ON MEXICAN BORDER, TUNNELS OF DRUGS

TECATE, Mexico - It was a typical bedroom with long curtains and a plush,
floral rug - except the fireplace wasn't just for keeping things cozy.

When police removed the metal grill still holding charred logs, they found
a secret tunnel to the United States.

Over the past decade, officials have discovered at least 16 tunnels along
the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, all of them thought to be used for
smuggling drugs. Six have been found since December, and federal law
enforcement officials on both sides of the border believe five of them
started operating after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. This suggests to
them that heightened U.S. border security is driving more smugglers to the
underground route.

"We firmly believe there is a direct relation to our fortification of the
border," said Vincent Iglio, associate special agent in charge of the U.S.
Customs Service office in Tucson, Ariz.

The passage behind the fireplace was discovered in February in an isolated
ranch house 20 miles east of the Mexican border town of Tecate. It had
rails on which smugglers would send cocaine on electric carts on a 300-yard
journey into the back of a staircase of a house in Tierra del Sol, Calif.

While it is believed to have gone undetected for 10 years, the other
recently discovered tunnels seem newer and more hastily dug. One was still
under construction when U.S. Border Patrol agents stumbled upon it last
month. Another, found in March, was built to bypass the entrance of another
tunnel that already had been discovered and sealed with concrete.

The sealed tunnel, found in December, ran 85 feet from a Nogales home in
Arizona to a concrete drainage canal in Mexico, where smugglers covered the
opening with a steel utility plate and resealed it with cement each time
they used it.

U.S. Customs authorities believe it had been operating only for three
months, in which time smugglers moved some $20 million worth of cocaine and
marijuana.

Another tunnel believed put into operation since Sept. 11 and found last
month ended in a parking lot near the U.S. Customs office in Nogales.

Authorities on both sides of the border are looking for more, but it's a
tough challenge.

"We can't go around doing seismic graphs, and we can't check (houses)
without a search warrant," said Donald Thornhill Jr., a Drug Enforcement
Administration spokesman in San Diego.

The most elaborate tunnel was found 12 years ago. It ran 100 yards from a
home in Agua Prieta, Mexico, to a warehouse in Douglas, Ariz. It had a rail
car and the initial stages of a track and was accessed by using hydraulic
lifts that raised the entire floor of the home's game room.

Years ago, street children lived in the drains and charged smugglers for
the right to pass. Migrants also traipsed through the darkness until
several drowned in a rush of floodwaters and the U.S. Border Patrol started
monitoring the tunnels' openings on the U.S. side.