increasingly caused drug smugglers to load backpacks full of marijuana or cocaine and try to sneak across the Papago Indian Reservation, a 2.8-million-acre desert in western Arizona that shares a 90-mile-long border with Mexico.

So in this age of electronic surveillance and spotter planes, Cross and 16 other Indians employed by the U.S. Customs Service are using the same methods that helped Papago Indians track intruders 100 years ago. With sharp eyes and a keen sense of intuition, the agents ride isolated desert trails, looking for traces of footsteps in the desert.

The hunting has been good. Arrests were up in the year ending last September, with 71 smugglers caught crossing the reservation with 11,000 pounds of marijuana and 700 pounds of cocaine. The year before, only nine smugglers carrying a total of 684 pounds of marijuana were arrested.

Sun-Parched Trails

But in many ways the trackers face a daunting task. The reservation is a flat, dry, sparsely populated expanse of cactus and mesquite crisscrossed by soaring mountains. The scouts search miles of sun-parched desert trails, looking for tracks that often amount to no more than a few square inches of trampled dust. For every band of backpackers caught, authorities say, perhaps nine get through.

Typically, the smugglers carry backpacks of marijuana or cocaine weighing as much as 100 pounds, making their way north from Mexico and across the reservation.

To avoid agents who patrol in cars along the reservation’s dusty roadways near the border, they hike 35 miles through the cactus-studded countryside, traveling at night. They sleep during the day, often hidden in mesquite thickets that shade the banks of the ubiquitous dry creek beds.

Loaded Onto Trucks

They head for rendezvous points along Arizona Route 86 in a hide-and-seek trip that can take as long as three days. There, the illicit burdens are loaded onto trucks that blend into ordinary traffic on the way to such cities as Tucson, an hour’s drive, or Phoenix, two hours farther.

Customs patrol officers track the backpackers by “cutting sign,” the Indian practice of searching for clues to identify people or animals that have passed by on foot. The clues may be the corner of a heel mark, a bit of rippled tread made by an athletic shoe or a faint scuffing of smooth Mexican sandals.

Riding in four-wheel-drive trucks, on horseback, or on foot, Indian Customs agents cut across the northbound trails that striate the open range. Once a fresh sign is spotted, they follow on horseback or radio ahead to warn other agents of the direction the smugglers are headed in.

Learns Job as Youth

Cross learned to cut sign when he was 7 and growing up on the reservation. It was his job each morning to round up his family’s horses, which were set free each night to forage on the open range.

But how did he know which direction his horse had taken? How could he tell it was his horse he was following, and not one of the others? With time, he learned to see and interpret what most people overlook--a shiny patch of dust here, a bit of crushed soil there--with skills his tribal ancestors had perfected and handed down.

The smugglers often try to hide their tracks by walking in the sparse desert vegetation rather than down the middle of a trail. Some of the smugglers have taken to covering their shoes with carpeting, further obscuring their tracks. And the trackers must avoid being confused by tracks left by wild burros, horses or residents of the reservation.

Summer Slowdown

The work is hot and there is no escape from the Arizona sun. Summers are so parching that neither trackers nor smugglers work as much. And Cross said smugglers have shot at him.

But he says he likes the work. He begins his day by hitching a horse van to the back of a four-wheel-drive pickup and bouncing along dirt roads with a fellow agent to where they believe smugglers may strike next. Then they may spend the next several hours in the saddle, riding across the open range in civilian garb.

“We keep our guns tucked under our shirts so they think we’re just cowboys living on the reservation,” said Cross, who patrols in a T-shirt, jeans and cowboy boots. “You don’t want them to know you’re an agent until you’ve got them.”

Travel in Bands

The smugglers travel in bands of as many as 15 men and usually are Mexican nationals led by a guide. They often pick up the drugs from ranches owned by drug rings just south of the border in Mexico and slip through holes in a chain-link border fence.

The drug “mules” are hired to tote the backpacks for about $200 per trip, but otherwise usually are uninvolved in the drug operation. Many who have been caught are illegal aliens who told authorities they had planned to use the money to buy bus tickets to Phoenix or Los Angeles, where they hoped to find jobs.

Judging by those arrested, most of the smugglers are non-Indians, Customs officials say. But increasingly, tribal members, some of whom live on the Mexican side of the border, have become involved in the smuggling, lured by the promise of wild profits.

Can Avoid Suspicion

Indian homes in reservation villages along the U.S. side of the border have been used as “stash” houses for drugs sent across from Mexico. Members of the tribe then can load several hundred pounds of drugs into pickup trucks and drive to large western cities, passing through the reservation without raising the suspicion that an outsider would.

Poverty is stark here. In 1986, fewer than two in five families had incomes greater than $5,000, and four of five tribal members lived below the poverty line. Many homes are no more than shacks built from irregular planks, wire and the gnarled ribs of the saguaro cactus.

“It’s money, good money, fast money,” said Tribal Chairman Angelo J. Joaquin Sr. “But they can go to jail fast, too.”

Indian Agent Dies

The trackers are finding the Mexican drug bands increasingly dangerous. Three years ago one of the Indian trackers, 12-year veteran Customs agent Glen Miles, was found shot to death on a desert trail after calling in by radio that he was trailing a band of smugglers. That was the first killing of an agent since Indian scouts were hired in 1973.

“With every load we are catching these days, it seems that one or two in the group is armed,” said Floyd S. Lacewell, who supervises Customs agents working out of Lukeville, Ariz., headquarters of the district covering the reservation. “We’re seeing sawed-off shotguns and automatic rifles.”