Tunneling Under Nogales: Arizona Border Town Flush with Drug Tunnels

Maria Elena Leyva cannot see the problem that has recently made her hometown notorious along the US-Mexican border.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement police officer examines the entrance to a recently constructed tunnel at a home in Nogales, Arizona. The Border Patrol has found more smuggling tunnels in Nogales than anywhere else in the US.

(Handout/Reuters)

It is beneath her feet -- hidden in the earth below hills speckled with mesquites, pines, and oaks.

In the words of the county sheriff, Nogales is becoming "the drug-tunnel capital of the world."

Since 1990, the US Border Patrol has found 109 tunnels along the border with Mexico, all in California and Arizona. Sixty-five -- or 60 percent -- have been found in Nogales, with 16 of those discovered in the past nine months.

Until the 1990s, the international line here was just a chain-link fence that allowed Americans and Mexicans to look each other in the eye, Ms. Leyva recalls, sitting on a porch only two blocks from the border. But during the past few years in particular, an arsenal of manpower, physical barriers, and electronic surveillance has made the border a virtual fortress.

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This has forced drug smugglers to look for alternate means of moving marijuana, heroine, and cocaine into the US. "We've increased our enforcement on the ground, so they have to compensate for it and that's why they're developing tunnels," Border Patrol spokesman Michael Scioli says.

Many have come to Nogales, where they can tap into an underground sewer and flood-control network shared by the city of Nogales and its larger Mexican neighbor. "That's why this is probably such a unique situation," says another Border Patrol spokesman, Mark Qualia.

The tunnels are often crude -- dug by hand or shovel. But they can also be sophisticated operations. One 83-foot long tunnel discovered in June was equipped with lighting and a ventilation hose. Another, discovered in 2003, had rails and a trolley system and ran 300 feet to a hillside house. A third ran to a church atop a bluff about a half mile from the border.

The sheer number of tunnels in this high desert town of 20,000 is a testament to Nogales's central role in cross-border drug smuggling.

"We do about 48 percent of the marijuana seizures in the whole country," Agent Scioli says, speaking about the Nogales area.