Tunnels Found Under Mexico’s Northern Border Show Smugglers’ Deep Commitment Arturo Martinez - VOA News
go to original May 25, 2017

Drug smugglers trying to tap into the United States’ highly profitable market have developed all kinds of secretive routes to deliver their illicit goods. One tactic is to go underground.

Drug traffickers will spend as much as $2 million on construction in hopes of big profit in return, the Drug Enforcement Administration told the Associated Press earlier this year. The DEA links most of the cross-border tunneling to Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, whose boss, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán used other tunnels to escape twice from Mexican prisons. He was extradited to the United States in January and awaits trial on various trafficking charges.

The unfinished Galvez tunnel, discovered in 2009, was intended as a link from about 18 meters south of the Mexican border stretching 231 meters north into California’s San Diego neighborhood of Otay Mesa.

Now, instead of serving as a conduit for drugs, it has become a training site for Border Patrol agents. They scramble down ladders to a passageway 20 meters deep, nearly 2 meters tall and just over a meter wide.

The tunnel yields clues into tunnel engineering and equipment. Dug with drills, picks and shovels, it was outfitted with lighting, railway, telephone and ventilation systems.

To aid its detective work, the Border Patrol uses an assortment of complex tools, including ground-penetrating radar and sensors.

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