If everyone had kept quiet, it could have been the most valuable parking spot on earth. Convenient only to the careworn clothing stores clustered in the southern end of downtown Nogales, Ariz., it offered little to shoppers, and mile-long Union Pacific (UNP) trains sometimes cut it off from much of the city for 20 minutes at a time. But the location was perfect: In the middle of the short stretch of East International Street, overshadowed by the blank walls of quiet commercial property, the space was less than 50 feet from the international border with Mexico.
On Aug. 16, 2011, just before 3:30 p.m., three men sat in a white Chevrolet box truck parked near the Food City supermarket on Grand Court Plaza. In the driver’s seat was Anthony Maytorena; at 19, Maytorena already had an impressive criminal record, and a metal brace on one arm as a result of being shot while fleeing from local police three years earlier. Locked in the cargo compartment behind him were two boys from Nogales, Sonora, the Arizona town’s twin city on the other side of the border—Jorge Vargas-Ruiz, 18, and another so young that his name has never been released. Together they drove over to International Street, where two cars were holding the parking spot for them.
Maytorena parked the truck, climbed out, and—watched by a spotter gazing down from high up in the hills on the Sonoran side of the border—sauntered around the corner. Inside, the two teenagers lifted a hatch in the floor of the cargo compartment; beneath, in the steel box that had once contained the truck’s refrigeration unit, was a trapdoor that opened less than a foot above the street.
On a word from the spotter, men underground lowered a camouflaged circular plug of concrete held in place by a hydraulic jack, revealing a hole just 10 inches in diameter. The hole opened into a tunnel 3 feet square and 90 feet long, leading to a room in an abandoned hotel on the Mexican side of the border. It took less than 40 minutes to transfer 207 tightly wrapped bundles of marijuana from the San Enrique hotel to the back of the truck: more than 2,600 pounds in all, conservatively valued at just over a million dollars.
U.S. Border Patrol agents and officers of the Nogales Police Department rode slowly past the truck while the transfer took place. None of them noticed anything unusual. Customs officers manning the pedestrian border crossing at the end of the street continued their work as normal. With the cylindrical plug jacked back into place, the boys in the back of the truck used a caulking gun to close the seam around it with concrete sealant. Once again, the tunnel entrance in the parking space was invisible. As the truck pulled away at a little before 4:30 p.m., it had begun to rain. Behind the wheel, Maytorena almost certainly believed the tunnel operation had been yet another audacious success.
Crime has been coming up out of the ground in Nogales for a while now. Since 1995 more than 90 illicit underground passageways have been discovered in various states of completion in the two-mile stretch of urban frontier that separates Arizona’s Nogales from its far larger twin in Sonora. Twenty-two complete tunnels have been found in the past three years alone. Streets have opened up beneath unwary pedestrians and subsided under heavy vehicles; the city has become infamous as the Tunnel Capital of the Southwest.
Although quantification is impossible, the underground shipment routes represent a significant economic investment, one that far exceeds the time and money spent on the homemade submarines, ultralight aircraft, and catapults used to move narcotics elsewhere. Some tunnels cost at least a million dollars to build and require architects, engineers, and teams of miners to work for months at a stretch. A few include spectacular feats of engineering, running as much as 100 feet deep, with electric rail systems, elevators, and hydraulic doors. But the economies of scale are extraordinary. Tunnels like these can be used to move several tons of narcotics in a single night.
by Adam Higgenbotham, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
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