Cash mules on the border

San Antonio Express-News:

When a customs official in Hidalgo questioned Aurora Garcia about the lumps of cash under her shirt, the then-25-year-old said she was carrying the $50,000, all her own money, to buy a house across the border in Reynosa.

But when a search by a female agent found nearly $120,000, Garcia’s story changed. She admitted that the money wasn’t hers but came from a friend named “Beto” and was likely drug proceeds. He picked her up, gave her $40 to buy loose clothes and a girdle at Kmart, and sent her in a taxi to the international bridge.

Drug-world denizens, or those who study them, might call Garcia a “smurf” or “mule,” a low-level participant lured by easy money to get cash from the U.S. market to drug lords in Mexico.

In an unusual outcome, Garcia was ordered to serve 15 months in prison in the 2005 case. Most smurfs are released, the pile of seized cash becoming government income and a write-off for a distant drug trafficker.

Operation Firewall, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement initiative last year, produced 1,034 cash seizures and 103 arrests — but only 22 convictions.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has pledged new emphasis on searching Mexico-bound vehicles for hidden cash, part of the nation taking responsibility for its role in the exchange of drugs moving north and cash and weapons moving south.

The department’s Laredo sector alone has reported more than $10 million in seizures so far this fiscal year, which began in October. That’s up from $3 million in the entire previous fiscal year. Borderwide, customs officials reported $54 million seized as of May 20, compared with $35 million for all of fiscal year 2008.

Cash is also confiscated on routes leading to the border. Texas Department of Public Safety troopers each year seize millions from random traffic stops — $16.4 million last year.

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Officials found more than $1 million under a mattress in a truck’s sleeping cab and arrested the driver, Jose Luis Martinez Gonzalez, 26. He admitted smuggling the cash for a man named “Ramos” and said he’d done it before, court documents show.

Government attorneys dropped the charge against Gonzalez nine days later.

“Many times we just don’t have what it takes” to make a criminal case, said Jerry Robinette, special agent in charge of ICE investigations in San Antonio.

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Is Robinette saying a confession is not enough to make a case against a smuggler? There is either something missing from the story or prosecutors are setting a strange standard of proof. You have the physical evidence as well as an admission that he is smuggling so what more should you need to get a conviction?

It seems like the law enforcement people believe that taking the cash is punishment enough, but that is unlikely to be a deterrent by itself. Are they afraid the crooks will stop sending cash for them to confiscate?