Drug Busts Surge on Mexico Border

Cocaine and marijuana seizures inside the southwestern U.S. border and along Mexico’s Pacific coast have escalated dramatically in the last two years, alarming U.S. law enforcement authorities, who say Mexican traffickers are sending greater quantities and larger loads of drugs into the United States.

Seizures of marijuana by U.S. agencies along the southwestern U.S. border, where 70% of all illicit drugs enter the country, are up as much as 33% over last year, according to U.S. drug interdiction agencies. From 1991 to 1998, seizures have jumped from 113 tons to 720 tons. At the same time, cocaine loads off Mexico’s Pacific coast appear to have increased dramatically; and this year, the U.S. Coast Guard made the largest cocaine hauls in its history in both the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean.

The heavier flow of drugs has exacerbated ongoing problems of trust and cooperation between U.S. and Mexican authorities and is particularly troubling to U.S. law enforcement in light of new statistics showing rising marijuana use among American teenagers.

The rising number of seizures reflects not only greater smuggling activity but also dramatic increases in drug production in Colombia and Mexico, according to U.S. officials and reports from law enforcement agencies. U.S. authorities estimate that they capture 10% to 15% of all drugs smuggled into the country. Although many officials credit improved coordination among U.S. law enforcement agencies for the increase in seizures, they say the trend clearly indicates that more drugs are arriving in the United States.

The year’s mounting tally of drug seizures, new U.S. calculations of significantly increased cocaine production in Colombia and expanding opium poppy and marijuana production in Mexico are sending “shock waves through the system,” said a senior U.S. official involved in monitoring drug trafficking.

Mexican authorities dispute some of the U.S. conclusions but said they would not compile Mexican seizure totals until next month and declined repeated requests to discuss this year’s trends until their figures are made public. Earlier this year, Mexico’s top anti-drug official, Mariano Herran Salvatti, said he believed that cocaine shipments into Mexico had dropped 50% this year, but he did not provide detailed supporting data.

Herran said in a news conference this summer that marijuana and poppy yields were up in Mexico because eradication is becoming increasingly difficult, noting that “the illicit plantations are turning ever more away from populated areas and into federal lands in the mountains.”

Mexican drug cartels appear to be reorganizing their operations to improve the transport of South American cocaine and Mexican marijuana and heroin to the United States at a time when many Mexican anti-narcotics units are in serious disarray and have made little progress in targeting the country’s biggest cartel leaders, according to U.S. law enforcement agencies.

“The drug groups are flexible and innovative and are using ever more sophisticated and well-organized countersurveillance and counterintelligence,” a new U.S. government intelligence assessment stated. “They are constantly . . . identifying and exploiting law enforcement predictability, patterns, weaknesses, vulnerabilities and routines.”

Although politicians at the highest levels in both countries continue to say that cooperation has improved, Richard A. Fiano, chief of operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, told a congressional subcommittee in September: “Until such time that adequate anti-corruption assurances and safeguards can be implemented, DEA will exercise extreme caution in sharing sensitive information with our Mexican counterparts.”

Fiano described the “investigative achievements” of Mexico’s most elite anti-drug units against major cartels as “minimal.” A special fugitive apprehension team created by Mexico’s anti-narcotics agency to track down the leaders of the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix cartel, one of Mexico’s two largest drug mafias, “has not participated in any significant enforcement activity,” Fiano said.

Mexican politicians this year created a national police force for fighting drug trafficking and other crime.