War on Drugs Taking Toll on Border Agents

When they come looking for him at the shopping mall, federal drug agent Bernie Minarik slips out a back way. When his wife drops him off at work, she takes a roundabout route back home in case she’s being followed.

But when he discovered a highway flare that Mexican drug traffickers had planted in the gas tank of his car in an attempt to blow him to bits, Minarik nearly called it quits.

Minarik has been a Drug Enforcement Administration agent in Arizona’s border country for eight years, and he didn’t take the job expecting it to be danger-free. But he didn’t count on the violence seeping into his home life, on his kid going to school scared, on his wife biting her lip as she watches him fasten his bulletproof vest every morning.

Violence against federal agents, which used to be rare, is becoming more common along the Southwest border, where cocaine, heroin and other illicit drugs are pouring into the United States from Mexico in ever greater quantities. Increasingly, the men and women on the front lines of the drug war are being targeted by traffickers who outgun them, outman them--and are out to get them as never before.

Violent assaults against federal agents along the Southwest border--ground zero of the biggest drug trade in the world--soared from 156 in 1992 to more than 500 last year. Since 1994, two agents have been killed. In 1997 alone, the last year for which detailed statistics are available, agents were shot at 97 times. They were rammed with cars or trucks 64 times. On 20 occasions, assailants planted bombs.

Nowhere is the escalating threat more pervasive than in southern Arizona, where vast expanses of desert and a network of back roads leave law enforcement forces more spread out and vulnerable. From January to November 1999, there were 208 documented incidents of violence against federal officers in Arizona. That’s more than in any other border state.

As recently as two decades ago, assaults by drug traffickers on federal agents working the U.S. side of the nation’s Southwest border were so rare as to be almost unheard of. Better to dump the dope and run back to Mexico than risk time in an American jail, the smugglers apparently calculated.

Dodging Bullets and Ball Bearings

But these days, Border Patrol, Customs and DEA agents patrolling the Arizona border have been drawn into gunfights with traffickers who hang out the windows of their Broncos and spray rounds from AK-47s. Agents have been pelted with rocks, ball bearings and sharpened metal shards, and have been knifed, beaten and stalked.

Those like Minarik, who work undercover, are often found out by drug underlords who live in the same small cities as they do and who have the money and the technology to track their movements, DEA officials say. Agents listen to plots being hatched against them via cell phones. Their wives use their maiden names to provide an extra margin of safety. They rotate the cars they use for work.

And despite their increasingly intricate precautions, sometimes they are killed.

In June 1998, four traffickers associated with one of Mexico’s most violent drug gangs fatally shot Border Patrol agent Alexander Kirpnick on a dirt road in Arizona at point-blank range. Four days later, two Border Patrol agents were shot outside McAllen, Texas, by coked-up heroin traffickers. In 1994, DEA agent Richard Fass was shot dead as he foiled a methamphetamine buy.

“Even though I used to be a churchgoer, I don’t go to church anymore,” said Minarik, special agent in charge of the DEA office in Sierra Vista, a middle-class town about an hour from the Arizona-Mexico border. “You never know who’s going to be there.”

Said another DEA agent who works with Minarik: “It’s a constant state of vigilance because everyone knows who you are. It just never stops. You can’t go to a Circle K without seeing someone associated with someone you put in jail. You learn to accept it.”

The amount of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana smuggled across the border in this corner of Arizona is less than in other border areas. Baja California, the base of the Arellano Felix brothers’ notoriously violent drug mafia, has long been a prime conduit of drugs into California.

But it is in remote areas like Cochise County where smugglers, armed and paid by powerful Mexican organizations, increasingly face off against federal agents on quiet desert roads. Emboldened because they often outnumber the law officers they confront, and often under intense competitive pressure from other smugglers, they are more willing to risk attacking U.S. peace officers, officials say.

“People have no clue what’s going on down here. It’s the Wild West, and there just seem to be more bad guys every day,” said Larry Dever, sheriff of Cochise County, a rocky, mountainous corner of Arizona that has been adopted by Mexico’s drug gangs as a preferred route for moving their products north.

Dever once regarded his main job as keeping the people of his county safe from one another. But these days, he said, he spends most of his time helping the more than 600 DEA, Customs and Border Patrol agents who have flooded into the county to battle the drug trade.

Four exchanges of gunfire a week between U.S. agents and drug smugglers is the norm, officials say. High-speed chases of traffickers are common. Drug runners are regularly stopped carrying automatic rifles, and two underground tunnels used to transport drugs across the border were discovered last year.

In January, Border Patrol and Customs agents chased two Ford Broncos loaded with 2,600 pounds of marijuana 10 miles across the desert from Naco to Palominas as a drug smuggler in one of the vehicles fired round after round at them with a semiautomatic weapon. No agents were hit.

The next night, Cochise County Sheriff’s Deputy Jerry Sevier came across a pickup that had been used to run cocaine through a hole in the border fence near Naco. The truck was empty. But on the front seat was what Sevier interpreted as a message: a fully loaded .45-caliber revolver.

Like most of the law enforcement professionals in Cochise County, Sevier lives in Sierra Vista, a high desert town that, with its malls, cinema, supermarkets and well-endowed private schools, is somewhat removed from the seediness of the county’s two dusty border towns, Naco and Douglas.

At least that’s what Sevier thought a few years ago, before he became a sheriff’s deputy. In those days, he was a computer engineer working at a high-tech firm. He almost never drove into Naco, a cluster of trailer homes and wooden houses, or Douglas, with its strip of nightclubs. Violent drug trafficking seemed to have nothing to do with his life.

Then Sevier took this job because he wanted to work in law enforcement. And he learned that the violence was being hatched by his neighbors down the street.

“Before I became a cop I thought I lived in a nice Arizona town,” Sevier said, maneuvering his patrol car down a sandy border road where he had chased some heavily armed traffickers the month before.

“When I became a cop I realized, hey, this is my neighborhood. The bad guys are living here too.”

For those who work the border, there is no escape from the anxiety. Minarik and his colleagues work out of a low-slung, nondescript building whose few windows are bulletproof glass. The building is on a side street in Sierra Vista, but the capos of the drug trade know it’s there.

At the Border Patrol headquarters in Tucson, about two hours away, the lobby is dominated by a large plaque draped in black crepe. Engraved on it are the names of Border Patrol officers killed in the line of duty.

“Warfare along the border has become a lifestyle and a business,” Dever said. “The worst is yet to come. No matter how much we spend, the traffickers can spend more.”

Like many places along the border, smuggling has been a way of life for generations in Cochise County, with its 83 miles of border snaking across rock-strewn desert and windy plateaus. A century ago it was Chinese workers who made their way across the frontier to work the copper mines. During Prohibition, the economies of Naco, Douglas and other border towns were powered by bootleg liquor. And since the 1960s, at least, marijuana smuggling has fueled a thriving illicit economy.

But about a decade ago, the drug underworld upped the ante. That was when successful American interdiction efforts in the Caribbean began to force as much as three-fourths of the cocaine grown in Colombia and the other Andean countries to reach the U.S. through Mexico.

Mexican smugglers, who had usually been paid in cash to transport drugs, began taking their cut in the cargo. As the Mexicans expanded their own wholesale drug business in the United States, their earnings shot up dramatically, making them significantly richer, more violent and more defiant.

“The stakes are very high. The competition is very fierce among deeply entrenched smuggling organizations. These guys just have more to lose,” said James Woolley, assistant special agent in charge of the DEA’s Tucson office. “The guys we run into have instructions to shoot any resistance they might encounter. Gun battles and gunfire exchange is becoming the norm rather than the exception.”

Washington has responded to the rising violence by pouring more agents into places like Cochise County and arming them with deadlier weapons. Nationwide, the number of DEA agents in border counties grew 155% from 1994 to 1998. The Border Patrol is increasingly taking a role in the anti-drug battle, in part because its number of agents has more than doubled since 1993. The Customs Service is on the front lines as well, its heavily armed investigators roaming border roads in search of “mules” loaded down with drugs.

Critics of the buildup decry what they call the militarization of the border and point out that it has done nothing to stem the growing tide of drugs headed for U.S. cities and towns.

“What we have on the border is a slippery slope of more use of military-style practices and equipment by these agencies, and for what?” said Ethan Nadelmann, director of the New York-based Lindesmith Center, a drug policy research organization that has consistently criticized the drug war. “The cocaine, heroin and other drugs just keep coming.”

Trouble Recruiting Agents Fast Enough

Even those who insist the buildup is necessary recognize it’s easier to say you’re getting tough on the border than to actually do it. The Border Patrol has not been able to recruit people fast enough to keep up with congressional mandates. According to a December report by the General Accounting Office for the three-year hiring period ending Sept. 30, the Immigration and Naturalization Service had a net hiring shortfall of 594 agents. In fiscal 1999, failure and dropout rates among Border Patrol agents were higher than ever before, the GAO found.

“It’s difficult to get [agents] to come in,” said David Aguilar, director of the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector office. “A lot of times we hire the people, we train them, they look at the place, they look at Douglas, Ariz., and they change their minds.”

Agents on the front lines say they need all the help they can get. But they recognize the deadly calculus of which they are part: The more heavily armed agents that Washington stations in one area of the border, the more people the trafficking organizations, with their seemingly endless resources, hire and arm to fight back.

“The drug smugglers seem to be of the mind-set that they don’t want to be deterred by the increased interdiction effort that we’ve mounted in the last two years,” said Woolley of the DEA.

“We are at war, and we’re experiencing the consequences of that war in terms of violent encounters, and I only see that increasing. A lot of the drug dealers wear bulletproof vests now. They are prepared to battle, and they are prepared to win.”

Lee Morgan is a big man who favors cowboy boots and belts with massive buckles. He has been working the border for the federal government since 1974, first with the Border Patrol and now as a special agent for the Customs Service. He remembers when he could pull over a truck that he knew was loaded with illicit drugs and the driver would stop, get out and put up his hands.

“Now you put red lights on a loaded vehicle, he’s gonna run. And more than likely, he’s gonna shoot,” Morgan said. “They use their vehicles as weapons.”

Morgan said more than half of the agents he supervises at the Customs office in Douglas have had to use their weapons or have come under fire in the last year. The other half have been assaulted in some other fashion.

Two years ago, his agents were being stalked by drug traffickers so frequently that Morgan decided he’d had enough. He trailed one known trafficker who had been driving close behind one of his agents for weeks. By asking about him around town, he tracked down the trafficker’s address: a spacious house on a winding street in Douglas. Then he talked to the U.S. attorney’s office and got a warrant for his arrest on charges of intimidating and threatening a federal officer.

The trafficker has been a fugitive, apparently in Mexico, ever since.

“That’s the way it goes down here,” Morgan said. “At home, we live in glass houses down here. At work, we never know what’s gonna happen to us or what kind of shape we’re gonna be in at the end of it.”

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Agents Under Siege

The men and women charged with fighting the drug trade along the U.S.-Mexico border increasingly are being targeted by traffickers.

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Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation

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Includes assaults and other violence directed at U.S. Border Patrol agents, U.S. Customs agents and certain Drug Enforcement Administration agents. Excludes some undercover DEA agents.