Mexican Cartels Tied to State's Pot Groves

UKIAH, Calif.Sgt. Ron Caudillo of the Mendocino County Sheriff's
Department saw the change coming five years ago as he looked down an
old logging road covered with 7,000 marijuana plants. His experience
in the state's most fertile potgrowing area told him the garden was
not the work of any local doper. The scale was too big, the rows of
sinsemilla too straight. Whoever it was didn't even spread out the
crop to avoid discovery. Based on police intelligence reports and the
presence of Spanishlanguage newspapers at the site, Caudillo
suspected the plants belonged to Mexican growersadvance men for an
influx of heavily armed traffickers now vying to dominate the state's
top cash crop. "We weren't used to seeing gardens like that,"
Caudillo said. "Looking back, it was a sign of what was to come. In
virtually every garden we went into after that, we kept finding the
same things." Growing marijuana in California was once the exclusive
domain of nativeborn profiteers, flower children from the 1960s and
enterprising potheads with a knack for horticulture. Not anymore.
Over the last 10 years, authorities say, domestic producers have been
gradually displaced by Mexican traffickers whose squads of
undocumented workers and paid pistoleros trespass onto private
property and national forest land to plant marijuana on an
unprecedented scale. Today, authorities in many parts of the state
believe that 80% to 90% of the cannabis plants they confiscate from
outdoor operations belong to Mexican growers. Most of them, police
suspect, have ties to Mexico's powerful drug cartels, which are
steadily expanding their operations in the United States. "Mexican
nationals have been branching out into heroin, cocaine,
methamphetamine and now marijuana. They are just taking over
everything," said Special Agent Bill Ruzzamenti, a U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration supervisor who has overseen marijuana
investigations in California. The trend is particularly troublesome
for police and property owners. With the price of potent sinsemilla
at a minimum of $4,000 a pound wholesale, the pressure to safeguard
crops and get them to market has increased substantially. As a
result, the new wave of growers pack more firearms than their
predecessors, raising the potential for violence. Federal statistics
show that the number of firearms seized at outdoor marijuana farms in
California has increased more than 25%, from 423 to 550, over the
last five years. Those weapons range from .22caliber pistols to
militarystyle assault rifles. In Northern California, Mexican
national growers have opened fire on competitors, timber company
employees and law enforcement officers. "It has turned into a real
public safety issue," said Doug Goss, the land security officer for
Louisiana Pacific Corp., which owns 320,000 acres of timber in and
around Mendocino County. "There is a considerable threat to our
workers, contractors and those who use our land for recreation, like
the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and churches." For years, Goss had been
on the receiving end of warning shots fired from semiautomatic and
automatic riflessometimes 50 rounds at a time, he says. Then, two
years ago, he and a Mendocino deputy sheriff raided what they thought
was a small garden belonging to Mexican nationals west of Ukiah. From
20 feet away, one of the growers shot twice at the deputy with a
revolver. Goss returned three shots with his pistol, but his target
escaped into the forest. No one was injured. Drug policy analysts say
the entry of larger and more violent organizations from Mexico simply
reflects the economics of the marketplace. Demand for pot,
particularly among the nation's youth, has risen slightly since 1990
after a decade of decline. At the same time, eradication programs
have reduced supply, putting upward pressure on price. Powerful
sinsemilla, the type of cannabis predominantly grown outdoors in
California, now fetches prices as high as $8,000 a pound. By moving
over the border, drug experts say, Mexican national groups have been
able to fatten their profits even more by reducing transportation
costs and eliminating the need to bribe government officials to get
their shipments through. The typical Mexican national operation
relies heavily on illegal immigrants, who are lured with wages of
$200 to $250 a week plus cash bonuses, free trips to the United
States and fraudulent immigration documents. All tools, pesticides,
fertilizers, irrigation hoses, camping supplies and weapons are
brought in on foot over some of the most rugged and inaccessible
country in the state. Similarly, the harvest is hauled out in duffel
bags and backpacks. Although Northern California continues to be the
venue of choice for most marijuana farmers, vast Mexicanrun fields
also are showing up with alarming frequency in San Bernardino,
Riverside, Los Angeles, San Diego and Ventura countieson farms,
avocado ranches, state land and national forests. "In the past, we
had hippie types growing a couple hundred plants. They were laid back
and nonconfrontational. This started to change about 10 years ago.
Now, more than 90% of the groves we uncover are tended by Mexican
nationals," said Special Agent Tommy LaNier, who supervises U.S.
Forest Service investigations on 3 million acres of federal land in
Southern California. Two years ago, Forest Service investigators
discovered a 23,000 plant operation in the Cleveland National Forest
in east San Diego County that they believe was run by Mexican
nationals. It was the largest plantation found by the Forest Service
in the region. Several acres had been cleared under a canopy of oak
trees. The site, virtually undetectable from the air, contained a
greenhouse, electric generators, water pumps and a dripirrigation
system. The estimated value of the seizure was $92 million. The two
growers escaped into the woods. Police say Mexican growers have made
their biggest gains in Mendocino and Trinity counties, which along
with Humboldt County make up the socalled "Emerald Triangle." The
area is to marijuana farming what the nearby Napa and Sonoma valleys
are to the wine industry. The Emerald Triangle's intense sun, fertile
soil and abundant water supply are ideal for cultivating potent
strains of marijuana. Earlier this year, Mendocino deputies
discovered more than 100,000 seedlings and young plants inside 17
clandestine greenhouses built on remote Louisiana Pacific land. It
was the largest single seizure of cultivated marijuana in California.
Mendocino authorities have confiscated a record 160,000 plants this
year, almost half of what has been found statewide. Caudillo
estimates that 85% has comes from Mexican operations. Marijuana
activists in Northern California, however, question authorities'
contention that Mexican growers have begun cornering the market. They
say such reports have been greatly exaggerated in an effort to win
political support for more expensive eradication programs. "This is
just more propaganda so the police can chase this illusion in the war
on drugs," said Ted Kogon, a pot legalization activist in Humboldt
County, where few Mexican groves have been reported. "Ninetyfive
percent of marijuana cultivation is done by the American middle class
for the middle class." Most of the year, only a few deputy sheriffs
are assigned to marijuana enforcement in counties where growing is
prevalent. They are up against drug rings with millions, if not
billions, of dollars in resources. But in August and September, just
before the harvest season, those forces are combined with the
Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, a staterun program that
provides air support and additional personnel drawn from police
agencies around California. Ten hours a day, five days a week, CAMP
crews spot gardens, transport eradication teams and haul marijuana
out of the back country with helicopters. Without the aircraft, law
enforcement would be unable to detect much of the pot they now seize.
Early last month, CAMP joined up with Caudillo's fourman eradication
team. Their target for the day was timberland between Boonville and
the Mendocino coast. Because of the heavily wooded terrain,
Caudillo's men had to be ferried in by helicopter while tethered to
150 feet of steel cable. Over the site, pilot Fred Young threaded
each officer through the fir and redwood trees and gently set them
down in the middle of a fragrant marijuana patch containing 8foot
plants. The garden was located on a series of terraces cut into steep
hillside property owned by a private logging company. The underbrush
had been cleared away, and plastic hoses for a dripirrigation system
crisscrossed the loamy soil. Two plastic barrels about five feet high
captured water from a nearby spring. Sleeping bags, ice chests and
lawn chairs filled the growers' campsite, but everyone was gone by
the time Caudillo's wrecking crew arrived. Caudillo warned the crew
that the plants had been sprayed with pesticides. Scores of large rat
traps also had been set along the furrows. Wielding survival knives
and Swedish brush axes, Caudillo's men took less than an hour to cut
down what had taken months of hard work to establish. When they were
done, more than 500 cannabis plants with a potential value of $2
million wholesale were stacked like cordwood. As usual, no one was
arrested, which is a constant source of irritation for law
enforcement agencies attempting to bring down the organizations
behind the gardens. In many ways, police say, the style of the
Mexican grower is turning out to be the perfect modus operandi.
Because someone else's land is appropriated for planting, there is
almost nothing that can be confiscated under federal and state
assetseizure laws. "If an arrest is made, you usually end up with
people who are either mules or itinerant farmers," said the DEA's
Ruzzamenti. "Although they may be involved in growing millions of
dollars' worth of illicit product, the level of violator we arrest is
not what we would like in order to make an impact. That is very
frustrating." Such law enforcement efforts may, in fact, aggravate
the problem as much as they alleviate it, according to Mark Kleiman,
a professor and drug policy expert at UCLA. Although eliminating tons
of marijuana, he said, the actions have probably forced many
smalltime operators out of business, allowing more powerful criminal
organizations to fill the void. "You're probably going to see more
violence and corruption," Kleiman said. "Domestic marijuana
production is becoming more like a criminal enterprise than a hobby."

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