RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – US officials announced on Wednesday, January 29th, the detection of a tunnel used by drug traffickers, the longest ever found on the country’s southwestern border. It starts from an industrial region in Tijuana, Mexico, and after 1.3 kilometers, it reaches an area near San Diego, in the United States.
The tunnel has a system of rails, ventilation, cables and high-voltage electrical panels, an elevator at the entrance and a drainage system.
The length, of over 14 soccer fields, stunned the authorities. There were no arrests, no drugs found at the site and no confirmed exit points in the USA.
Lance LeNoir, Border Patrol’s operations supervisor, said they did not expect anyone to have the skill and acumen to go this far. “They keep surprising me,” he claimed.
It is considered more efficient than the coarsely built small tunnels, often called “Gopher holes”.
The announcement of its existence was made on Wednesday, January 29th, but the finding occurred in August. Mexican authorities identified the entrance, and US investigators mapped the tunnel, which extends for a total of 1,313 meters.
In 2014, a 904-meter-long tunnel had been detected in San Diego.
Depth of over 20 meters
The newly uncovered tunnel is approximately 1.68 meters high and 0.61 meters wide and runs at an average depth of 21.3 meters below the surface, officials said.
Officials noted there are hundreds of sandbags blocking a suspected previous exit in an area of industrial warehouses in Otay Mesa, San Diego. The tunnel runs beneath some of these stock centers.
An incomplete branch of the tunnel that extended for 1,090 meters suggests that smugglers had connected one initial exit point and were building another.
The previous exit “became unsustainable for some reason,” Border Patrol spokesman Jeff Stephenson said.
Under US law, tunnels must be sealed with concrete after they are found.
“The sophistication and length of this detected tunnel show that transnational criminal organizations are willing to undertake time-consuming efforts to traffic,” said Cardell T. Morant, a US border investigation and migration officer.
Officials have located 15 sophisticated tunnels on the California-Mexico border since 2006, with lighting, ventilation, rails and hydraulic elevators.
The tunnels are concentrated in the Otay Mesa region, an area where the clay soil is conducive to excavation and the warehouses conceal their existence.
The last tunnel to be uncovered by Mexican authorities came out at a cargo truck parking lot near the the Tijuana airport.
US authorities mapped out its route, drilled a hole in the US side and lowered a camera to determine where to start.
Unidentified owner
Police have not reported who is behind the recently found tunnel, but the area has been a stronghold of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico – longtime cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States in July.
Source: AP, G1
