The Lure of the Open Border : New Fence Turns Criminals East, Crashing Into Quiet Lifestyles

Boulevard rancher Bernie Tucker often herds truant cows and goats back across the border to his Mexican neighbor--who receives his U.S. mail in Tucker’s mailbox.

When Campo dry waller Bill Clevenger recently stayed in Tecate drinking margaritas past midnight--the hour the border crossing closes--he snipped the flimsy barbed-wire fence and drove home the back way.

The border in rural East County--nothing more than a four-strand cattle fence--is porous and always has been, but since the U.S. Border Patrol erected a solid steel-mat fence from Otay Mountain west to the beach, more and more drug traffickers have been barreling across the border to the east. Marijuana seizures for the San Diego sector are up three times over last year, and cocaine seizures are up tenfold.

Most of those seizures were made in the open desert between Tecate and Boulevard.

In the past two weeks alone, the Border Patrol’s Campo station has reported seizing more than 4,500 pounds of marijuana from three vehicles that drove across the border onto the maze of rutted dirt roads that scar the scrub and sage on the U.S. side. On Monday, agents arrested a Tijuana man suspected of driving across with 302 pounds of the drug.

The increased activity has alarmed the loose community of goat herders, small-time ranchers, recluses and retirees, most of whom listen to Border Patrol chases on their personal scanners. Others have had to contend with vehicle chases that rammed right through their gates, as well as drug drop-offs on their property at night. Although most tolerate illegal immigrants crossing on foot--which the Border Patrol says is also on the rise in the area--the drug activity has frustrated some residents and frightened others.

L. C. Masterson, a 66-year-old World War II veteran who lives on a swatch of land south of Boulevard with an assortment of geese, horses, chickens and cows, has been hit hard by the upswing. His 13 acres hug the border, and his dirt drive connects Mexico with Tierra del Sol Road, one of the only blacktopped roads in the region and a straight shot to California 94 and Old Highway 80 for speeding smugglers.

Masterson put up two gates to seal off his property and keep his 10 cows from heading for the border when they break out of their wooden enclosure, but smugglers have been stubborn.

First a man in a fancy new Jeep Cherokee showed up at the gate. “He wanted to know if he could go through. He just kept on and on,” said Masterson, a lanky man with two gold-capped teeth whose labored walk shows the mark of years. “I told him the gate was there because I wanted it there.” Although he said he can’t be sure, Masterson’s hunch told him the man was a drug runner.

Grinning shyly, he said he “packs a piece” and wasn’t afraid. The man finally left in search of another route, but Masterson’s problems had only begun.

About three weeks ago, a truck involved in a Border Patrol chase tore through a cable on the side of his property and damaged his back gate. He fixed it.

The following Sunday, while Masterson was attending church in San Diego, it happened again.

A citizen reported seeing a black pickup drive through a hole in the fence near Masterson’s land. Border Patrol agents caught up with the suspects on Interstate 8 and chased them back down Tierra del Sol--right through both of Masterson’s gates.

Just before the truck reached Mexico, it got stuck. The two men inside bailed and fled across the border, leaving 2,033 pounds of marijuana behind.

“They just crashed on through,” Masterson said, glancing at the twisted remnant of his back gate that still lay in the rutted road, about 40 feet closer to Mexico than it belonged. “I feel pretty bad about it. It’s rather discouraging, to be honest with you. The fences hadn’t been up a week yet.”

Though a federal Drug Enforcement Agency spokesman said drug apprehensions are up nationwide, both the DEA and Border Patrol agree that the 10-foot-tall steel fence from Otay Mountain to the beach has pushed vehicle crossings east.

“We have a higher concentration (of law enforcement agents) in San Ysidro to combat drugs than we do out in Campo,” DEA spokesman Jack Hook said. “If you put that together with the big border fence, they’re going to have to go somewhere. It’s like a balloon effect. You push it down in one area and it’s going to pop up somewhere else.”

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service began building the Otay Mesa section of fence, made of surplus corrugated steel sheeting, in October.

“That has stopped a lot of the vehicle drive-throughs, where they’ve just come crashing through the holes in the fence. It’s pushed the drive-through area east to the Campo region. In a lot of places there is no fence,” Border Patrol spokesman Mike Gregg said.

For the whole San Diego Border Patrol sector--66 miles of border--the fiscal year that began in October so far has brought in more than 38,000 pounds of marijuana and nearly 7,000 pounds of cocaine, contrasted with 13,674 pounds of marijuana and nearly 700 pounds of cocaine at the same time last year. The bulk of that has been in the Campo station area, which stretches for 45 miles from the eastern edge of Otay Mountain to the Imperial County line, Gregg said.

Three days after the chase on Masterson’s land, and hours after Border Patrol agents snagged another ton of marijuana from a pickup they chased south of Dulzura, Masterson was busy rigging up some makeshift gates. The heavy cable strung and padlocked across his dirt driveway should keep out the traffic until he gets the material together to build a new front gate of galvanized steel pipe. He plans to sink massive wooden posts across the back. His old gates, designed by Life-Time Gate Co., are beyond repair.

Masterson has leased the land for the past five years, and the only crime he’d ever encountered in the quiet rural expanse was a stolen goose one Christmas Day.

“Before, when I first moved in the area, it was mostly foot traffic. They would just be wanting to come through. I’d be in the back working, and they’d be gone before I could see them,” he said of the illegal immigrants who slipped through the border fence.

The drug running has disturbed the calm, he said.

Bernie Tucker, who lives a few miles west of Masterson, has also noticed a change.

Tucker, a Jehovah’s Witness and former air traffic controller who has herded goats in the hilly border scrub since he gave up urban living 20 years ago, has never minded the steady stream of immigrants who cross his property nearly every night, their journey north marked by the barking of herd dogs.

He and his neighbors immediately to the south are like any neighbors in a close-knit rural community, Tucker said, even though they cross an international border to go visiting and sometimes overcome a language barrier with grunts and points. Once, he and his wife helped a Mexican woman who showed up at their door with a sick baby. She came back a few days later with a vat of hog-head stew.

When the Tuckers leave home for the weekend, it’s their Mexican neighbors who check on their goats and the small, olive-green house Tucker and his sons built.

Tucker’s tolerance cannot be called thin. When he and his wife came home and found a Salvadoran man in their closet, she chatted with him in Spanish. Then the couple gave him a few magazines and sent him on his way, Tucker said.

But, when a vehicle made a drug run through Tucker’s property with its headlights out in January, he drew the line.

“I put the gate up then,” he said.

Even residents who don’t live smack on the border have picked up the increased activity in the hiss and blare of their personal scanners.

“We have a scanner, and we listen to it: They’re chasing them here; they’re chasing them there; they’ve got a vehicle they’re trying to apprehend,” said Bob Ward, a 72-year-old retired county worker who has lived in the area with his wife, Mildred, for more than 17 years.

Althugh Wood said he and his wife, who live less than 3 miles from the border, have never been bothered by the activity, the increase is apparent.

Marilyn Polen, a receptionist for the tiny health clinic in Campo who lives near Masterson and watched his gates come down, said a lot more Border Patrol vehicles are speeding past her house these days.

“It’s a little scary sometimes because they do go pretty fast. I’d hate for someone to be on our road,” Polen said.

“It just seems like more and more drugs. These guys know where the border is. He came right to Tierra del Sol. He knew where he was going,” Polen said. “A lot of us have scanners. There was a fire Sunday, and it was getting pretty close, so I wanted to hear. Then I picked up the Border Patrol, and I knew there was a chase.”

Although Polen said she doesn’t “sit up worrying about it,” others do.

One 62-year-old goat herder, who asked to be identified only as John, said he is living on “the front lines of the battle area.”

“These people are all armed,” he said, hunched over his lunch at the Campo Community Center. About a month ago, a friend of his notified the Border Patrol when he saw some traffickers coming through on foot. The men fled, but agents recovered 200 pounds of marijuana in the scrub, John said. The drug activity has instilled fear in him and his friend, who wanted a reward from the federal government so he could “hitch up his trailer and get out of here.”

Though the problem of drug trafficking drive-throughs is not new, the Border Patrol is catching more vehicles now that the criminals have been pushed east.

“The problem (before) was that we apprehended very few of those that drove across. Most would loop around and go back into Mexico or through San Ysidro. It was a lot easier to do that on Otay Mesa, before the fence, whereas Campo is lots of dirt roads,” the Border Patrol’s Gregg said.

Vehicles crossing at Otay Mesa could also blend into heavy traffic or make it to the freeway faster than they can in the Campo area.

Before the fence, which has been up for more than a year but remains unfinished for one half-mile stretch, there were sometimes 300 vehicle drive-throughs per month on Otay Mesa, Gregg said, “and those were the ones we knew about.”

The increase in drug traffic to the east is also keeping sheriff’s deputies in the area busy.

“Before, every car would be an illegal alien,” said Deputy Gary Vanderford, who has worked the Campo area since 1986. “With what’s going on now, you can almost be sure that it’s drugs.

“You got a difference between this time last year and now,” he said. “As a citizen you can see it. We had a nice little area here with just a few illegal aliens coming across. Now we’ve got mega-dope.”

Vanderford and other deputies have tracked the increase in activity by the amount of assistance they provide Border Patrol agents.

“It’s getting pretty bad. As a single unit, the previous year I probably assisted them 10 times out of the whole year. I’ve probably gone out with them 20 times just in the first six months of this year,” Vanderford said.

Even so, drug traffic is not new to the mottled terrain of dusty trails and high desert scrub.

About a decade ago, major drug raids on the Mexican side led the federal government to send in the army, Bernie Tucker recalled, and, for a while the stretch of border where his nannies chew on sage and oak was patrolled by Mexican federales.

Even before that, Tucker said, a woman who used to live on the land he bought was arrested by law enforcement agents for letting smugglers through.

And Jose Leonardo Contreras Subias, a major Mexican drug smuggler with ties to the torture-slaying of U.S. drug enforcement agent Enrique Camarena, was accused in a federal indictment of moving at least 11 tons of marijuana through the Johnson Swine Farm, two properties west of Masterson’s.

Elbert Johnson, 53, who ran the successful pig farm, pleaded guilty along with Contreras in federal court in 1990 to conspiracy to import the drug. Johnson’s plea agreement called for him to serve 11 years in federal prison, where he was already doing time for an Oklahoma tax evasion conviction.

Today the Johnson Swine Farm sign still hangs in front of the padlocked gates of the Tierra del Sol Road ranch, and Johnson’s story has gradually turned to parable in the sparse community of loners Tucker has proudly dubbed “peculiar.”

“That guy raised great pigs,” Tucker said of Johnson. “He was probably bringing in $300,000 a year. I don’t know why he turned to smuggling.”

Although foot crossings of illegal immigrants are just a part of life to most area residents, those have also increased markedly.

The crossings are up 7% for the whole San Diego sector, but up 21% in the Campo station’s territory alone, Gregg said.

Gregg said the fence has definitely channeled foot traffic to other areas, and crossings closer to Otay Mountain and at Imperial Beach have increased. Whether the increase in the Campo area is due to the fence remains unclear, he said.

The barbed-wire border fence in the back of Masterson’s property, a stretch Masterson said Border Patrol officers had repaired less than a week earlier, already showed a massive gap.

To many, however, crossings that are not drug-related are merely part of living near the border. Tucker recently met a Salvadoran woman in Los Angeles who remembered crossing when she was 9 years old with a group of 30 people on the property Tucker now owns.

“That’s just people coming across and getting work,” John, the goat herder, said of the foot traffic.

But not all feel that way.

“I think we’re all real uncomfortable about the fact they’re coming over,” said Ruth Zelner, a volunteer at the Campo Community Center who said her dog has kept people from crossing her land. “All they have to do is sign and promise to go to a hearing and (the Border Patrol) lets them go. We’ve no idea who or what they are or anything else.”

Others feel some action should be taken.

“It’s so wide-open you can just drive right home,” said Clevenger, the dry waller who did just that after his late night in Tecate. “You hear what I’m saying. It’s easy. It’s too easy.

“I’d like to see the big fence come right through, because if you do run into these guys, they’re not going to spare you,” said Clevenger, who has been out of work for six months. He said illegal immigrant labor has flooded his trade.

Others, like Masterson, aren’t advocating any changes to the spindly cattle fence that serves as the border. But they aren’t predicting any end to the chases in the near future, either.

“I am kind of leery that it will keep going,” Masterson said. “It will probably slow down for, say, a month, and then it will happen again because they know that this road is here, right here from the border. They might slow it down, but I don’t think they’ll ever stop it.”