Elements of the Mexican army guard the home in Tijuana where a “narco tunnel” was located on May 15, 2022. Omar Martinez (Cuartoscuro)
More than 300 meters long, 10 meters deep and fully illuminated. This is the latest drug tunnel authorities have uncovered in Tijuana, on the border between Mexico and the United States. The underground corridor was used for drug trafficking into San Diego, California and has since been closed. It’s not an accidental find. “There are over 200 tunnels along the border in this area,” US Ambassador Ken Salazar warned during a visit to this border town last week.
The tunnel was discovered last weekend after a joint operation by the Mexican Army, Tijuana Police and the Attorney General’s Office. The entrance is under a house in the Nueva Tijuana neighborhood a few meters from the Otay border crossing, right where Salazar made these statements. The passage, reinforced with metal beams, remains under the protection of the police and ministry troops. It has not been established which criminal group used it, nor have there been any arrests.
Mexican authorities stressed that communication with their US counterparts had been “close” and that bilateral cooperation was key in finding the tunnel. Less than 48 hours earlier, Salazar had made the same points. “In cooperation with the Mexican government, we have a very good cooperation in trying to eradicate these tunnels, which should not be, because there is a lot of crime happening there, a lot of suffering that we see,” the ambassador said in statements obtained by the weekly zeta “This has to stop,” he added.
A drug trafficking passageway on May 14, 2022 in Tijuana, Mexico
Salazar’s visit to Tijuana included a tour of a narco tunnel discovered in 2009. The pass is known as Gálvez, also beyond the border wall, and was 270 meters long and 30 meters deep. The structure’s construction has been credited to the Arellano Félix cartel, a criminal organization formed in the 1980s that for decades dominated drug shipments to the United States at this square.
After the tour, Salazar, senior US anti-drug officials and Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard held a press conference announcing a $4.2 billion investment to strengthen the borderline. Ebrard urged the authorities of both countries “to be more effective at the border against fentanyl, drugs and weapons that come and go on both sides”.
“[Se pretende] Make sure that border is a place where people can safely move from one place to another and where trade goes on better than it has before,” Salazar said. Last month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott enforced strict security controls to the point where cross-border trade was all but paralyzed. More than 2,000 of the 3,000 kilometers between the two countries pass through this state.
Following the White House’s historic call to stop drug trafficking from Mexico, the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has brought to the negotiating table that the United States do the same with smuggling firearms. More than 500,000 US guns are arriving in the Latin American country, according to Mexican authorities who have been trying to prosecute the US arms industry for the past year.
Less than a week ago, another tunnel made headlines in Culiacan, stronghold of the Sinaloa Cartel, the organization historically led by Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán. A young man who was sleeping on the sofa at his home suddenly fell after a hole opened in the ground. The hole in the ground has been attributed to the existence of the underground passage found in 2011.
El Chapo escaped from Altiplano Prison, a maximum-security prison in central Mexico, in July 2015 through a tunnel that took members of his criminal organization more than a year to construct. In the videos broadcast from his cell, the criminal leader is seen disappearing in an instant after falling into a hole in the ground. Guzmán rode a motorcycle more than a kilometer underground. The capo was arrested in early 2016 and extradited to the United States a year later. Previously, Guzmán managed to evade several captures through networks of passages through the underground, and the first tunnel attributed to him dates from 1989.
The longest narco tunnel discovered measured more than two kilometers and its discovery was published in January 2020. It had rails, air conditioning, an elevator to descend to the passage, and electricity. The entrance was in Tijuana and the exit in San Diego. “The sophistication of this tunnel demonstrates the determination and financial resources of the cartels,” the US border patrol said at the time. Despite the spectacular announcement, there have been no arrests or reports of confiscations like the last tunnel discovered just last weekend.
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