Man arrested in connection to tunnel
Suspect owns building where opening was located
A Yuma man has been arrested and charged with four counts of possession of intent to distribute narcotics in connection to the cross-border tunnel found last week inside a vacant restaurant in San Luis, according to an agent from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).
Speaking at a press conference, held jointly on Wednesday with Yuma Sector Border Patrol and the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office, Special Agent in Charge Scott Brown identified the man as Ivan Lopez.
“He owns the building. He was stopped with a significant amount of narcotics,” Brown said from the Yuma Sector Headquarters building.
Brown said the tunnel, which stretched from the vacant building at 552 San Luis Plaza Avenue in San Luis (once a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant) to a residence in San Luis Rio Colorado, Mexico, was discovered on Aug. 13 following a traffic stop on a pickup truck by San Luis police.
During the stop a K-9 was brought in, and it alerted to two toolboxes on a trailer being pulled by the pickup. When officers searched the toolboxes they found 168 kilograms of hard narcotics, including three kilograms of Fentanyl, which Brown said was equivalent to three million doses.
“The toolboxes were previously observed being removed from the KFC by Lopez,” Brown said. “As a nation in the midst of an opioid crisis, this is obviously a significant seizure.”
In addition to the Fentanyl, San Luis police also found over 118 kilograms of methamphetamine, six kilograms of cocaine, 13 kilograms of white heroin and six kilograms of brown heroin.
HSI was contacted and executed two search warrants, one at Lopez’s residence and the other at the vacant KFC, where they found the exit of the tunnel cut into a concrete slab in the floor of the kitchen of the restaurant. The exit was not visible from outside the building.
“The opening was only about eight inches in diameter, not large enough for a person to pass through,” Brown said.
The following day, Mexican authorities served a search warrant at a home in a residential compound in San Luis Rio Colorado, Mexico, where the other end of the tunnel was located under a trap door hidden beneath a bed.
Chief Patrol Agent Anthony J. Porvaznik, of the Yuma Sector Border Patrol, said the discovery of the tunnel was another example of the collaborative effort of the area’s federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies.
“Tunnels represent an elusive and dangerous threat to our country and are used by criminal organizations seeking to thwart border security measures,” Porvaznik said from the Yuma Sector headquarters. “They can be used to smuggle people and narcotics, and pose a potential risk to be exploited by terrorist organizations wishing to harm our people and way of life.”
In describing its dimensions, Brown said the tunnel was dug 22 feet down and approximately 590 feet long, five feet high and three feet wide. While he did not know precisely when the tunnel had been built, indications are that it was constructed over the summer, and that it has been linked to the Sinaloa Drug Cartel, the predominant drug cartel operating in the area.
“The narcotics, we believe, were raised up by rope, loaded into the toolboxes, and taken from the restaurant,” Brown said. “At the U.S. entry side, there was no mechanism in place to come up to the opening.”
Chief Porvaznik said the San Diego Sector Border Patrol’s tunnel team is clearing and mapping the tunnel. When HSI finishes its investigation, he said, U.S. Customs and Border Protection will seal it off, essentially rendering it unusable.
Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmot said that because of the cooperation between the area’s law enforcement agencies, an estimated $1.2 million worth of narcotics never made it to the streets.