Mexican Cartels Tied to State’s Pot Groves

Sgt. Ron Caudillo of the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department saw the change coming five years ago as he looked down an old logging road covered with 7,000 marijuana plants.

His experience in the state’s most fertile pot-growing area told him the garden was not the work of any local doper. The scale was too big, the rows of sinsemilla too straight. Whoever it was didn’t even spread out the crop to avoid discovery.

Based on police intelligence reports and the presence of Spanish-language newspapers at the site, Caudillo suspected the plants belonged to Mexican growers--advance men for an influx of heavily armed traffickers now vying to dominate the state’s top cash crop.

“We weren’t used to seeing gardens like that,” Caudillo said. “Looking back, it was a sign of what was to come. In virtually every garden we went into after that, we kept finding the same things.”

Growing marijuana in California was once the exclusive domain of native-born profiteers, flower children from the 1960s and enterprising potheads with a knack for horticulture. Not anymore.

Over the last 10 years, authorities say, domestic producers have been gradually displaced by Mexican traffickers whose squads of undocumented workers and paid pistoleros trespass onto private property and national forest land to plant marijuana on an unprecedented scale.

Today, authorities in many parts of the state believe that 80% to 90% of the cannabis plants they confiscate from outdoor operations belong to Mexican growers. Most of them, police suspect, have ties to Mexico’s powerful drug cartels, which are steadily expanding their operations in the United States.

“Mexican nationals have been branching out into heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and now marijuana. They are just taking over everything,” said Special Agent Bill Ruzzamenti, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration supervisor who has overseen marijuana investigations in California.

The trend is particularly troublesome for police and property owners. With the price of potent sinsemilla at a minimum of $4,000 a pound wholesale, the pressure to safeguard crops and get them to market has increased substantially.

As a result, the new wave of growers pack more firearms than their predecessors, raising the potential for violence.

Federal statistics show that the number of firearms seized at outdoor marijuana farms in California has increased more than 25%, from 423 to 550, over the last five years. Those weapons range from .22-caliber pistols to military-style assault rifles.

In Northern California, Mexican national growers have opened fire on competitors, timber company employees and law enforcement officers.

“It has turned into a real public safety issue,” said Doug Goss, the land security officer for Louisiana Pacific Corp., which owns 320,000 acres of timber in and around Mendocino County. “There is a considerable threat to our workers, contractors and those who use our land for recreation, like the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and churches.”

For years, Goss had been on the receiving end of warning shots fired from semiautomatic and automatic rifles--sometimes 50 rounds at a time, he says. Then, two years ago, he and a Mendocino deputy sheriff raided what they thought was a small garden belonging to Mexican nationals west of Ukiah. From 20 feet away, one of the growers shot twice at the deputy with a revolver. Goss returned three shots with his pistol, but his target escaped into the forest. No one was injured.

Drug policy analysts say the entry of larger and more violent organizations from Mexico simply reflects the economics of the marketplace.

Demand for pot, particularly among the nation’s youth, has risen slightly since 1990 after a decade of decline. At the same time, eradication programs have reduced supply, putting upward pressure on price.

Powerful sinsemilla, the type of cannabis predominantly grown outdoors in California, now fetches prices as high as $8,000 a pound in some parts of the country.

By moving over the border, drug experts say, Mexican national groups have been able to fatten their profits even more by reducing transportation costs and eliminating the need to bribe government officials to get their shipments through.

The typical Mexican national operation relies heavily on illegal immigrants, who are lured with wages of $200 to $250 a week plus cash bonuses, free trips to the United States and fraudulent immigration documents.

All tools, pesticides, fertilizers, irrigation hoses, camping supplies and weapons are brought in on foot over some of the most rugged and inaccessible country in the state. Similarly, the harvest is hauled out in duffel bags and backpacks.

Although Northern California continues to be the venue of choice for most marijuana farmers, vast Mexican-run fields also are showing up with alarming frequency in San Bernardino, Riverside, Los Angeles, San Diego and Ventura counties--on farms, avocado ranches, state land and national forests.

“In the past, we had hippie types growing a couple hundred plants. They were laid back and nonconfrontational. This started to change about 10 years ago. Now, more than 90% of the groves we uncover are tended by Mexican nationals,” said Special Agent Tommy LaNier, who supervises U.S. Forest Service investigations on 3 million acres of federal land in Southern California.

Two years ago, Forest Service investigators discovered a 23,000- plant operation in the Cleveland National Forest in east San Diego County that they believe was run by Mexican nationals. It was the largest plantation found by the Forest Service in the region.

Several acres had been cleared under a canopy of oak trees. The site, virtually undetectable from the air, contained a greenhouse, electric generators, water pumps and a drip-irrigation system. The estimated value of the seizure was $92 million. The two growers escaped into the woods.

Police say Mexican growers have made their biggest gains in Mendocino and Trinity counties, which along with Humboldt County make up the so-called “Emerald Triangle.” The area is to marijuana farming what the nearby Napa and Sonoma valleys are to the wine industry.

The Emerald Triangle’s intense sun, fertile soil and abundant water supply are ideal for cultivating potent strains of marijuana.

Earlier this year, Mendocino deputies discovered more than 100,000 seedlings and young plants inside 17 clandestine greenhouses built on remote Louisiana Pacific land. It was the largest single seizure of cultivated marijuana in California.

Mendocino authorities have confiscated a record 160,000 plants this year, almost half of what has been found statewide. Caudillo estimates that 85% has comes from Mexican operations.

“They know what our manpower is,” Caudillo said. “Informants tell us that these groups are trying to plant as much marijuana as it takes to overwhelm us.”

Marijuana activists in Northern California, however, question authorities’ contention that Mexican growers have begun cornering the market. They say such reports have been greatly exaggerated in an effort to win political support for more expensive eradication programs.

“This is just more propaganda so the police can chase this illusion in the war on drugs,” said Ted Kogon, a pot legalization activist in Humboldt County, where few Mexican groves have been reported. “Ninety-five percent of marijuana cultivation is done by the American middle class for the middle class. Why would Mexicans want to grow pot here when it’s cheaper and safer to do it in their own country?”

Most of the year, only a few deputy sheriffs are assigned to marijuana enforcement in counties where growing is prevalent. They are up against drug rings with millions, if not billions, of dollars in resources.

But in August and September, just before the harvest season, those forces are combined with the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, a state-run program that provides air support and additional personnel drawn from police agencies around California.

Ten hours a day, five days a week, CAMP crews spot gardens, transport eradication teams and haul marijuana out of the back country with helicopters. Without the aircraft, law enforcement would be unable to detect much of the pot they now seize.

Early last month, CAMP joined up with Caudillo’s four-man eradication team. Their target for the day was timberland between Boonville and the Mendocino coast.

Because of the heavily wooded terrain, Caudillo’s men had to be ferried in by helicopter while tethered to 150 feet of steel cable. Over the site, pilot Fred Young threaded each officer through the fir and redwood trees and gently set them down in the middle of a fragrant marijuana patch containing 8-foot plants.

The garden was located on a series of terraces cut into steep hillside property owned by a private logging company. The underbrush had been cleared away, and plastic hoses for a drip-irrigation system crisscrossed the loamy soil. Two plastic barrels about five feet high captured water from a nearby spring.

Sleeping bags, ice chests and lawn chairs filled the growers’ campsite, but everyone was gone by the time Caudillo’s wrecking crew arrived.

“They sure went to a lot of trouble here,” said Jimmie Martin, a CAMP officer and reserve policeman from El Centro. “Hate to spoil the party.”

Caudillo warned the crew that the plants had been sprayed with pesticides. Scores of large rat traps also had been set along the furrows.

Wielding survival knives and Swedish brush axes, Caudillo’s men took less than an hour to cut down what had taken months of hard work to establish. When they were done, more than 500 cannabis plants with a potential value of $2 million wholesale were stacked like cordwood.

“If I can’t sell this stuff legally, nobody can,” said Maurecio Velarde, a reserve Long Beach police officer.

As usual, no one was arrested, which is a constant source of irritation for law enforcement agencies attempting to bring down the organizations behind the gardens. In many ways, police say, the style of the Mexican grower is turning out to be the perfect modus operandi.

Because someone else’s land is appropriated for planting, there is almost nothing that can be confiscated under federal and state asset-seizure laws.

The kingpins remain well-insulated from law enforcement because the illegal immigrants they hire know little, if anything, about the organizations they work for. About all the workers say to police is that a stranger drove up in a pickup truck and offered then $200 a week to work.

“If an arrest is made, you usually end up with people who are either mules or itinerant farmers,” said the DEA’s Ruzzamenti. “Although they may be involved in growing millions of dollars’ worth of illicit product, the level of violator we arrest is not what we would like in order to make an impact. That is very frustrating.”

Such law enforcement efforts may, in fact, aggravate the problem as much as they alleviate it, according to Mark Kleiman, a professor and drug policy expert at UCLA. Although eliminating tons of marijuana, he said, the actions have probably forced many small-time operators out of business, allowing more powerful criminal organizations to fill the void.

“You’re probably going to see more violence and corruption,” Kleiman said. “Domestic marijuana production is becoming more like a criminal enterprise than a hobby.”