Mexican Police Make Record Heroin Seizure : Trafficking: Authorities break up an unusual international alliance involving smuggling teams in Southeast Asia and Mexico transporting narcotics into California. Nine people are arrested.

Mexican federal police have made the largest heroin seizure in Mexican history, breaking up what authorities described Sunday as an unprecedented Asian-Mexican alliance that shipped Asian heroin into the United States through an unusual route: the border.

In a series of raids over the past five days, police seized 52 kilos--114.4 pounds--of pure heroin and arrested nine suspects in this port city about 70 miles south of San Diego, said Jose Arturo Ochoa Palacio, federal attorney general for the state of Baja California.

“This is a major blow to international drug trafficking,” Ochoa said.

Prosecutors filed drug trafficking charges Sunday against four Thai nationals and one Laotian, all of them U.S. residents allegedly involved in smuggling the heroin into California in vehicles.

The other suspects were Mexicans, including an employee of the Ensenada post office who helped sneak the heroin into Mexico from Thailand by mail, police said.

The bust apparently reveals a previously unknown and ingenious ring teaming Asian and Mexican smugglers at the border, said Jack Hook, a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in San Diego.

“This sounds like it might be a new trafficking route to get Southeast Asian heroin into the United States,” Hook said. “The methodology is new. . . . It’s a very significant seizure.”

Although smuggling of heroin across the porous U.S.-Mexico border is common, the vast majority is manufactured in Mexico, Hook said. Couriers generally smuggle heroin from Southeast Asia--the world’s largest producer of the drug--into the United States at major coastal cities such as New York and San Francisco.

The Ensenada traffickers allegedly mailed packages containing shampoo, soap and lotions to nonexistent addresses in Thailand, where accomplices in the Thai postal service concealed heroin in the bath products and sent back the packages as undeliverable, authorities said.

Because the packages were supposedly unopened and also contained Mexican products, the shipments did not have to go through Mexican customs inspection on their return, Ochoa said. U.S.-bound smugglers picked up the packages at Ensenada post office boxes and drove across the border into California.

In addition to indicating a potential new drug-smuggling route, the case is another example of the increasing internationalization of criminal organizations. Asian traffickers appear to have followed the lead of Colombian cocaine cartels that have gained access to the lucrative U.S. market by contracting with a longtime smuggling infrastructure in northern Mexico, Hook said.

Similarly, a flurry of arrivals around Ensenada last year by ships carrying U.S.-bound illegal immigrants from China resulted from a joint operation by Chinese and Mexican smuggling networks, causing a surge of Chinese immigrants trying to cross the border.

The heroin-smuggling ring had been operating in Ensenada since at least September, according to Mexican federal police. Investigators got a break after a postal administrator discovered that two packages mailed back from Thailand contained not only soap but also 17 kilos of heroin.

Police discovered several more loads at other post offices and later arrested the five Southeast Asian suspects.

Their statements implicated Alfonso Romero Verdugo, supervisor of the central post office in Ensenada, and three women suspected of storing the heroin before it was sent north, authorities said.

The heroin has a wholesale value of $20 million, but would be worth many millions more on the street, authorities said.