Heroin in soups and lollipops: How drug cartels evade border security
BALTIMORE — The tip came the last day of January 2014 to special agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement: A drug courier was about to land at the Baltimore airport with a large shipment.
Hours later, the agents asked the man, Edgar Franco Lopez, a Guatemalan, if they could search the three large duffel bags he was loading in a car outside the airport. But agents found only food. So they bluffed, saying they had found evidence of drugs in the bags.
The driver, Edwin Quintana Carranza, a Mexican in the United States illegally who had claimed the bags were his and consented to the search, confessed. The drugs were hidden in the sugar wafers, he said.
Lopez and Carranza were key links in a drug smuggling network that stretched thousands of miles from Guatemala to Baltimore, according to court records and interviews with agents involved in the case. Law enforcement officials said members of Guatemala’s Ipala Cartel, a drug trafficking organization named for the city where it is based, shipped large amounts of heroin into the United States, hiding drugs in food, primarily sugar wafers, brownies, soups, lollipops and other candy.
Instead of smuggling heroin through ports of entry or across the border, the cartel’s traffickers exploited weaknesses in border security: parcels shipped through the mail, UPS and FedEx; air cargo; and travel on transit systems with relatively little security, like Amtrak. Their packages were factory-sealed and showed no signs of tampering, suggesting that they might have had access to a food-processing factory, agents involved in the case said. ‘Adaptive adversaries’
The case highlights the increasingly sophisticated tactics drug trafficking organizations use to largely bypass traditional border security screening systems and walls. Even as the U.S. spends billions of dollars along the Mexican border — the main route for drug trafficking — as part of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on border security, the traffickers have found ways to avoid the cameras, drones, drug dogs and agents along the border, officials said.
Agents say the group may have also used the mail and parcels to avoid paying Mexican drug cartels for crossing their territory.
“A lot of people think of these drug trafficking organizations as gangs, and they are not. These organizations are a very adaptive adversary,” said Jayson P. Ahern, former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under President George W. Bush. “If we cut off one of their transportation networks like at the border, they are still going to try to move their goods to market by other means.”
The nearly three-year investigation into the transnational drug smuggling organization concluded this year when 23 people pleaded guilty to intent to distribute heroin.
The sentences ranged from one year of home detention to more than five years in prison. Agents also seized $5.2 million worth of heroin and identified more than $2 million in drug profits from the organization laundered to Guatemala in the span of a year.
Federal authorities and homeland security experts said the Guatemalan drug smuggling group’s exploitation of the mail and parcel systems showed a sophisticated understanding of the holes in post-Sept. 11 border security.
The sheer volume of mail and packages — the Postal Service alone processes billions of packages a year — makes it next to impossible for every item or cargo to be searched for drugs, experts say. Hard to prevent
Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, also inspects international mail and packages, but it also only randomly checks packages when it is alerted to problems.
“These organizations are always adapting to whatever we do in terms of border security,” said Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security in the Obama administration. “You can’t just say you’re going to build a wall to stop the drugs. These groups have identified our mail and parcel systems and other modes of transportation such as trains as a weakness and exploited them.”