Texas Border Ranchers Decry Drug Smugglers

For the second time in a week, an unlikely group huddled in a conference room at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration headquarters here--not far from what has become one of the most porous spots on the U.S. border.

They were from the United States and Mexico. Some were former policemen, others lifelong cattle ranchers. But most were now cowboys with a deep mistrust of government, residents of what they call “The Free State of Maverick County.” And they came to see Uncle Sam, they said, as a last resort before they’re simply driven out.

Each owned a slice of land on the Rio Grande--the border between Mexico and the U.S. Each was a recent victim in the war that the United States is losing here to Mexican smugglers who are flooding the U.S. with cocaine, heroin, marijuana and illegal migrants.

Even the DEA officials in the room said that May morning that they were surprised by the number of ranchers who showed up--about a dozen--and alarmed by their message.

The ranchers said their problems began a few years ago when migrant-smugglers started cutting through their fences at night. But now, they said, heavily armed Mexican drug gangs were taking the smugglers’ place--terrorizing the ranchers in broad daylight as they smuggle record quantities of drugs and migrants through their property and into the United States.

Even the nearby riverfront Moody Ranch--where the CBS miniseries “Lonesome Dove” was filmed--was being victimized by smugglers, the ranchers and federal officials asserted.

Some of the ranchers already had sold out to smuggling gangs or their front men--a decision almost all in the room agreed was on their minds. But neither the U.S. Border Patrol nor any other law enforcement agency said it has the manpower to protect the ranchers--or this desolate frontier.

A 62-year-old federal-agent-turned-rancher, who, like the others in the room, refused to be identified for fear of reprisals, summed up the desperation. After months of digging surveillance bunkers, plotting aerial maps and patrolling his property by pickup, he concluded: “It’s we private citizens who have upheld the integrity of the border . . . and we can’t do it anymore. We’re losing America.”

Compromised Border

Based on the accounts of the Rio Grande ranchers, court documents, intelligence assessments by federal agencies and interviews with landowners, The Times--after an extensive tour north and south of the line--has found that drug-smuggling gangs have quietly compromised hundreds of miles of the United States’ southern border.

Using intimidation, bribery and murder on both sides of the Rio Grande, the smugglers have opened a route through Texas for billions of dollars of Mexican marijuana--and, increasingly, heroin and cocaine--destined for U.S. cities.

Equipped with night-vision equipment, cellular telephones, border sentries and their own intelligence network, the smugglers have outmanned, outgunned and out-planned the U.S. Border Patrol, Customs Service and DEA at strategic points on the Rio Grande--particularly in Maverick County and its seat, Eagle Pass.

They have threatened owners of riverfront property, forcing them to remain silent or even move out; they have corrupted several dozen local officials in about half of the 14 Texas counties along the Rio Grande in the last four years; they are increasingly combining their drug trade with the lucrative smuggling of illegal immigrants.

Statistics for drug seizures and illegal migrant arrests by the Border Patrol here in the first half of this fiscal year tell part of the story: In just six months, they more than exceed the totals for all of 1995 in both categories. And federal agents estimate they’re catching just 5%--at most--of the drugs and migrants moving across the river, day and night.

For example, between Oct. 1, 1995, and April 1, 1996, just on a 55-mile stretch of the river that includes Eagle Pass, the Border Patrol seized 41,382 pounds of marijuana; that compares with 33,291 pounds nabbed in all of the previous year and just 15,763 pounds stopped in the year before that. In the same period, 67,278 undocumented migrants were arrested here--almost double the 35,604 arrested in the entire year before.

Cocaine Bust

Evidence that cocaine is moving across the border in large quantities in this area came on May 25, when customs agents seized more than a ton of the drug--worth an estimated $100 million--in two Rio Grande arrests. Those hauls were followed a week later with a 1,018-pound cocaine seizure during a routine customs inspection of a tractor-trailer at the border.

In January, customs agents seized 55 pounds of heroin at the border crossing in nearby Del Rio--the largest shipment of that contraband ever detected in the region.

“There are so many little roads, back roads, side roads coming out of here that it’s impossible for us to stop it with the manpower we have in this sector,” conceded Benny Carrasco, the U.S. Border Patrol agent in charge in Eagle Pass.

He said he has been asking Washington for more agents since 1992, explaining: “For 24-hour coverage, you’d need to give me another 50 agents. Now, I’ve got 85 uniformed agents with 55 miles of river I’m responsible for, night and day. Simple math will tell you I just can’t do it.”

Carrasco and other Border Patrol agents said Washington has deployed most of its additional agents to San Diego and other troublesome areas in Southern California, leaving “soft spots” on the Rio Grande. The Border Patrol is training 705 new agents, but few are expected to be assigned to Eagle Pass, a training instructor in Del Rio said.

Donald Ferrarone, the DEA field division chief in Houston who is in charge of the region, is well aware of the problem. He put it even more starkly during a recent visit: “It’s the drug runners pouring across the Maginot Line here. All the basic elements are missing. There’s not enough people here; no infrastructure to interact with the [Mexican] side; and zero intelligence. What you’ve got here is a dark zone.”

It is a phenomenon that law enforcement officials fear will spread to even less populated areas of the Texas border. Agents there said they are anxiously watching Eagle Pass. They fear that drug gangs--after infiltrating counties in the lower Rio Grande Valley to the southeast--will employ a similar model to corrupt and penetrate other border “soft spots.”

Responding to such concerns, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey--President Clinton’s drug czar--has scheduled a law enforcement summit in El Paso this week to scrutinize the U.S. counter-drug strategy on the border. McCaffrey, after a briefing on Eagle Pass’ woes, also plans to visit here Tuesday, his office confirmed.

A June 10 news release on the upcoming Cabinet-level conference, which will include Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and other top U.S. officials, said it “will kick off Stage II of a comprehensive border-control strategy by cutting drugs off at their source before they wreak havoc on people’s lives.”

But the view from Eagle Pass is that the booming drug trade and its accompanying violence and corruption already have wreaked their share of havoc in the region.

“Ranchers here feel like the last Americans in Vietnam on the embassy roof--just trying to keep them off until the helicopters arrive to bail them out,” said a U.S. special agent assigned to a counter-drug task force here.

The Eagle Pass DEA headquarters itself illustrates the problem: For security reasons, there’s no indication on the lobby directory--or on any office door--that the DEA is in the modern, downtown office building. But visitors can smell it from the lobby: Thousands of pounds of confiscated marijuana are overflowing the office’s drug vault--so much so that Larry Leon, the DEA acting special agent in charge here, had to store the spillover in a detention cell.

“I’ve got 10,000 pounds in here now, and that’s just in the last 60 days,” he said of the captured dope. “I burned 6,000 pounds last Wednesday, and I’m still running out of places to put it all.”

Leon and the ranchers--who also were interviewed later on their properties--explained that smuggling gangs, which operate with near-impunity through Mexico and into the Mexican border state of Coahuila, are exploiting weaknesses in U.S. border defenses. Modern highways parallel the river on both sides and feed into little-patrolled roads that connect marijuana fields and clandestine cocaine airstrips deep inside Mexico with the U.S. interstate highway system.

There is, however, more at work here than just logistics. Law enforcement officials from San Diego to Brownsville stressed a delicate political problem, which they plan to discuss at the border summit: The Mexican federal police, they asserted, often act as middlemen, protecting tons of illegal drugs transported from Mexico’s interior to the border smuggling organizations, which control the river and have contacts with U.S. distributors.

Smuggling groups that control the Mexican side of the river are well known to U.S. drug and Border Patrol agents--all the major traffickers in Coahuila started as migrant smugglers, agents said. But the agents stressed that they get little cooperation from Mexican authorities in cracking down on the gangs.

The Victims

As the trade in drugs and migrants has merged, it has victimized not only the ranchers but also the illegal migrants.

Border Patrol agents, for example, say the migrants are charged less for their brief voyage across the river if they will carry drugs. But this can cost them their liberty, because the smugglers use them as decoys. While Border Patrol agents chase the migrants, the smugglers bring in another cargo: marijuana, destined for markets as far away as Chicago and Tampa, Fla.

Although many in the U.S. tend to view marijuana as a less serious matter than harder drugs, Ferrarone of the DEA and other federal agents said marijuana is “the cash cow” of Mexico’s drug cartels--wealthy, well-armed and well-connected enterprises that also started smuggling South American cocaine in the late 1980s and now are believed to supply 70% of the U.S. market.

“There’s cocaine coming through here too, but it’s harder to detect,” Leon said. “I think a lot of heroin is coming through here, but you can put it in something the size of a baked potato. . . . In any case, it all goes hand in hand, and it’s tearing up the border.”

Mexican ranchers see problems on their side of the river too. A rancher at the May DEA meeting explained over lunch in a cafe that smugglers started moving in south of the border--and onto his riverfront property--two years ago. They mowed down his fence. He rebuilt and fortified it. Finally, they just tore it down and took over. “They’re coming from all over,” he said. “They’re crossing [the Rio Grande] like crazy.”

He said he went to the DEA because he found no recourse in Mexico. “You can’t talk to the [Mexican] police or to the federal attorney general’s office or to the business community, because the traffickers are their major clients,” he said. “The general feeling is we can’t do anything on this side.”

But he expressed surprise that the U.S. side is also hamstrung. “I don’t understand why the richest government in the world can’t do anything about it,” he said. “It’s so blatant.”

Part of the reason, U.S. ranchers and federal agents agreed, is that the drug trade’s billions of dollars have generated the same kind of corruption on the U.S. side.

Court documents throughout Texas tell how wealthy smugglers have infiltrated more than a dozen local police departments, federally funded drug task forces, county sheriff’s offices and even federal agencies. They use the same tactics, officials assert, that have made the Mexican federal police their partners in crime south of the border.

Statistics released by the FBI show the agency helped win convictions of 79 local, state and federal officials on the Texas border since 1992--more than half of them involving narcotics-related corruption, an FBI spokesman said.

Rampant Corruption

Other federal officials said drug corruption is rampant north and south of the river. In counties southeast of Maverick County, officials have been convicted on charges of trafficking, possession and extortion involving hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of marijuana and cocaine. Consider:

* The three top elected officials in Zapata County--the sheriff, the clerk and the presiding judge--were sentenced to prison in 1994 on federal drug charges. The judge was convicted of conspiracy to receive bribes to give cocaine smugglers access to the county airport for shipments; the clerk was convicted of laundering drug-money proceeds; the sheriff pleaded guilty to money laundering after he was arrested in an FBI sting--he took a $20,000 bribe in exchange for permitting a smugglers’ motor launch to land a ton of cocaine on his border ranch.

* In Hidalgo County, a local mayor and police commissioner were convicted on charges they stole 626 pounds of marijuana from the police evidence room, and a justice of the peace in neighboring Starr County pleaded guilty in a separate case to charges of delivering 159 pounds of marijuana to an undercover DEA agent.

* And the corruption has begun to appear in Maverick County: Roberto Hernandez, a sheriff’s deputy, pleaded guilty in April to federal drug-conspiracy charges after he was caught using his squad car, while in full uniform and on duty, to smuggle marijuana through a Border Patrol checkpoint. He told investigators he had done it on numerous occasions. He was arrested in January and awaits sentencing.

* A federal grand jury last year indicted three local officials on charges of profiting from the drug trade while serving on a federally funded counter-drug strike force here. The case was the result of an FBI sting. U.S. prosecutors asserted that a Maverick County district attorney’s office investigator, the administrator of the county jail and the chief deputy in the Sheriff’s Department kept money and resold drugs seized from traffickers during a smuggling crackdown. The U.S. government dropped those charges, mid-trial, because the credibility of a chief witness was impeached in another matter. But much of the government evidence was videotaped or recorded, and, even while dropping this case, Assistant U.S. Atty. Charlie Strauss stated in court that he was convinced of the defendants’ guilt.

As for the Maverick County ranchers, they said they are convinced that some local officials are in league with smugglers. One rancher said of them: “They’re good guys. But they see all this money, they lose their morality, and they just become a part of it.”

The huge cash flow generated from smuggling drugs and humans has enriched the local Mexican smugglers. “These little smuggling organizations have been made rich,” the DEA’s Leon said, “rich enough to buy their own property on the river.”

Land Game

Owning Texas riverfront property helps secure those valuable crossings. Few of these property transfers are easily detected. Federal agents say the criminals disguise their deals through straw owners or dummy front companies, some of them based in Mexico.

In June 1993, for example, a federal court in Del Rio jailed Juan Manuel Ortiz-Salazar after he was convicted on charges of using his riverfront land to smuggle 1,213 pounds of marijuana into the United States. Federal agents caught him loading the bales of dope onto a trailer on the land on the outskirts of Eagle Pass; DEA officials said he leased the property from a hidden owner who was later traced through several front companies to Mexico.

And one rancher at the May DEA session conceded he unwittingly sold 67 riverfront acres to a businessman who later turned out to be a drug dealer. DEA officials said in interviews that they believe businessman Hector Jesus Ramon Fuentes, who pleaded guilty in New York to cocaine-trafficking charges last year, was moving cocaine that had been floated across the river from Mexico to his newly acquired Texas property.

U.S. drug intelligence analysts said Mexican trafficking cartels, which are much larger operations than traditional family-style smugglers with whom they contract on the river, have been buying up ranches in northern Mexico for years, building landing strips, bunkered warehouses and roads, and transforming them into drug-staging areas.

The local smuggling gangs’ effort to muscle into American property is new, said U.S. officials and locals. But why buy north of the Rio Grande? Better logistics, Border Patrol officials said. Ownership allows them to control access to the land by U.S. authorities. “If you own the property, you can control our comings and goings,” Border Patrol chief Carrasco said. “We have to notify the owners.”

As the pressure from the armed gangs has increased, the Border Patrol’s Carrasco said, the Texas ranchers “are ready to sell . . . and we know who’s going to buy the property--the doggone dopers.”

Few Options

For the ranchers, caught in the cross-fire, there are few options, especially as the violence has increased in recent months. They said they increasingly view themselves as trapped in a life-and-death struggle.

Indeed, last January, Border Patrol Agent Jefferson Barr was gunned down by drug smugglers while on routine patrol in Eagle Pass. Before his killing, officials said, the traffickers had never fired on agents. But, since then, there have been at least half a dozen exchanges of gunfire; agents now routinely patrol in bulletproof vests.

Barr’s killing was raised as a concern in congressional hearings in Washington. But no additional agents have been assigned to this area yet.

As a result, as the cop-turned-rancher observed at the DEA meeting: “The night belongs to the bad guys--all up and down the border.”

While others here speak of defending their holdings, of taking justice into their hands, the rancher spoke of his own future in the area. He recalled how he had, as a boy, waded across the river to play baseball with Mexican neighbors. Then he concluded: If nothing changes, he too will have to sell out to the highest bidder.

“I can’t leave this place to my daughter,” he said. “How can she protect it when I can’t?”

Fineman is a Times staff writer; Pyes is a special correspondent.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Drug Siege?

In Eagle’s Pass, the Maverick County seat, and other areas of Texas, residents and law enforcement officials fear that a sudden surge in the number of illegal immigrants arrested and drugs (especially marijuana) seized is a sign that the U.S.-Texas border has been compromised by increasingly wealthy and high-tech smugglers.

Residents on both sides of the border say smugglers have threatened ranchers who refused to sell out.

Marijuana seizures (In thousands of pounds)

‘96*: 41,382

****

Illegal migrant arrests (In thousands)

‘96: 145,000

* projected