Forced north by enhanced U.S.
border security, Mexican cartels are seizing land to grow and
produce drugs in national parks and forests.
South of Los
Angeles, between the gated coastal communities of Orange County and
the working-class towns inland, the Cleveland National Forest is a
rugged oasis amid the urban sprawl. If you hike back from the busy
two-lane Ortega Highway, which snakes through the dense brush and
sage-covered canyons of the Santa Ana Mountains in the northern part
of the forest, you enter a world of cedar and cypress, gigantic
boulders and scrub oak, where gnarled junipers cling tightly to
steep, wind-swept ravines. It would be easy to assume this land,
where trails routinely cross 85-degree slopes, is fit only for
hikers and rock climbers. In fact, the Cleveland National Forest is
a major battleground in the U.S. war on drugs - a battleground
increasingly ceded to foreign drug cartels.
Paradoxically, government attempts to enhance national security
following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have fueled this trend.
Tightened border security has made it harder for traffickers to move
drugs from Mexico across the southwest border, spurring producers to
move their operations north of the border and closer to their
market. And the Defense Department, in an effort to focus more
resources on overseas military operations, has decided to reduce its
counternarcotics support to civilian law enforcement agencies. The
reduction in Defense's assistance comes despite the fact that it has
been critical in limiting domestic drug production in recent years
and the suspected connections between the Mexican cartels and Middle
Eastern terrorists.
Marijuana and methamphetamines, and this year even opium, are
being produced in record quantities on public land - much of it in
California. The remote terrain and scarcity of law enforcement on
public land always have attracted loners and outlaws. But more and
more, those outlaws are well-armed foreign nationals working for
Mexican drug trafficking organizations. And some cartels are
believed to have financial links to Middle Eastern terrorist
organizations, such as Hezbollah. Last spring, for example, the Drug
Enforcement Administration and Canadian authorities arrested nearly
70 people in the United States and Canada, among them a number of
Jordanians, believed to be smuggling the ingredients for
methamphetamine production from Canada into California for use in
Mexican-run labs.
Three months ago, in a secluded stretch of forest near a
campground off the Ortega Highway, Orange County sheriff's deputies
seized 2,200 marijuana plants with an estimated street value of $3
million. The haul was small potatoes. Law enforcement officials
seized more than 115,000 marijuana plants in the Cleveland National
Forest last year - more than in any other forest in the country. In
2002, eight of the top 10 national forests found to produce
marijuana were in California. Forest Service officials expect law
enforcement operations will net 500,000 marijuana plants from
California forests this year - almost all of it believed to be grown
by Mexican cartels.
Dan Bauer, a senior special agent in the Forest Service and the
national program coordinator for the agency's counterdrug
operations, says drug production on federal land has grown
exponentially since the mid-1990s. The effects of the activity are
wide-ranging: More drugs find their way to the streets, ecological
harm to public lands is severe and growing, and violent activity in
parks and forests poses serious threats to public safety. With the
street value for high-grade marijuana sometimes exceeding that of
cocaine, the financial incentives for producers are enormous. To
guard their high-value crops, growers are carrying automatic assault
rifles and booby-trapping the areas they cultivate. As a result, the
danger to federal land managers is growing. "That's a lot of
exposure for our people, and a lot of our people didn't get into the
Forest Service to do this," says Bauer. Like many other
officials familiar with the issue, Bauer believes the problem will
only worsen in the next few years. "We fully expect we will see
these drug trafficking organizations reach into Utah, Idaho, Arizona
and Arkansas," he says.
OUTGUNNED
AND OVERWHELMED
Ross Butler, the Bureau of Land Management's acting special agent
in charge for California, says BLM's experience mirrors that of the
Forest Service. "The violence has definitely escalated, and
we've had a number of employees threatened." One employee was
checking on range improvements on federal land in San Benito County
when he stumbled across a marijuana garden. Two armed growers took
him hostage. After several hours he managed to talk his way out of
the situation, promising not to disclose the location of the plot.
"He was so terrified, he didn't even tell agency officials
about it for four months. By then, it was too late to do anything
about it. He still won't talk about it," because the growers
instilled such fear in him, says Butler.
The National Park Service reports a similar trend. Last year, 12
growers were arrested in Sequoia National Park, northeast of Los
Angeles. As of mid-October, three had been arrested.
"Unfortunately, none of the arrests have led to the higher
levels of the cartel [believed to be operating in the park],"
said Richard Martin, superintendent of Sequoia and Kings Canyon
national parks, testifying before a House Government Reform
Committee field hearing in the park in October. "We are deeply
concerned for the safety of National Park Service employees who must
fight this war on drugs and for those visitors who seek to enjoy the
beauty and serenity of the back country."
While all federal land management agencies report an increase in
drug production nationwide, particularly in California, the
Agriculture Department's Forest Service has experienced the greatest
threat. This is partly because the national forests, which cover
more than 192 million acres in 44 states - nearly 10 percent of the
land mass of the continental United States - tend to be more remote,
less popular with visitors, and have less tightly controlled access
than do national parks. The forests also tend to be better suited to
cultivating marijuana, which grows best at elevations between 4,000
feet and 6,000 feet above sea level. In California, the problem is
exacerbated because the agency has authority over 20 million acres,
more land than any other federal agency. Forest Service officials
say they have identified five separate Mexican drug trafficking
organizations operating in the state, one of which has marijuana
cultivation operations in seven different forests in nine counties.
In 2002, almost 600,000 plants, with a street value likely in the
billions of dollars, were seized from outdoor cultivation sites in
national forests across the country. Seventy percent of those were
seized from forests in California. In addition, during 2000 and
2001, more than 300 clandestine methamphetamine labs and 500 lab
dump sites were found, and 246 pounds of methamphetamines were
seized in national forests. "The [cartels] are on virtually
every forest in this region," says Laura Mark, who leads the
agency's counterdrug operations in California. "These guys are
armed, they're in great shape and they know the country like the
back of their hand." The growers who manage the gardens for the
cartels get a percentage of the profits from their production. They
and the laborers, some of whom have been arrested in recent years,
generally are Mexican nationals recruited specifically to cultivate
marijuana in California, Mark says. They rarely reveal much about
their organizations, fearing retaliation by the cartels against
their families back in Mexico.
Drug production on federal land presents a singular challenge for
land management agencies. In general, they are not well-structured
or well-equipped for the mission - Mark, for example, has only six
full-time special agents responsible for working all drug cases on
Forest Service land in California. On the other hand, the agencies
designated to enforce drug laws - the Drug Enforcement
Administration and local law enforcement in particular - generally
are not well-trained to operate in the wilderness. The DEA
understandably has focused more on cocaine and heroin trafficking in
urban areas than on marijuana production in remote areas because the
consequences of cocaine and heroin use are more dangerous and the
cost to society much greater. Congress recognized the Forest
Service's dilemma as early as 1986, when it gave the agency drug
enforcement authority under the National Forest System Drug Control
Act. Through a memorandum of understanding with the DEA, the Forest
Service assumed leadership in the enforcement of federal drug laws
in national forests. "As a rule, we have great relationships
with DEA offices and agents, and roles are worked out quite easily.
Aside from a few specific areas, the DEA just doesn't do that much
drug work on [Forest Service] lands," says Bauer.
With about 400 uniformed law enforcement officers and about 150
special agents nationwide, the Forest Service can't begin to address
the drug problem, however. "We have very limited
resources," says Tommy LaNier. LaNier coordinates Forest
Service counterdrug operations with other federal, state and local
law enforcement agencies through the nationwide interagency High
Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program, which is managed by
the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The Forest
Service works with all 28 inter-agency HIDTAs, which are based in
major drug-trafficking regions. The HIDTAs receive federal funding
to conduct specific, coordinated operations within the counties they
represent. "We try to base our operations on real-time
intelligence. The HIDTAs allow the members to pool intelligence and
coordinate resources," LaNier says.
Interagency cooperation and intelligence sharing has improved
through the HIDTAs, LaNier says, allowing the Forest Service and
local law enforcement agencies to begin chipping away at the drug
trafficking organizations. In addition, the Mexican government is
cooperating with U.S. drug investigations to a greater degree than
in the past. "There are some positive trends," says LaNier.
In addition, Forest Service biologists recently started studying
the DNA of marijuana plants in an effort to unravel the
relationships among the growers and the cartels by tracing the
lineage of seized plants, which are carefully cultivated and cloned
for maximum potency. LaNier hopes to create a database that will
allow investigators to more easily connect operations in one forest
with operations elsewhere. He's also optimistic that improved
satellite technology will allow the Forest Service and law
enforcement agencies to more easily spot the clandestine gardens.
"Right now, we really have no idea how much stuff we're not
getting," LaNier says.
Without more resources, the Forest Service won't begin to
adequately address the problem, he says. It's safe to say that
people don't join the Forest Service because they want to do drug
enforcement, and agency leaders never have been entirely comfortable
with the counterdrug mission, he says. Of the Forest Service's
16,000 employees, only about 600 are involved in law enforcement and
only a handful of those are focused on illegal drug activity.
Responding to poaching and illegal timber harvesting are more
traditional law enforcement roles for the service. "We suffer
because we don't have the support from our management - sometimes
because they don't believe in the law enforcement mission, and
sometimes because there are too many competing priorities,"
such as firefighting and forest health initiatives, LaNier says.
"Don't misunderstand, those things are important too, which is
why this is so difficult."
"Until the administration says this is a priority, the
Forest Service will continue to try to balance a broad spectrum of
needs," and counterdrug operations will continue to be
shortchanged, says LaNier. "This will get worse before it gets
better."
LOSING
MILITARY SUPPORT
A major setback for the Forest Service occurred in October when
the Defense Department revised its counternarcotics program. Since
1995, the Forest Service has been able to tap military surveillance
and training resources through Joint Task Force Six, a counterdrug
planning and coordination unit in El Paso, Texas, supported by all
the military services. The task force was created by Congress to
provide intelligence analysis, surveillance, training and other
military support to civilian agencies involved in counterdrug
activities. The civilian agencies would request support from the
task force for specific operations, and the task force would
prioritize those requests by the training value the missions would
provide the military units conducting them. Not all requests were
honored, either because military officials deemed the training value
too limited, or because there were no units available or willing to
conduct the mission. But volunteer active duty and reserve units
honored hundreds of requests a year, mostly from the Border Patrol
and the Forest Service.
The military support has been invaluable, says Bauer. He
estimates that 95 percent of the aircraft used to spot marijuana in
national forests are provided by the military, either by state
National Guard units or by active-duty units coordinated by Joint
Task Force Six. "If this support goes away, 200,000 to 300,000
plants won't be eradicated" in California forests next year,
says Mark.
Under new rules established by Pentagon officials, that is
exactly what will happen. Joint Task Force Six no longer will be
able to provide direct support to the Forest Service. The Defense
Department is shifting responsibility for the mission to the
National Guard. According to a senior Defense official, "Even
though we recognize there's a need for [aerial surveillance in the
Forest Service], it was very difficult to quantify how that was
either helping the DoD train for its core mission, or how it was in
a strategic way helping get rid of the flow of drugs into this
country. Ultimately the determination was made that we will work
with the Forest Service to help them get the assets they need. We
will help them go to the Hill to get the authorities they need to
buy the aircraft and to train the pilots, but we can't, just because
we have a $487 billion budget, be the agency that everybody turns to
for support."
The idea that the Forest Service, with its $4.8 billion annual
budget, could purchase or somehow replace the support it receives
from Joint Task Force Six is highly optimistic. Military aircraft
use sophisticated surveillance and communications equipment not
readily available in the commercial market, and it's hard to
conceive how the Forest Service could purchase and maintain a fleet
of aircraft for counternarcotics operations. Even if the DEA could
increase its aerial surveillance of national forests, Forest Service
personnel are not authorized to fly on those aircraft, whereas they
are authorized to fly on military aircraft as spotters. Because
Forest Service investigators are intimately familiar with the flora
of their forests, they are far better than others at spotting
marijuana plantations from the air.
This past summer in California alone, Joint Task Force Six
provided 62 aircraft for Forest Service surveillance, according to
unit officials, with most of them flying multiple missions over the
course of an operation. Calculating the value of that support in
monetary terms is difficult, because it went well beyond the cost of
maintaining the aircraft and paying the salaries of the air crews
for the duration of the missions. It also included critical
intelligence analysis and mapping data. When the costs of those
things are added up, military officials estimate they provided
several million dollars' worth of support.
The loss of that support will have far-reaching impact, says
Mark. The agency shared surveillance data with state and local law
enforcement officials, primarily through the Campaign Against
Marijuana Planting program run by the California Department of
Justice, allowing state, local and federal agencies to coordinate a
response - usually hiking into the gardens, seizing the marijuana,
and arresting the growers whenever possible. "I don't think
people realize yet what this is going to mean," she says.
Denise Stokes, a Forest Service special agent based in Mentone,
Calif., says, "We literally cannot operate in Southern
California without Joint Task Force Six." Both because the
California National Guard does not have the extensive assets Joint
Task Force Six can command and because many of the aerial assets the
Guard does have are now deployed to Iraq, "the Guard really
cannot support the missions we're doing," Stokes says.
Because the military units that flew surveillance missions for
the Forest Service did so voluntarily, agency officials and even
some military officials are baffled and frustrated by Defense's new
position. If the missions were detracting from the services'
warfighting responsibilities, units presumably wouldn't volunteer
for them. Under the new rules, the Defense Department will continue
to provide support to the HIDTAs and the Justice and Homeland
Security departments, according to the senior Defense official. In
addition, he said, the military services could pay out of their own
training budgets for their units to conduct missions for the Forest
Service if they believe the training is so valuable.
BOOMING
BUSINESS
While federal agencies sort out their priorities, the forests are
producing ever more marijuana. The gardens are becoming more
sophisticated and the plants more productive. A few years ago, a
large garden might have contained 200 plants; now, officials are
finding gardens with 30,000 to 40,000 plants, says Bauer.
Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for the White House Office of
National Drug Control Policy, says drug production on the 716
million acres of federal and tribal land is a serious and growing
problem. ONDCP considers marijuana - the most widely used and
available illegal drug and the one about which the public is most
ambivalent - to be the nation's leading drug threat. Marijuana also
has become extraordinarily potent. In the 1970s, most marijuana
contained 1 percent to 3 percent of THC - the ingredient with
hallucinogenic properties. Most of the processed marijuana officials
seize today has a THC content of 10 percent to 15 percent, and can
reach levels of more than 30 percent, according to ONDCP's 2003
National Drug Threat Assessment. With each plant worth anywhere from
a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars, depending on
potency, federal officials estimate that marijuana is the No. 1 cash
crop of a number of states, including California.
Most marijuana gardens follow a standard operating procedure: The
growers establish drop-off locations for food deliveries, usually
about every two weeks, and the gardens have the same general layout.
There are designated areas for cooking, sleeping and marijuana
processing; a shrine for religious worship; a dump site for garbage
and feces; and lookout posts for the well-armed guards that protect
the crop.
"It's like they all attended the same Marijuana 101
class," Mark says. More impressive is the horticultural
sophistication the growers demonstrate. They clone the plants to
achieve maximum potency. They terrace and irrigate the terrain,
sometimes by diverting streams or drilling wells. They trim the
overhead foliage to allow maximum sunlight to reach the plants,
while retaining enough for camouflage. To the Forest Service special
agents who have been tracking the activities of growers for several
years now, it seems clear that the various cartels have staked out
particular forests or regions within forests for themselves. As one
investigator describes it, "it's as if a group of them sat
around a map of California and said, 'You take this, we'll take
that.'"
From the beginning of the growing season in April to the harvest
in September through early November, growers conduct their
operations with the logistical precision of a military operation.
The laborers haul in miles of irrigation hose, gallons of propane
for cooking and pounds of fertilizer. Twenty or more armed workers
typically work in a garden. Investigators have found that some of
the growers previously have worked for contractors hired by the
Forest Service for reforestation projects, Mark says. "These
guys really know what they're doing," she says. "This
stuff goes in as seed and comes out as processed marijuana a few
months later. The logistics of it are phenomenal."
So are the physical demands on both the growers and the law
enforcement officers who find them. Bradford Burns, a law
enforcement officer in the San Bernardino National Forest, marvels
at the ability of the growers. They have managed to cultivate bumper
crops of marijuana, which requires a lot of water to grow, even in
drought conditions, he says. "It's unbelievable how good these
guys are at finding hidden springs, diverting streams, and even
drilling wells in some cases." During one garden takedown
operation last year, Burns says, it took law enforcement personnel
more than five hours to hike a mile and a half to a marijuana garden
because the vegetation was so thick and the terrain so rough.
ENVIRONMENTAL
DAMAGE
The environmental effects of drug production can be devastating,
says the National Park Service's Martin. In the last few years,
National Park Service employees have hauled off tons of trash
generated by drug producers - garbage, human waste, carcasses of
poached animals, gardening tools and miles of irrigation hoses.
Last year, at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, park rangers
investigating a massive tadpole die-off found marijuana growers had
used a can of fertilizer to jury-rig a small dam to create a
dependable water supply for a number of marijuana gardens. A flash
flood had wiped out the dam, washing fertilizer downstream and
poisoning the tadpoles.
In addition, Forest Service officials say that marijuana growers
sometimes spark wildfires, not difficult in the West where years of
drought have turned millions of acres of forest into a tinderbox. In
1999, when a campfire in a marijuana garden in Sequoia National
Forest started a wildfire, firefighting efforts had to be delayed so
law enforcement officials could secure the area.
Marijuana growers have terraced land, contributing to soil
erosion, and have diverted water sources, disrupting the ecosystem
of the forest. In one California forest, rangers discovered a
10-acre plot where all the trees had been stripped of bark, causing
them to die. Apparently growers were trying to increase the amount
of sunlight reaching their marijuana plants by eliminating overhead
foliage.
The production of methamphetamines can have devastating
environmental consequences as well. The chemicals involved include
Freon, hypophosphorous acid and lithium metal - substances both
flammable and poisonous.
According to ONDCP, 15 percent of methamphetamine labs are
discovered as the result of an explosion or fire. When labs are
discovered, buildings often have to be razed in expensive cleanup
operations.
For the Forest Service, a shortage of money and people makes
cleanup of most drug production sites, especially marijuana gardens,
impossible. "We don't clean those sites up. We don't have the
manpower," says Mark, who is frustrated that her agency can't
do more to combat the problem in California. "It's only a
matter of time before someone is killed here, either a hunter or a
visitor or one of our employees. I reached a point where I realize I
just can't do this anymore. The stress is too much."
In January, Mark will leave California, her home for more than 20
years, and move to Montana, where she will become the special agent
in charge of all investigations for the Northern Region. She will
miss the intensity of California, but she hopes to trade it for
sanity and bring back a measure of job satisfaction she's been
missing. "I'm tired. I'm tired of fighting. For some reason,
we're not allowed to say we don't have enough resources."