Mexican smugglers use vehicle ramps to defeat border fence

NY Times:

Drug smugglers parked a car transport trailer against the Mexican side of the border one day in December, dropped a ramp over the security fence, and drove two pickup trucks filled with marijuana onto Arizona soil.

As Border Patrol agents gave chase, a third truck appeared on the Mexican side and gunmen sprayed machine-gun fire over the fence at the agents. Smugglers in the first vehicles torched one truck and abandoned the other, with $1 million worth of marijuana still in the truck bed. Then they vaulted back over the barrier into Mexico’s Sonora state.

Despite huge enforcement actions on both sides of the Southwest border, the Mexican marijuana trade is more robust — and brazen — than ever, law enforcement officials say. Mexican drug cartels routinely transported industrial-size loads of marijuana in 2008, excavating new tunnels and adopting tactics like ramp-assisted smuggling to get their cargoes across undetected.

But these are not the only new tactics: the cartels are also increasingly planting marijuana crops inside the United States in a major strategy shift to avoid the border altogether, officials said. Last year, drug enforcement authorities confiscated record amounts of high potency plants from Miami to San Diego, and even from vineyards leased by cartels in Washington State. Mexican drug traffickers have also moved into hydroponic marijuana production — cannabis grown indoors without soil and nourished with sunlamps — challenging Asian networks and smaller, individual growers here.

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There is much more showing how the Mexican criminal insurgency is spreading its reach into the US. The vehicle ramp is pretty clever and the Times has a photo at the above link. In this particular case the Border Patrol had assets in the area that spotted the operation and foiled it. It points out the continued need for more border agents. We also need to look at ways to make the fence less easy to defeat. In this case a double fence would have done the trick.

I think the US needs to closely examine the US side of the border across from where the cartels are fighting each other for control. What they are fighting over is control of the access to the US and we need to determine how they get that access here.