Megacorruption at the border

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 11, 1996 | by Jamie Dettmer

Three senior U.S. Customs officials are targets of federal probes -- including Pacific Regional Commissioner Rudy M. Camacho. Craft is so common there even is a price list for federal cops on the take.

During the last four years the war against drugs has taken another distinctly dangerous turn: An American equivalent of the Retreat from Moscow appears to be occurring. Since the early 1990s an estimated 750,000 pounds of cocaine have been smuggled into the United States each year. Heroin abuse is reaching epidemic proportions. New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles have reported dramatic jumps in heroin use and deaths attributed to the drug. Teenage drug abuse nationwide has soared by nearly 200 percent.

South of the U.S. Mexico border, the drug cartels are growing in strength and viciousness--their tentacles reach into every nook and cranny of Mexican politics and law enforcement. Their audacity is not confined to Mexico, nor is their reach. Texas ranchers with land adjacent to the border have testified before Congress recently about how drug traffickers are intimidating them and brazenly using their property for smuggling activities. And allegations are mounting about drug-related corruption of American law-enforcement officers along the border. Slowly, surely and relentlessly, the Southern states of America are being drawn into the cocaine economy According to some U.S. lawmakers, Mexico's narco-traffickers, who are believed to be responsible for 70 percent of the cocaine pouring into America, now constitute a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.

In the first presidential debate of the '96 race, Bill Clinton defended his administration's record on narcotics. He refuted the GOP charge that he has given up on interdiction by trumpeting the work of his drug czar, Barry McCaffrey. He claimed he has "submitted the biggest drug budget ever" and has "dramatically increased control and enforcement at the border."

But Clinton's funding figures are disputed by Republican critics -- and federal law-enforcement officers -- who maintain that his drug strategy has overemphasized treatment for addiction at the expense of interdiction. They point out that Clinton's budget requests consistently have been designed to slash federal interdiction programs and U.S. funding for international and source-country counternarcotics efforts.

Some Democrats also have expressed concern about the thrust of Clinton's drug policy and publicly worried about the president's failure to use the bully pulpit of the White House to send out the old Reagan message of "Just Say No." The president's FBI director, Louis Freeh, and Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA, head, Tom Constantine, have been critical of the direction of drug policy and, in an April 1995 memo -- the full text of which the White House refuses to release -- outlined what they see as failings in Clinton's strategy, drawing particular attention to the administration's neglect of interdiction. In an interview during the summer with editors of Insight and the Washington Times, McCaffrey, a retired Army major general, admitted that the administration had, for the first two years, taken its eye off drugs.

Drawn by the importance of the issue and prompted by our readers, Insight has set out to discover how the war on drugs is being waged now at its sharpest point -- on the front lines at the Southwest border. In a series of investigative articles to be published during the next few months, we will try to pierce the fog of this war and show through a series of snapshots the larger picture of what the war on drugs is like for the foot soldiers -- for US. Customs Service inspectors and Border Patrol officers, for DEA agents and for those police officers and prosecutors battling corruption and narcotics on both sides of the 2,000-mile frontier.

Specifically, the series will:

* Explain why the foot soldiers believe the battle for the border is lost;

* Review what steps can be taken to turn the tide, such as a drug summit with the heads of federal law-enforcement agencies;

* Reveal the nature, structure and modes of operation of the Mexican drug cartels;

* Identify the narco-traffickers' battle order for control of the border; and

* Provide a Who's Who of the drug kingpins and their lieutenants.

Some of the information we have gleaned is virtually raw intelligence, such as details about a Mexican ranch close to Arizona that is used for cocaine smuggling by Amado Carillo Fuentes, Mexico's top narco-trafficker.

Other information comes from eye-witnesses, documents and interviews with dozens of inspectors, agents and internal-affairs officers of the various federal agencies involved in the war on drugs. We begin our examination with a review of the health of U.S. law enforcement along the 2,000-mile Southwest border. Between San Diego and Brownsville, Texas, for example, there are 24 ports of entry, or POEs, operated by the US. Customs Service. Few of these are untainted by allegations of drug-related graft.