How Cartels Infiltrate The Border Patrol

Rotten cops aren't only south of the Rio Grande. Cartels use cash, sex and blackmail to recruit "narco migra."

Goat Canyon is a dry valley of crystalline rocks in the east of San Diego county named after the desert bighorns that roam. It was the perfect spot, Border Patrol agent Noe Lopez told his contact, to move dope through. “Honestly, the thing is that there aren’t—there aren’t any cameras,” Lopez said. “Nothing, nothing, nothing.”

Lopez went himself to the store and purchased three backpacks for the smugglers to use. On the first night, he collected one at the border fence with a glint of crystal meth inside. He stashed it in his Border Patrol truck, drove to base, switched it to his private car and then handed it to his connect in a parking lot in exchange for three grand in cash.

The second night he grabbed a bag with seven kilo bricks with the markings of cocaine. His source gave him $7,000 but said the smugglers were uneasy about going over the fence. Lopez said there was nothing to worry about. “If I’m saying, ‘cross now,’ that means that I am taking the responsibility for them to cross.”

But Lopez never made it to the third drop. He was arrested and charged with attempted cocaine and meth trafficking. The source, he discovered, was a DEA informant who had him on tape and the drugs were fake. He plead guilty and got seventy months in prison in 2017.

It was no freak case. In 2023, a judge sentenced agent Oberlin Cortez Peña for waving cars of cocaine through a checkpoint north of McAllen, Texas. In 2014, customs agent Lorne “Hammer” Jones got seven years for letting trucks of dope through San Ysidro. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.

Since the Department of Homeland Security was created in 2002, incorporating Customs and Border Protection, well over a hundred agents and officers have been convicted of trafficking dope or running undocumented migrants. This usually means working with cartels and their affiliates who control drug and human smuggling over the border.

In February, a New York court convicted Mexico’s former public security chief Genaro García Luna of working with the Sinaloa Cartel. A common retort in Mexico is that the rot infests both sides of the border. It’s a valid point. One of the issues I will be exploring in this newsletter is the narco corruption north of the Rio Grande and wherever it leads. And a solid place to start is the CBP - the United States’ first line of defense.

Putting it in perspective, corruption in the CBP is on a much lower level than in Mexico, where entire police forces work for cartels and carry out brutal massacres on their behalf. Yet we don’t know the full extent of CBP corruption. And the fact U.S. agents themselves are waving trucks of dope through raises questions about Washington’s entire strategy on drugs at a time of record overdose deaths.

A van with marijuana bundles than ran out of gas in the lane of CBP agent Margarita Crispin in El Paso. She was convicted of trafficking and of making $5 million.

Honey Pots and Money Pots

Alex Pacheco served two decades in the Border Patrol, working as special agent, supervisor and finally investigating rotten officers. Money is the obvious incentive for bad apples, Pacheco says. The $10,000 that Noe Lopez bagged may seem relatively low considering the risks. Yet, the sight of a bundle of cash is tempting. And some corrupt agents make considerably more.

Margarita Crispin was a customs officer in El Paso who waved trucks of marijuana through for years before being sentenced in 2009. The FBI claims she banked $5 million for her services.

A key difference, Pacheco says, is between Border Patrol agents who roam the desert, and customs officers, or CBPOs, who work the official crossings. A corrupt customs officer takes less risk yet has the opportunity to make more money.

“You have to actively be engaged in the smuggling act as a Border Patrol agent. You have to physically touch the stuff,” Pacheco says. “But a CBPO sits at an inspection booth at a Port of Entry. He doesn’t have to do anything. He sets up the arrangement. ‘My buddy is coming through in a red van.’ ‘Okay, cool. I am working that lane.’ When that vehicle pulls up, he doesn’t know whether there is people, meth, weapons of mass destruction, fentanyl, dead bodies. All he has to do is wave it through, not inspect it.”

Seizures indicate that traffickers move most high-value drugs, including fentanyl, cocaine, and meth, in “trap cars” through these official crossings rather than in backpacks over the desert. So officers at the booths are in a more strategic position.

Cartels also use the honey pot to corrupt, Pacheco says. Agents, either married or unmarried, will start seeing a woman connected to the mobsters and she will pull them in. Often beautiful buchonas (narco girlfriends) or strippers, these women can be confidential sources or suspects of the agents. They will not only connect them but also put pressure on them to spend money. “They expect a certain lifestyle that an honest person, a border patrol agent, can’t provide,” Pacheco says.

Agents may rationalize they will only do a couple of loads and then leave with the funds to put their kids through college. But they get hooked on the cash and the cartel can have tapes or photos to blackmail them if they try to leave. “It’s that slippery slope that there is absolute no coming back,” Pacheco says. “It’s like you can’t get someone a little bit pregnant. Once you are in there, you are fucking in there.”

On the flip side, cartels can protect the corrupt agents in prison. Convicted cops will often have to go to protective custody. But some of those who worked with narcos are able to walk the main yards of federal prisons without problems. “They have somebody looking over them that allows them to go into general population,” Pacheco says. “Everyone knows they were Border Patrol agents.”

How Deep Is The Rot?

Customs and Border Protection has over 60,000 employees so those nabbed working with traffickers are a tiny percentage. Still, we don’t know how many haven’t been caught. It’s hard to prove that an officer who just waves a car through conspired with the cartel.

Back in 2014, Politico reported that a CBP officer was arrested for misconduct every single day. James F. Tomsheck, who headed internal affairs before being ousted that year, claimed up to 10 percent of agents could be breaking the rules. This, however, includes everything from excessive force to making up expenses to stealing from migrants. (One agent was going into the evidence locker and bagging cash that migrants had before they were sent to prison thinking they would never come back to claim it).

Excessive force can include beatings and shootings, and agents have a saying that, “In the mountain, you are God,” meaning that you can get away with anything off the track. These are heinous crimes, but they don’t mean all these officers are working for cartels.

Pacheco believes the fact they are locking up rotten agents shows the force takes this seriously and the problem is being dealt with. “I believe it’s very low in U.S. law enforcement. I believe we have created a culture of anti-corruption. Does it happen? Absolutely, because power corrupts,” he says. “We do our best to mitigate it. And nobody will let shit slide any more.”

But even if Pacheco is right, narcos only need a small number of agents to get a lot of dope through. A car with a typical load of 50 kilos of cocaine is taking product worth about a million dollars wholesale. A car with ten pounds of fentanyl has enough to make 4.5 million pills each with a milligram of the poison. Every officer deliberately waving a vehicle through is worth a lot of money.

Stopping drugs is a Herculean task even when cops are honest. With tens of thousands of cars and trucks crossing the border daily, officers only have time to search a small percentage - unless they want to cause a mammoth hold up that disrupts trade. Traffickers accept they are going to get a certain amount of dope nabbed but their profits make up for it. Yet cartels improve their odds even more with corrupt agents. It’s like they are playing Black Jack and have bribed the dealer to slip them aces every few hands.

It also contributes to the bigger picture of how U.S. law enforcement is fighting, or collaborating, with drug traffickers. If prosecutors give narco witnesses cozy deals, DEA agents skim money for raucous parties, the CIA has assets who move drugs, and if Border Patrol agents themselves smuggle, does this together shatter the whole prohibition strategy ?

Perhaps drug trafficking is like a river where barriers with holes are effectively useless as the water will find a way though. Or is the CBP, while flawed, stopping the flood from becoming a tidal wave and without it the overdose crisis would be even worse?

Copyright Ioan Grillo and CrashOut Media 2023