Four drug tunnels found along US-Mexico border

TIJUANA: Three sophisticated drug tunnels equipped with lighting and ventilation — including one with a railcar system — have been discovered along the US-Mexico border in less than a week, the latest signs that cartels are building passages to escape heightened detection above ground.
Two of the tunnels were incomplete, including one that the Mexican army found in a Tijuana warehouse Thursday with more than 40 tons of marijuana at the entry. The passage extended nearly 400 yards, including more than 100 yards into the United States.
Soldiers found the Tijuana warehouse with four moving trucks full of marijuana, a trailer full of dirt, pickaxes, wheelbarrows, drills and other excavation equipment. The tunnel was equipped with a railcar system.
The Mexican army said three people were detained.
An incomplete tunnel along Arizona's border with Mexico was found Friday during an inspection of a drainage system on the Mexican side of Nogales in early stages of construction, said US Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Amber Cargile. No arrests have been made in the investigation of the crude passage.
The 240-yard tunnel in San Luis, Ariz, showed a level of sophistication not typically associated with other crude smuggling passageways that tie into storm drains in the state.
"When you see what is there and the way they designed it, it wasn't something that your average miner could put together," said Douglas Coleman, special agent in charge of the Phoenix division of the Drug Enforcement Administration. "You would need someone with some engineering expertise to put something together like this."
As Thursday's massive pot seizure in Tijuana demonstrated, tunnels have become an increasingly common way to smuggle enormous loads of heroin, marijuana and other drugs into the country. More than 70 passages have been found on the border since October 2008, surpassing the number of discoveries in the previous six years.
More than 150 secret tunnels have been found along the border since 1990, the vast majority of them incomplete, according to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Raids last November on two tunnels linking San Diego and Tijuana netted a combined 52 tons of marijuana on both sides of the border.
The first Arizona tunnel was discovered after state police pulled over a man who had 39 pounds of methamphetamine in his vehicle and mentioned the strip mall.
The tunnel was found beneath a water tank in a storage room and stretched across the border to an ice-plant business in the Mexican city of San Luis Rio Colorado. It was reinforced with four-by-six beams and lined with plywood.