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| Mexico's Drug Runners taking to Border Skies |
| 2005-11-20 |
| HERMOSILLO, Mexico - It's a cat-and-mouse game played over and over again here in Sonora, as Mexican authorities chase airborne drug runners high over the deserts and mountains south of Arizona. The planes don't cross the border, but they bring drugs to staging areas where smugglers load them into cars, trucks, backpacks or saddlebags for the final trek into the United States. It's the FedEx of the underworld, an air-to-ground smuggling system that has survived despite increased security and rising drug seizures along the border. And while drug planes may not make the final trip north, the way they operate says a lot about the drug trade today. The pilots fly in plain sight of U.S. radar. They commandeer village airports and country roads. They pay bribes to keep the outmanned, outgunned local cops from bothering them. They serve as executive transport for hit men and kingpins. For authorities on both sides of the border, the planes are symbols of the impunity drug traffickers enjoy. No plane has been detected crossing the U.S. border in recent years, according to ICE's Air and Marine Operations Center. But they come awfully close. In Sonora and northern Sinaloa, airborne drug smuggling lives on because of rugged mountains, sparse population and proximity to the United States, officials say. The states are dotted with tiny airstrips, many of them built years ago by mining companies in the mountains. Sonora alone has 90 legally registered airfields, and hundreds of abandoned or clandestine ones. The smuggling has fueled a market in stolen Cessna 206s and 210s. In the past two years, three such planes from the United States have been stolen during stops in Sonora and northern Sinaloa, said Jack McCormick of Chandler-based Baja Bush Pilots, which assists U.S. pilots in Mexico. The United States has begun patrolling the Arizona-Mexico border with remote-control surveillance planes, and is quietly arming Mexico with dozens of new aircraft. Last year, the U.S. Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs gave Mexico two new Schweizer 333 helicopters and four refurbished "Huey" helicopters under a "no-cost" lease. It plans to provide eight more Hueys and 26 more Schweizers in the next few years. Mexico already flies 67 aircraft donated by the United States, according to a bureau report. This month, Mexican agents began patrolling northern Sonora with a jet equipped with anti-drug radar. The measures have forced the drug planes to take riskier routes through the canyons of the Sierra Madre. |
| Posted by:Pappy |