Mexican Drug Traffic Now Roaring Into the US Heartland

By Roberto Suro
Washington Post Service

WASHINGTONTo his neighbors in a middleclass, predominantly Hispanic,
section of Houston, Chano Rojas seemed a quiet family man who lived in a
small house with his wife and stepdaughter. The 53yearold Mr. Rojas set
off most days for the old dockside neighborhood of Magnolia, which has
welcomed Mexican immigrants as a point of first arrival for nearly a
century. There, he was known as a oneman employment agency. He would pay
men cash to work a few hours unloading trucks or simply to stand on a
nearby street corner and watch for anybody who was not a neighborhood regular.

The best jobs went to men who would drive a car to Chicago, Washington or
another city. Mr. Rojas would tell them to take their families, obey the
speed limit and drop the car at a specified address. Sometimes he had as
many as a dozen people working for him.

Mr. Rojas is now serving a 30year federal prison sentence for drug
trafficking. Investigators found nearly 120 pounds (55 kilograms) of
cocaine more than $1 million worth at wholesale pricesin his
warehouse and more than $1 million in cash stuffed into a closet at home.

"You would have never figured Chano Rojas as a major league coke dealer
because everything he did blended into the community around him," said a
Houston police detective who helped close the case "It's that ability to
fade into the woodwork of a big Latino neighborhood that makes Mexican
dealers so elusive and so dangerous."

The burgeoning drug traffic from Mexico has generated corruption, violence
and a kind of lowintensity war along the border between Mexico and the
United States. But mounting evidence from many sourcesthe Rojas case, a
courtroom in Des Moines, wiretaps in Los Angeles, drug seizures in New
Jerseyconfirms that the problems have spread deep into the U.S. heartland.

Mexican traffickers have established distribution networks capable of
delivering marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine to local
retailers in most parts of the country.

Along the way, the traffickers are beginning to have a potentially profound
effect on MexicanAmerican communities in cities around the United States.
Mexican drug syndicates exploit the fact that their country is by far the
largest source of new immigrants to the United Sfates. They hide in the
neighborhoods that other Mexicans have established in every major city and
they recruit financially strapped newcomers as drivers, couriers and
lookoutsthe cannon fodder of their operations.

"Often we are dealing with people who know how to operate here because they
have spent time in the United States," said a senior Drug Enforcement
Administration official based in Texas. "They know how to gain access to
businesses, services, vehicles, and they have access to a virtually
unlimited supply of foot soldiers. All that has helped the Mexicans gain
dominance very quickly, and it also makes them much more dangerous in the
long run."

Although the number of individuals with any connection to the drug trade is
only a tiny fraction of the nearly 7 million people born in Mexico but now
living in the United States, the growing prominence of the drug operations
threatens to taint the whole of the Mexican immigrant experience, just as
the Mafia cast a stigma that Italian immigrants struggled against for
generations. Mexican immigrants and their children born in the United
States constitute the only large segment of the U.S. population that is
growing rapidly.

"The American people could turn on Mexico very quickly and make it the
scapegoat for their drug consumption problems, the same way they heaped
blame in the past on the Colombian cartels or the Mafia," said Rodolfo de
la Garza, a professor of government at the University of Texas in Austin.

Currently, most Americans distinguish between the mainly poor Mexican
immigrants they see living on the U.S. side of the border and the rich
Mexican drug traffickers they perceive as living and operating in Mexico,
said Mr. de la Garza, who has conducted extensive opinion research on
attitudes toward Latinos and in Latino communities.

"The distinction between good Mexican workers and bad Mexican drug kingpins
could break down, however and produce a much more widespread demonization
of Mexicans in this country," he said. "And if the Americans turn on
Mexico, it is the Mexican Americans who will get caught in the middle,"

Thomas Goldsbury, a teacher and community activist in a predominantly
Latino neighborhood in Houston, put it this way: "I see parents who are
scared to death at what is happening to their kids but they are scared to
death to admit it."

Mr. Goldsbury said he had watched local teenage gangs go from mischief to
felonies largely as a result of their involvement with drug trafficking.

" Drugs are the easiest form of income for a teenage boy who doesn't have
any skills and who doesn't speak much English," said Mr. Goldsbury, who
lives and works in area of southwest Mouston crowded with large immigrant
families and identified by the police as a prime recruiting ground for
Mexican traffickers seeking drivers and lookouts. It is increasingly an
area where drugs are sold and consumed.

"The parents are the weakest link in the whole chain because they are
usually working two jobs and they simply don't find out what their kids are
doing until it is too late," Mr. Goldsbury said. ''You are talking about
newcomers who do not feel like they belong here yet and who are still
struggling to survive. All that makes them and their children very, very
vulnerable."

The impact of the rise of the Mexican drug traffickers reaches far beyond
border cities like San Diego or El Paso, and beyond other cities with
traditionally large MexicanAmerican communities like Houston or Chicago.
It reaches deep into the heartland, touching unlikely places like Judge
Carol Egly's courtroom in Des Moines.

In the summer and fall of 1995, young Mexicans began appearing before Ms.
Egly as defendants. They had no credible identity papers and rarely spoke
any English. They seemed poor but were carrying thousands of dollars worth
of drugs, usually methamphetamine, a highly addictive stimulant.

"We didn't know who they were, where they had come from or what they were
doing," Ms. Egly said recently.

About that time, she also started seeing young lowans who arrived in a
frenzy. "They were literally climbirig the walls," she said. "Several times
a day we'd have people too incoherent to be arraigned, too noisy and
lunatic to handle in a courtroom." Some had committed bizarre crimes, like
the young man who pistolwhipped his grandparents or the woman who went on
a checkforging spree in her sister's name.

After several had been referred for psychiatric treatment, jail officials
discovered these suspects were methamphetamine users.

It took Ms. Egly a while to realize that she was seeing two small pieces of
a much bigger puzzlethe rapid expansion of the Mexican traffickers'
reach. These organizations had grown large enough and extensive enough to
become the primary impetus for an epidemic of methamphetamine use that was
sweeping the Midwest.

"All of a sudden we are looking at a very large and efficient drugdealing
operation that seems to have popped up out of nowhere and that has made a
real change in the life of this community," she said.

"How did that happen? I think we should know."

A few recent lawenforcement operations illustrate this widening impact:

Seven tons of cocaine were seized and 35 people arrested in an
investigation last summer that uncovered Mexican traffickers operating in
New York City, which has long been considered a stronghold of the Colombian
cartels. The cocaine arrived from the border area in tractortrailers with
false compartments or hidden in hollowedout stacks of plywood, and much of
the operation was run from headquarters in Los Angeles.

Another Mexican drug organization discovered this year operated with
distribution cells in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and the border region.

The police seized nearly two tons of cocaine hidden in a 30 ton shipment
of carrots that was on its way from McAllen, Texas, to wholesalers on the
East Coast.

More than 50 individuals have been prosecuted for running a network that
linked drug suppliers in Mexico and distributors in rural areas and small
towns in eastern Kentucky.

Two families dominated the network, which federal officials allege is
responsible for importing more than 11 tons of marijuana since 1992.