- Location
- Desert Beach So Cal
Busted!
Drug dealers are planting pot farms all over our
national parks, and the Park Service is
struggling to root them out. TIME goes on a raid
By MARGOT ROOSEVELT I AUBURN, CALIF.
Sunday, Jul. 27, 2003
A blue-gray dawn tickles the tops of the
ponderosa pines at the Sugar Pine Recreation Area
in California's Tahoe National Forest. Campers
slumber in lakeside tents; bikers have yet to hit
the trails. But all is not quiet on this cool
July morning. A platoon of camouflaged figures
equipped with rifles, pistols and bulletproof
vests creep through manzanita brush with a police
dog. Their objective: a marijuana plantation a
few hundred yards from a well-traveled tourist
area.
As the Forest Service rangers stealthily
approach, an unsuspecting Mexican laborer named
Pedro Villa García, 51, stands in a clearing. All
around him the hillside is freshly terraced,
irrigated by black plastic hoses and dotted with
iridescent green cannabis. Villa García peers
down the path. Is that a black bear-a common
local species-emerging from the morning mist?
Suddenly he sees the rangers and dashes off
through the brambles. But the police dog, a
Belgian Malinois, catches up quickly, sinking its
teeth into Villa García's arm. Two rangers
wrestle him to the ground and handcuff him.
"We're good at jungle warfare," says Laura Mark,
a Forest Service investigator, as she prepares to
question the suspect. "We're the ninjas of the
woods."
Armed combat is hardly what families hope to
encounter as they head for their summer vacations
in America's national parks and forests. But drug
smugglers, methamphetamine cooks and cannabis
cultivators are invading federal lands as never
before. A U.S. Park Service ranger in Arizona's
Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument was gunned
down by a Mexican pot smuggler last August. In
Missouri's Mark Twain National Forest, 192 meth
labs have been dismantled over the past three
years. And marijuana farms are infesting
Kentucky's Daniel Boone National Forest and
Alabama's Talladega National Forest.
But the most explosive conflicts-and the biggest
hauls-are taking place in California. As
enforcement tightens along U.S. borders,
especially since 9/11, it is getting harder to
transport drugs into America. So Mexican
traffickers have turned to creating vast
marijuana plantations Stateside, that much closer
to their main customers. Thanks to a mild
climate, rich soil and a lengthy,
March-to-October growing season, California
cultivators routinely produce 10-ft.-high
specimens worth up to $4,000 each. Some of these
California pot farms stretch over several hundred
acres and have as many as 50,000 plants. Last
year 420,000 pot plants with a street value of
$1.5 billion were eradicated from the state's 18
federal forests, a tenfold increase from 1994.
In Sequoia National Park, renowned for its
majestic trees, rangers confiscated eight tons of
marijuana in a single week last September. "We
have a tremendous influx of Mexican growers,"
says Ross Butler, a special agent for the federal
Bureau of Land Management. "They are
sophisticated. They have guns. And we don't know
much about who they are."
Villa García is unarmed when he is caught in the
Tahoe forest-probably, rangers say, because it is
early in the season. If they had already matured,
the 3,500 plants he was tending would have
yielded some $8 million worth of pot-an
investment worth protecting. In the fall, when
scores of Mexican workers arrive to harvest and
process the pot, shoot-outs occur between
law-enforcement agents and camouflage-clad
growers toting AK-47s. Sometimes the pot pirates
mistake innocent tourists for thieves or cops.
Last year kayakers on the Salmon River in the
Klamath National Forest were held at gunpoint by
traffickers, as were a hiker in the Sequoia
National Park and hunters in Mendocino National
Forest. Two years ago, an 8-year-old boy hunting
deer in the Eldorado National Forest with his
father was shot in the face by pot farmers. "If
you are a hunter, a fisherman or a backpacker, it
can be dangerous," says Michael Delaney, who
oversees marijuana cases for the Drug Enforcement
Administration in Northern California. "There's a
safety factor for everyone who is out there."
Squirming in his handcuffs, the white-bearded
Villa García looks more like a kindly grandfather
than a drug trafficker. He says he has been in
the U.S. poquito-only a short time. A stranger
came to his village in the Mexican state of
Michoacán and brought him across the border,
along with four others.
One of them was with him on the Tahoe farm but
managed to escape. "I did not know what kind of
work it would be," he says in Spanish, adding
that he was paid $200 a month. Villa García was
arraigned on narcotics-cultivation charges,
pleaded not guilty, and is in prison awaiting
trial. His is a story federal agents know well
after arresting scores of low-level gardeners,
all undocumented, most hailing from Michoacán.
"They don't know much, and they're told, 'You
talk, you gonna die,'" says Mark, who has
questioned 60 such workers in the past year. "The
odds of us finding the organizers are slim."
At least five Mexican drug rings are under
investigation, some of them related to the
Michoacán-based Magana family. In June 2001, nine
members of the Magana clan pleaded guilty in
federal court to narcotics charges and were given
prison sentences ranging from four to 12 years.
The Maganas have been tied to 20 large gardens
with more than 100,000 plants in the Sequoia,
Sierra, Stanislaus and Mendocino national
forests. They also supplied workers for pot farms
on federal land in Arkansas, Idaho, Oregon, Utah
and Washington. According to investigators, the
Maganas and other groups have used profits from
methamphetamine operations to expand into
marijuana. They own gas stations, haciendas and
million-dollar resorts in Puerto Vallarta,
Guadalajara, Michoacán and other parts of Mexico.
"They have tremendous networks involving legal
businesses, money laundering and distribution,"
says Jerry Moore, the Forest Service's regional
law-enforcement chief. "We arrest people, but new
players move in."
Villa García and his Tahoe pot farm were
discovered a week after two forest rangers on
patrol noticed a recently bushwhacked footpath.
After the bust, the rangers found the usual
layout and pattern of cultivation. "It's like
they all go to the same college course-Marijuana
101," says Mark. As in other grows, seedlings are
planted 6 ft. apart in rows. A forest canopy
admits filtered sunlight but hides the seedlings
from aerial surveillance. A stream is diverted to
allow its water to flow through drip-irrigation
tubes along the terraces. So that the workers can
escape more easily, their sleeping area-strewn
with toothbrushes and bottles of Pepto-Bismol and
NyQuil-is hidden in the brush, apart from the
kitchen and processing area. Propane bottles
provide fuel for a two-burner stove next to bags
of tortillas, cans of Juanita's-brand menudo
(tripe), sacks of fertilizer and a votive card of
St. Peter with the inscription "May your spirit
intercede for sinners Š" in Spanish.
Rangers say that in March and April, workers are
driven in vans along remote forest roads at dusk
or dawn. They pile out onto prescouted paths with
100-lb. packs of supplies. Once they set up camp
and begin planting, they are resupplied every two
to three weeks. Throughout the summer, a skeletal
crew tends the gardens, which are often divided
into connected plots. In the fall, more workers
come in to process the weed; one raid found 40
sleeping bags at a single site. The workers pick
the flowering tops and hang them in nets to dry
for up to a week. They peel off the buds, package
the pot using scales and Baggies, and hike it out
at night in duffel bags. At preset pickup points,
vans await to transport the pot to consumers
across the U.S.
Beyond the safety issue, the ecological damage
from large-scale farms in parks and forests could
take years to repair. Tree cutting and terraced
slopes are causing massive erosion. In addition,
the pot farmers leave a mess. At the Tahoe grow,
20 rangers and sheriff's deputies dug up the
cannabis and stuffed it into paper bags as
evidence. But propane tanks, coils of irrigation
hose and food cans were left behind. "We don't
have the manpower to get the garbage out," says
Mark as she rips open plastic bags and tosses
tortillas into the bushes.
Only seven drug-enforcement agents are assigned
to police California's 20 million acres of
federal forests. Rangers estimate that they
discover as few as a third of the pot farms
growing on public lands-and more than half of
those are left untouched for lack of personnel to
investigate them. When forest fires demand extra
bodies, as was the case during last year's
drought, even more cannabis is left to harvest.
"This is a huge criminal enterprise, and we have
so few resources to fight it," says Mark. "There
are more growers than we know about or can deal
with. We pick off a couple. The rest get away."
From the Aug. 04, 2003 issue of TIME magazine
Drug dealers are planting pot farms all over our
national parks, and the Park Service is
struggling to root them out. TIME goes on a raid
By MARGOT ROOSEVELT I AUBURN, CALIF.
Sunday, Jul. 27, 2003
A blue-gray dawn tickles the tops of the
ponderosa pines at the Sugar Pine Recreation Area
in California's Tahoe National Forest. Campers
slumber in lakeside tents; bikers have yet to hit
the trails. But all is not quiet on this cool
July morning. A platoon of camouflaged figures
equipped with rifles, pistols and bulletproof
vests creep through manzanita brush with a police
dog. Their objective: a marijuana plantation a
few hundred yards from a well-traveled tourist
area.
As the Forest Service rangers stealthily
approach, an unsuspecting Mexican laborer named
Pedro Villa García, 51, stands in a clearing. All
around him the hillside is freshly terraced,
irrigated by black plastic hoses and dotted with
iridescent green cannabis. Villa García peers
down the path. Is that a black bear-a common
local species-emerging from the morning mist?
Suddenly he sees the rangers and dashes off
through the brambles. But the police dog, a
Belgian Malinois, catches up quickly, sinking its
teeth into Villa García's arm. Two rangers
wrestle him to the ground and handcuff him.
"We're good at jungle warfare," says Laura Mark,
a Forest Service investigator, as she prepares to
question the suspect. "We're the ninjas of the
woods."
Armed combat is hardly what families hope to
encounter as they head for their summer vacations
in America's national parks and forests. But drug
smugglers, methamphetamine cooks and cannabis
cultivators are invading federal lands as never
before. A U.S. Park Service ranger in Arizona's
Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument was gunned
down by a Mexican pot smuggler last August. In
Missouri's Mark Twain National Forest, 192 meth
labs have been dismantled over the past three
years. And marijuana farms are infesting
Kentucky's Daniel Boone National Forest and
Alabama's Talladega National Forest.
But the most explosive conflicts-and the biggest
hauls-are taking place in California. As
enforcement tightens along U.S. borders,
especially since 9/11, it is getting harder to
transport drugs into America. So Mexican
traffickers have turned to creating vast
marijuana plantations Stateside, that much closer
to their main customers. Thanks to a mild
climate, rich soil and a lengthy,
March-to-October growing season, California
cultivators routinely produce 10-ft.-high
specimens worth up to $4,000 each. Some of these
California pot farms stretch over several hundred
acres and have as many as 50,000 plants. Last
year 420,000 pot plants with a street value of
$1.5 billion were eradicated from the state's 18
federal forests, a tenfold increase from 1994.
In Sequoia National Park, renowned for its
majestic trees, rangers confiscated eight tons of
marijuana in a single week last September. "We
have a tremendous influx of Mexican growers,"
says Ross Butler, a special agent for the federal
Bureau of Land Management. "They are
sophisticated. They have guns. And we don't know
much about who they are."
Villa García is unarmed when he is caught in the
Tahoe forest-probably, rangers say, because it is
early in the season. If they had already matured,
the 3,500 plants he was tending would have
yielded some $8 million worth of pot-an
investment worth protecting. In the fall, when
scores of Mexican workers arrive to harvest and
process the pot, shoot-outs occur between
law-enforcement agents and camouflage-clad
growers toting AK-47s. Sometimes the pot pirates
mistake innocent tourists for thieves or cops.
Last year kayakers on the Salmon River in the
Klamath National Forest were held at gunpoint by
traffickers, as were a hiker in the Sequoia
National Park and hunters in Mendocino National
Forest. Two years ago, an 8-year-old boy hunting
deer in the Eldorado National Forest with his
father was shot in the face by pot farmers. "If
you are a hunter, a fisherman or a backpacker, it
can be dangerous," says Michael Delaney, who
oversees marijuana cases for the Drug Enforcement
Administration in Northern California. "There's a
safety factor for everyone who is out there."
Squirming in his handcuffs, the white-bearded
Villa García looks more like a kindly grandfather
than a drug trafficker. He says he has been in
the U.S. poquito-only a short time. A stranger
came to his village in the Mexican state of
Michoacán and brought him across the border,
along with four others.
One of them was with him on the Tahoe farm but
managed to escape. "I did not know what kind of
work it would be," he says in Spanish, adding
that he was paid $200 a month. Villa García was
arraigned on narcotics-cultivation charges,
pleaded not guilty, and is in prison awaiting
trial. His is a story federal agents know well
after arresting scores of low-level gardeners,
all undocumented, most hailing from Michoacán.
"They don't know much, and they're told, 'You
talk, you gonna die,'" says Mark, who has
questioned 60 such workers in the past year. "The
odds of us finding the organizers are slim."
At least five Mexican drug rings are under
investigation, some of them related to the
Michoacán-based Magana family. In June 2001, nine
members of the Magana clan pleaded guilty in
federal court to narcotics charges and were given
prison sentences ranging from four to 12 years.
The Maganas have been tied to 20 large gardens
with more than 100,000 plants in the Sequoia,
Sierra, Stanislaus and Mendocino national
forests. They also supplied workers for pot farms
on federal land in Arkansas, Idaho, Oregon, Utah
and Washington. According to investigators, the
Maganas and other groups have used profits from
methamphetamine operations to expand into
marijuana. They own gas stations, haciendas and
million-dollar resorts in Puerto Vallarta,
Guadalajara, Michoacán and other parts of Mexico.
"They have tremendous networks involving legal
businesses, money laundering and distribution,"
says Jerry Moore, the Forest Service's regional
law-enforcement chief. "We arrest people, but new
players move in."
Villa García and his Tahoe pot farm were
discovered a week after two forest rangers on
patrol noticed a recently bushwhacked footpath.
After the bust, the rangers found the usual
layout and pattern of cultivation. "It's like
they all go to the same college course-Marijuana
101," says Mark. As in other grows, seedlings are
planted 6 ft. apart in rows. A forest canopy
admits filtered sunlight but hides the seedlings
from aerial surveillance. A stream is diverted to
allow its water to flow through drip-irrigation
tubes along the terraces. So that the workers can
escape more easily, their sleeping area-strewn
with toothbrushes and bottles of Pepto-Bismol and
NyQuil-is hidden in the brush, apart from the
kitchen and processing area. Propane bottles
provide fuel for a two-burner stove next to bags
of tortillas, cans of Juanita's-brand menudo
(tripe), sacks of fertilizer and a votive card of
St. Peter with the inscription "May your spirit
intercede for sinners Š" in Spanish.
Rangers say that in March and April, workers are
driven in vans along remote forest roads at dusk
or dawn. They pile out onto prescouted paths with
100-lb. packs of supplies. Once they set up camp
and begin planting, they are resupplied every two
to three weeks. Throughout the summer, a skeletal
crew tends the gardens, which are often divided
into connected plots. In the fall, more workers
come in to process the weed; one raid found 40
sleeping bags at a single site. The workers pick
the flowering tops and hang them in nets to dry
for up to a week. They peel off the buds, package
the pot using scales and Baggies, and hike it out
at night in duffel bags. At preset pickup points,
vans await to transport the pot to consumers
across the U.S.
Beyond the safety issue, the ecological damage
from large-scale farms in parks and forests could
take years to repair. Tree cutting and terraced
slopes are causing massive erosion. In addition,
the pot farmers leave a mess. At the Tahoe grow,
20 rangers and sheriff's deputies dug up the
cannabis and stuffed it into paper bags as
evidence. But propane tanks, coils of irrigation
hose and food cans were left behind. "We don't
have the manpower to get the garbage out," says
Mark as she rips open plastic bags and tosses
tortillas into the bushes.
Only seven drug-enforcement agents are assigned
to police California's 20 million acres of
federal forests. Rangers estimate that they
discover as few as a third of the pot farms
growing on public lands-and more than half of
those are left untouched for lack of personnel to
investigate them. When forest fires demand extra
bodies, as was the case during last year's
drought, even more cannabis is left to harvest.
"This is a huge criminal enterprise, and we have
so few resources to fight it," says Mark. "There
are more growers than we know about or can deal
with. We pick off a couple. The rest get away."
From the Aug. 04, 2003 issue of TIME magazine
community service project...
