| | |  Americas & Beyond | July 2009 
Smugglers from Mexico Turn to Sea Off San Diego Coast
 Randal C. Archibold - New York Times
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July 19, 2009
 |  | It's always a fight between technology and the ingenuity of smugglers.
-Clark Alfaro |  | | |
San Diego — They move north in rickety fishing boats, often overloaded and barely seaworthy, slipping through the darkness and hidden from the watchful radar of American patrols.
Along beaches north of here, the migrants from Mexico and beyond scramble ashore, in groups of a dozen or two, and dash past stunned beachgoers, sometimes even leaving behind their boats, known as pangas. Drug smugglers, too, take this sea route, including one last month found paddling a surfboard north with a duffel bag full of marijuana on it.
As the land border with Mexico tightens with new fencing and technology, the authorities are seeing a sharp spike in the number of people and drugs being moved into the United States by sea off the San Diego coast.
Law enforcement authorities in the United States said the shift demonstrated the resolve of smugglers to exploit the vastness of the sea, the difficulty in monitoring it, and the desperation of migrants willing to risk crossing it.
"It's like spillover from a dam," said Cmdr. Guy Pearce, who oversees the anti-smuggling effort for the Coast Guard in San Diego.
For generations, people have tried to swim, surf and ride boats, sometimes carrying contraband, into the United States from south of the border.
But Pearce and other officials in the Department of Homeland Security say those sporadic efforts have accelerated to unprecedented levels recently: a doubling in the number of illegal immigrants caught on boats or beaches — more than 300 in the last two years — and a seven-fold increase in maritime drug seizures, principally several thousand pounds of marijuana.
The authorities have taken note that the increase coincides with the near completion of new, more fortified border fencing, including additional cameras, lights and other equipment, along a 14-mile stretch from the ocean inland.
New smuggling rings have also emerged, operating out of beach towns south of the border and islands off the Mexican coast, persuading migrants that the passage is safe and the ocean too wide open for maritime law enforcement to catch them.
A recent patrol with the Coast Guard showed they might have a point.
All night and into the early morning, the Coast Guard cutter Petrel dashed across the seas looking for any suspect boats. A tip that a suspect boat was due to pass miles off the coast around 1 a.m. sent the cutter, nearly all of its lights off to avoid detection, looking for it by the faint glow of a half moon. The boat was not found.
Later, just after at 4 a.m., a radar sweep picked up two boats moving quickly south, prompting the crew to cut off the classical music wafting from overhead speakers on a bridge lighted only by navigation monitors.
As the roaring engines sent the cutter crashing over swells for more than 20 minutes after the boats were first noticed, the crew could see the boats were traveling at high speed and without their lights on.
A boarding team mobilized with body armor and rifles and raced in a small craft from the cutter to check out the boats, some 21 nautical miles off San Diego's Point Loma. Just early morning fishing, said the people on the boats, who insisted they did not realize their lights were off. With no evidence of contraband, they were let go.
But Chief Petty Officer Gary Auslam, who was in charge on this watch, had his doubts as he watched the boats quickly motor on. Gunrunners bringing weapons from the United States move swiftly south like this, as do returning smuggling crews. "Boy, they got out of here pretty quick, didn't they?" Auslam said, gazing out the bridge.
It falls mainly to the Coast Guard and the Customs and Border Protection Division of Homeland Security to patrol the seas with a mix of cutters, aircraft and a few small high-speed boats.
Altogether, the authorities arrested 136 illegal immigrants sneaking in by sea in the fiscal year that ended Oct. 30, double the 66 marine arrests in 2007. Since October, more than 100 illegal immigrants have been arrested, bringing the marine arrests of illegal immigrants in the past couple of years to unprecedented levels, said Michael Carney, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in San Diego who overseas a task force devoted to combating marine smuggling.
The seizure of drugs, principally marijuana, has similarly skyrocketed. In the fiscal year that ended in October, the authorities seized 6,300 pounds of marijuana in the coastal waters north of the border, a seven-fold increase from the 906 pounds confiscated in 2007. This fiscal year, 6,100 pounds have been found.
"This is somewhat of an alarming trend," Carney said.
The Department of Homeland Security is responding to this surge with orders for more boats and equipment, though officials would not provide details, citing security concerns.
Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana, Mexico, and a lecturer at San Diego State University who has studied smuggling, said he doubted the fence was causing the spike. Instead, Clark Alfaro said, "a new generation" of smugglers have simply had success ferrying people over the seas and are encouraging migrants to go their way.
The charge is more than $4,000, roughly double what a pollero, or smuggling guide, would charge to lead somebody over land, he said. Marijuana smugglers, likewise, have gotten wise to the sea route. "It's always a fight between technology and the ingenuity of smugglers," Clark Alfaro said. |
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