Longest Trafficking Tunnel Between Mexico and U.S., Record Haul of Cocaine Discovered

The longest ever drug-trafficking tunnel between the border of California and Mexico, nearly a kilometer long, was recently discovered by San Diego authorities. The 800 meter/ 874 yards-long tunnel was used to smuggle a ginormous quantity of cocaine and marijuana; 1,016 kilograms of cocaine and a whopping 6350 kilograms of marijuana was seized. It was called “ingenious” by a local official, who added that it was unlike anything he had seen prior.

Southern California District Attorney Laura Duffy called it “the largest cocaine seizure ever associated with a tunnel.”

On the Tijuana Mexico side, the tunnel is located 46 feet below ground and has an elevator shaft with a working elevator connecting it to a house. The elevator entrance is hidden in a wardrobe. The perfect cover. The tunnel itself was a sophisticated affair; besides the elevator, it  had ventilation and lighting.

On the American side its entrance was located in a fenced-in lot of a pallet business. The entrance was hidden by a trailer-sized dumpster that was also used by smugglers to move their “dirty” cargo.

“They put the drugs in the dumpster and then hauled the dumpster to another location to unload it,” Ms Duffy said.

Federal agents tailed the dumpster divers to a central San Diego address, where the cargo was loaded onto a box truck. They then stopped the truck, apprehended the smelly smuggler suspects and seized the drugs.

“I think it fair to say that few would suspect that traffickers were moving multi-ton quantities of cocaine and marijuana in this very unassuming way, in full view of the world around them,” the paper quoted Ms Duffy as saying.

“It’s a rabbit hole,” she said. “Just the whole way that it comes up right out into the open is a bit ingenious. It’s something completely different than what we’ve seen before.” It is unclear how old the hole is, though the pallet business had started up about a year ago. Agents had apparently monitored the pallet business since the beginning of the year.

Yes, ingenious is one way of putting it. It is also pretty hilarious how they actually bothered building a house to hide it on the Tijuana side but thought “meh, nobody would notice a hole with a giant dumpster on top of it once we get to the other side of the border.” Then again, there are probably more sophisticated tunnels that haven’t even been discovered yet.

Margarita Ontiveros, an employee at a legal firm near the US side said, “they loaded and unloaded a lot of pallets.”

Sources: BBC, DNews, Guardian, Telegraph

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