The More Time and Money the Government Spends Finding and Filling Drug Tunnels, The Bigger and More Elaborate They Get

Originally posted on August 10, 2014:

“You can’t fight markets,” says David Shirk, associate professor
of international relations and director of the Justice in Mexico project at the
University of San Diego. “When a market reaches a certain size, you
can’t fight it.” 

Joe Garcia, a deputy special agent with the Department of
Homeland Security and head of the San
Diego Tunnel Task Force, would beg to differ. He and his
colleagues have spent much of their careers doing just that,
discovering more than 200 drug tunnels under the California-Mexico
border since the inception of the task force in 1990. 

“We want to make it so unattractive to do the type of work that
they do, that they’ll go somewhere else,” says Garcia.

Garcia and his team are skilled at discovering tunnels and
filling them up and have garnered
favorable local press coverage on a number of big drug busts.
But despite these high-visibility wins for Garcia’s team, a recent
report from the California Attorney General’s office paints a
picture of a California-Mexico border that’s
leakier than ever and reports that California has surpassed
Texas as the nation’s top methamphetamine entry point. 

“For every mile of fencing we put up, for every extra thousand
or ten thousand border patrol agents that we throw into the area,
there’s always some trafficker or some organization out there who’s
figuring out how to maneuver around those obstacles,” says Shirk,
who contributed to the Attorney General’s report. 

Garcia acknowledges that the team’s initial approach felt a lot
like “playing whack-a-mole,” with a new tunnel popping up every
time they shut an old one down. So, the team shifted its strategy
and began targeting the heads of the organizations funding the
tunnels, which reflects a broader shift in the U.S. war on drugs.
Government efforts to systematically eliminate cartel leaders
promptly destabilized the region and led to some of
the worst bloodshed in the country’s history. 

“It was when the government decided to take on drug traffickers
that the drug war became a literal war,” says Shirk.

Decades of experience and improvements in technology have honed
the tunnel task force’s proficiency at detecting and eliminating
tunnels, and Garcia’s team has all but stamped out amateurish,
unskilled smuggling operations. In this challenging environment,
the most sophisticated and well-funded operations have cornered the
market and see a bigger and better payout at the end of the
proverbial, and literal, tunnel. As a result, the team has
discovered numerous so-called
“super tunnels” over the past five years: deep, multi-million
dollar, professionally constructed tunnels boasting elevator
shafts, high-powered ventilation, and even electric trains,
possibly making them some of California’s first ever profitable
rail projects.

The technological arms race between law enforcement and drug
traffickers has done little to shake Garcia’s faith in the
righteousness of his mission. He describes himself as the Dutch boy
from the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, holding his
finger in
the leaky dike to hold back a flood until backup arrives with a
more permanent solution.

“We know that’s a long, hard road, and we may never be
successful in our lifetimes. But we have to continue to lay that
foundation down,” he says.

That’s one way to think about America’s 40-year war on drugs.
Another is to imagine a tiny tunnel underneath the border. You fill
it. But another, bigger and better tunnel appears, so you assemble
a special team of professionals to fill up tunnels and keep up with
the professionals on the other side. And now, it’s just you, and
the professionals. You both learn and improve every time. The
tunnels are getting bigger and better, but at least you’re finding
them. You are finding all of them, right?

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Approximately 6 minutes. Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera
by Paul Detrick and Weissmueller. Music by Chris Zabriskie.