| | |  Americas & Beyond 
Baja Smugglers’ Use of Boats Rising Rapidly
 Leslie Berestein - San Diego Union-Tribune
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January 25, 2010
 |  | A panga this month was found drifting about five miles off Point Loma, its passengers dehydrated and disoriented. They had been lost at sea for two days.
- Lt. Josh Nelson, U.S. Coast Guard |  | | |
On any given night, small fishing boats from Mexico are puttering up the San Diego County coast, unlighted and so dangerously overloaded with human cargo that their hulls are barely above water.
Until recently, the smuggling of illegal immigrants into the United States by sea was a phenomenon mostly associated with the Florida Straits, long a corridor for boats and rafts loaded with immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere attempting an often fatal trek toward Miami.
The deaths of two immigrants after an overcrowded smuggling vessel capsized off Torrey Pines State Beach on Jan. 16 highlighted the area’s status as a maritime corridor for the illicit traffic of people and drugs. The two victims, a man from Mexico and a woman from Guatemala, are the first known maritime smuggling fatalities in San Diego County.
“It was totally predictable,” said Wayne Cornelius, director emeritus of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California San Diego. “People always underestimate the determination of the migrants themselves, and the creativity of the professional people smugglers.”
Border experts and immigration authorities concur that as land smuggling routes have become harder to penetrate because of tighter border enforcement, smugglers have come up with new options. Those involve not only Pacific routes but the Gulf Coast of Texas.
Immigration authorities say there are cells of Mexican smuggling organizations that dedicate themselves to the maritime human smuggling trade, a trend that has grown dramatically in this region over the past three years.
As authorities have responded with more sea patrols, including roaming U.S. Customs and Border Protection powerboats and increased Coast Guard vigilance, smugglers have become bolder. In recent months, suspected smuggling boats have been found abandoned onshore in southern Orange County, said Mike Carney, deputy special agent in charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Diego.
Smugglers are also taking their human cargo as far as 25 miles out to sea, crossing open ocean in small fishing boats called pangas — 20- to 30-foot wooden craft that are not sturdy enough for such voyages.
Since 2007, the frequency and cost of maritime smuggling between Baja California and San Diego County has spiked. From fiscal 2007 to 2009, apprehensions in boat-related smuggling incidents off San Diego County increased from 35 to 152. The pace has picked up over the fall and winter months, with 138 illegal immigrants arrested since Oct. 1.
The average price of the trip has gone from about $2,000 — common even a year ago — to as much as $5,000, making it one of the most expensive ways to be smuggled from Mexico, according to ICE investigators. That is more than the average rate paid to be smuggled through a port of entry and double the going rate for crossing the border on foot.
There seems to be a perception among immigrants that entering illegally by sea is safer than crossing by land and that there is less risk of getting caught, said Alberto Díaz, a spokesman for the Mexican Consulate in San Diego.
“We can only speculate that they (the smugglers) are telling them it’s a safer option than crossing through the mountains and the desert,” Díaz said. “Perhaps they think it’s safer, more effective, not as much vigilance as in the border zone. But there are other risks, as we saw in this terrible incident. There is no guarantee.”
San Diego is not the only place seeing an increase in these incidents. While Florida remains the key destination of maritime smugglers, Border Patrol officials in eastern Texas are reporting an uptick in human and drug smuggling along the Gulf of Mexico as traffickers, trying to circumvent border enforcement and highway checkpoints, attempt to get their cargo north toward Houston.
“They have gotten as close as the shoreline and as far out as 40 nautical miles,” said Joe Treviño, a supervisory agent with the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector. “I’d say the increase is fairly recent, due to our tactical infrastructure. It is pushing them to get a little more desperate.”
Smugglers there try to blend in with the local fishing industry, Treviño said. Human smugglers often have immigrants cross the river into Texas first, then get them to boats and ferry them up the coast to avoid detection. Drug smuggling boats come straight up from Mexico.
Carney, of ICE in San Diego, said there has also been an increase in maritime drug smuggling locally.
“Generally, the cells that get involved in alien smuggling by boat, once they perfect their craft, they move into smuggling drugs,” Carney said.
Like the land routes used for smuggling drugs and people, the sea smuggling routes are controlled by drug cartels that collect a fee from human smugglers who use them, Carney said.
Maritime smuggling has existed off the San Diego County coast, but incidents were infrequent, Carney said. A few years ago, immigration authorities were observing a small number of human smuggling arrests involving recreational boats, often beat-up older vessels that tried to blend in with summer boat traffic.
Since then, smugglers have moved over to using pangas, and the pace has picked up. There are launching sites as far south as Ensenada, Carney said, the most notorious of which is Popotla, a fishing and artisan village near Rosarito Beach. Sometimes, the uninhabited Coronado Islands are used as a second staging area before the trek north, Carney said. Rather than try to blend in during the day, they travel at night, attempting to land before dawn.
The boats are too small for the loads they carry; the panga that capsized Jan. 16 had about two dozen people on board, authorities said. They run on a single outboard motor and are ill-equipped, often lacking lights, working radios or appropriate flotation devices. They also usually lack food and water for anything beyond a quick run up the coast.
A panga this month was found drifting about five miles off Point Loma, its passengers dehydrated and disoriented. They had been lost at sea for two days, said Lt. Josh Nelson of the U.S. Coast Guard in San Diego.
“It’s safe to say they (smugglers) are not concerned with safety,” Nelson said.
Immigration authorities have devoted resources to fighting maritime smuggling in recent years, including increased patrols by U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Marine Interdiction Unit, which works with other federal and local authorities.
Smugglers who are caught are being prosecuted, including two men who were on the boat that capsized at Torrey Pines. Both are Mexican citizens, and they face federal smuggling charges.
This is the first time the California coastline has been such a focus of federal law enforcement activity since the Prohibition era, when bootleggers ran alcohol up the coast as far as Northern California, said Cornelius at UCSD.
As long as there is demand, human and drug smugglers will continue their trade, Cornelius said. And like on land, no one knows how many maritime smuggling attempts have been successful.
“The only cases that we know about are those in which there have been apprehensions,” he said. “We have no idea how many landings have been made undetected.”
Leslie Berestein: leslie.berestein(at)uniontrib.com
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