Border Sniper Incidents Making Agents Wary

Not long ago, Border Patrol agent Angel Pena’s biggest fear was tumbling down a deep ravine in the dark.

These days he worries about getting shot.

Snipers have shot at U.S. agents seven times in the past eight weeks, U.S. officials say. No one has been killed, but agents are now being watched over by specially trained Border Patrol sentries armed with M-16 assault rifles and ready to return fire.

In the first shooting May 17, one agent was grazed in the forehead and hit in the shoulder with shots from an AK-47. Bullets shattered his windshield, sending glass shards flying into his eyes, officials said. He is recovering, but doctors are still concerned about his vision, the officials said. He is the only agent to be wounded in the attacks.

Who exactly is shooting is still under investigation by both countries. The only known suspect is a former state judicial police agent, Javier Martinez, who was arrested at a hotel in Playas de Tijuana in late June on weapons charges, according to Baja federal prosecutor Jose Luis Chavez Garcia.

But U.S. suspicions reflect a deep well of concern about organized crime at the border.

“We are acting on the assumption that it is an organized criminal threat, from the alien smugglers and drug smugglers who no longer have free rein over the border,” said San Diego U.S. Atty. Alan Bersin, President Clinton’s southwest border czar.

“The smugglers who have owned this border for generations are reacting to a workplace that is no longer their own,” Bersin said.

Although Border Patrol agents have been shot at sporadically for years along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, they have never been so systematically targeted as in the past two months.

But as Mexico emerges as a major player in the international narcotics trade, Border Patrol agents are being thrust to the front lines of the drug war, exposing them to a cast of far more lethal enemies, lawmakers say.

“This is a border on alert, a border where there is great recognition that anything can happen,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). “You’ve got these cartels moving drugs across the border, and we know they’re operating with impunity. That adds an increased risk to the lives of Border Patrol agents,” she said. “This is a different border than it was two years ago.”

Nowhere is that perception more heightened than in San Diego. The neighbor of Mexico’s most violent narcotics organization, the Tijuana drug cartel, San Diego is a main gateway for cocaine and heroin bound for the world’s biggest illicit drug market, the United States. The county is also the Ellis Island of illegal immigrants.

To cope with the avalanche of binational law enforcement matters this triggers, U.S. and Mexican officials are cooperating more than ever at the San Diego border, U.S. officials say.

Analysts say gunmen may be trying to sabotage this.

“It would be to the advantage of drug traffickers to disrupt cooperation,” said Peter Smith, director of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies at UC San Diego. “The question is whether a big tragedy would interrupt whatever cooperation now exists.”

U.S. Atty. Bersin said the slaying of a U.S. agent at the border would not result in a replay of the diplomatic deep freeze that followed the torture-slaying of Drug Enforcement Administration Agent Enrique Camarena in 1985. Today, such an incident would only intensify bilateral cooperation against criminals, Bersin said, in a view echoed by Washington.

“These new channels of communication can help make a difference,” said U.S. Atty. Janet Reno in a recent visit to San Diego, where she toured the scene of the shootings.

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Alongside the cooperation there is also mistrust, fueled by the knowledge that Tijuana security forces are plagued by deep institutional corruption. There is also skepticism.

“I don’t see the cooperation,” Feinstein said. “It’s spin. It’s public relations. It’s political rhetoric designed to be soothing.”

The border shootings were preceded by months of unconfirmed reports of threats against American law enforcement officers in San Diego, reported by field informants to U.S. agencies. They began last fall, at a time the Tijuana cartel was engaged in a bloody turf war against rivals.

One Immigration and Naturalization Service bulletin issued in October said the alleged cartel leaders, the Arellano Felix brothers, had “reportedly contracted with local gangs on both sides of the border to kill federal law enforcement personnel”--preferably on U.S. soil, according to the memo. The memo said smugglers had instructions “to kill any law enforcement officials that impede drug smuggling operations.”

In recent months, U.S. officers have received reports that cartel henchmen will pay $10,000 for the home address of any U.S. federal agent.

U.S. law enforcement officers believe many such reports may be designed simply to intimidate.

“We can’t afford not to take any threat to an American life seriously,” one agency chief said. “But we can’t go on condition red every time someone reports a threat.”

All U.S. agencies have taken some cautionary measures.

But the Border Patrol, the agency under fire, has tried to avoid overreacting and adopting measures that could lead to tragedy.

Johnny Williams, the chief of San Diego’s 2,000-strong sector, says he has warned Border Patrol agents to be cautious during trips to Mexico and to provide headquarters with as many details on their travel plans as possible.

Out in the field, agents most at risk are gradually getting .40-caliber semiautomatic Barettas, replacing the .357 magnums first issued years ago, a changeover begun last summer. They also have access to 12-gauge Remington shotguns.

In some stations in rural east San Diego County, a specially trained response unit has been allowed to use M-16 assault rifles.

That unit was assigned to Imperial Beach posts after the May 17 shooting and they have fired back at snipers in subsequent incidents, Williams said.

The Border Patrol has resisted making the M-16s more widely available in Imperial Beach, despite the urging of some outspoken officials of their own union. M-16s have a range of more than a mile and could pose a hazard to the densely populated neighborhoods of Tijuana.

“This escalation of violence is of grave concern to me and my agents,” said Williams, who himself was shot at in the 1970s, when he was a Border Patrol agent in Laredo.

“We need to take precautions, but not let our reactions boil over. We need the presence of mind to have a professional response,” he said. “Caution is the right response.”

Feinstein agreed.

“I think what they’re doing is really the right thing,” she said. “I think it’s really important to be careful how firearms are handled on the border. If this kind of thing keeps up, that might change. But at this point, I think that’s the right reaction.”

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The five-mile stretch where all but one of the shootings occurred had been relatively peaceful in the past few years. The silent, dusty canyons and gulches between the Pacific Ocean and the San Ysidro crossing bear no resemblance to the chaotic, crime-filled no-man’s land it was for years before Operation Gatekeeper, Clinton’s 3-year-old western border crackdown.

Now, immigrants have moved to eastern San Diego County, to places such as Buttewick Canyon, where the latest shooting took place June 30 as U.S. agents were rounding up immigrants at dawn. The canyon is a longtime drug smuggling route used by illegal immigrants since Gatekeeper restricted their traditional routes. In this area, Border Patrol agents often stumble across backpacks full of drugs.

“We’ve made it increasingly difficult for drug traffic between the ports of entry,” said Williams, who is also branch chairman of a national law enforcement council called the High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.

“We are making it tough on crime, and shifting it out of their traditional areas,” he said. “And that certainly could have some bearing on their reaction.”

By now, just about every agent on night patrol has been on duty during one of the shootings, and all are exercising greater caution. Some agents have pulled back from the border floodlights. Others carefully scan the Ensenada highway that gunmen have used as a staging area.

Angel Pena, 29, sits in his vehicle as far back from the tripod-mounted night scope viewer as the electrical wire will stretch. He covers the video monitor so its green glow won’t make him a target “just in case there’s a sharpshooter.”

“Gunfire along the border is not unheard of,” Pena said. “But to actually be targeted by a gunman--that is the anomaly. You just become more careful and stay on your toes. There’s not much more you can do.”