NARCOmex TUNNEL UNDER OUR OPEN & UNDEFENDED BORDERS

Another day, another tunnel

17 Aug 2011

A few days ago, the Defense Ministry sent around a bulletin saying soldiers had discovered a 977-foot tunnel being dug under the U.S. border from Tijuana.
The tunnel was not yet fully excavated. But like many of the increasingly sophisticated tunnels that criminal gangs dig, it had lighting and ventilation systems. The tunnel was 3-feet wide and 6-feet tall. The army said a citizen complaint had led them to the tunnel, which was in a partially constructed house adjacent to the Tijuana international airport.
Mexican army Gen. Alfonso Duarte told reporters that the tunnel had been under construction for about a year and had already reached U.S. soil. He said it needed to go about 300 more feet to be completed.
The announcement barely created a ripple since tunnels are found many times a year. Indeed, the Department of Homeland Security reports that 154 attempted tunnels have been found along the Southwest border since 1990. Most of them are near Tijuana and San Diego because warehouses and trailer truck traffic can mask illicit activity, and the clay-like soil is easier to dig. Two large tunnels were found within three weeks of each last November opening to warehouses in Otay Mesa, a zone of some 600 warehouses near San Diego.
The tunnels, obviously, are security threats for both the United States and Mexico. Just as narcotics and undocumented migrants can travel northward, weapons can go south.
The U.S. attorney for southern California, Laura E. Duffy, told the Senate Caucus on Narcotics in June that the U.S. government has provided Mexico with tunnel safety and detection equipment and “tunnel exploring robots.”
But it is a tough battle.
“The technology used to create tunnels is outpacing the creation of effective technologies for discovering them,” she said.
Drug gangsters almost never go to the tunnel sites and compartmentalize knowledge of the construction. They use sophisticated horizontal drills that can pierce metal and concrete, she said.
Moreover, she said, the Border Enforcement Security TaskForce “believes that some tunnel excavators in Mexico are killed when the job is done to prevent them from spreading the word on the location.”
Here’s more of what Duffy said:
“Understandably, American citizens react to news stories about the discovery of a large tunnel, complete with plumbing, lights, ventilation and a rudimentary railway system, with a mixture of surprise, indignation, alarm and dismay. How, they ask, can such a sophisticated illegal structure be constructed right under our noses? What will stop this from occurring again? And how can we punish those responsible for creating the tunnels? The answer is layered with complexities that are not always obvious to the casual observer. The reason tunnels seem to appear suddenly, with no tell tale signs of digging, is that most of the work is done on foreign soil. All of the tunnels discovered thus far were started in Mexico. The critical witnesses and evidence are usually located in Mexico where we are unable to independently investigate.”