Heroin in Soups and Lollipops: How Drug Cartels Evade Border Security

By RON NIXON of The NY Times. Excerpts:

"The tip came on the last day of January 2014 to special agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement: A drug courier was about to land at the Baltimore airport with a large shipment.

Hours later, the agents asked the man, Edgar Franco Lopez, a Guatemalan, to search the three large duffel bags he was loading in a car outside the airport. But agents found only food. So they bluffed, saying they had found evidence of drugs in the bags.

The driver, Edwin Quintana Carranza, a Mexican in the United States illegally who had claimed the bags were his and consented to the search, confessed. The drugs were hidden in the sugar wafers, he said.

Mr. Lopez and Mr. Carranza were key links in a drug smuggling network that stretched thousands of miles from Guatemala to Baltimore, according to court records and interviews with agents involved in the case. Law enforcement officials said members of Guatemala’s Ipala Cartel, a drug trafficking organization named for the city where it is based, shipped large amounts of heroin into the United States, hiding drugs in food, primarily sugar wafers, brownies, soups, lollipops and other candy.

Instead of smuggling heroin through ports of entry or across the border, the cartel’s traffickers exploited weaknesses in border security: parcels shipped through the mail, UPS and FedEx; air cargo; and travel on transit systems with relatively little security, like Amtrak. Their packages were factory-sealed and showed no signs of tampering, suggesting that they might have had access to a food-processing factory, agents involved in the case said.

The case highlights the increasingly sophisticated tactics drug trafficking organizations use to largely bypass traditional border security screening systems and walls. Even as the United States spends billions of dollars along the Mexican border — the main route for drug trafficking — as part of President Trump’s crackdown on border security, the traffickers have already found ways to avoid the cameras, drones, drug dogs and agents along the border, officials said.

Agents say the group may have also used the mail and parcels to avoid paying Mexican drug cartels for crossing their territory.

“A lot of people think of these drug trafficking organizations as gangs, and they are not. These organizations are a very adaptive adversary,” said Jayson P. Ahern, the former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under President George W. Bush. “If we cut off one of their transportation networks like at the border, they are still going to try to move their goods to market by other means.”"

"Agents said they initially bypassed the drugs concealed in the packaged food, even after searching for hours, because they saw no tampering. Concealing the drugs in food also helped to mask the smell of drugs from drug-sniffing dogs at the airport.

The Baltimore airport stop provided federal authorities with key information that they used to obtain 19 wiretaps and listen in on the co-conspirators as they discussed drugs deals, often in code. The agents recorded video of meetings and intercepted packages shipped to various airports through the Postal Service, UPS and FedEx, air cargo and small parcel companies, where other members of the trafficking organization picked them up. The group also used Guatemalan shipping companies with even fewer controls in place.

“Because they were using packages, they didn’t worry about anyone getting caught,” said Adam Parks, assistant special agent in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations in Baltimore. ”Even if we intercepted the packages, we couldn’t connect them to anyone because the names and addresses were fake.”"

"Mr. Bello also received several shipments through the Postal Service directly from Guatemala, with the drugs mixed in with flour, chocolate and hard candy. In one instance, agents watched as a UPS package filled with heroin was delivered to a Silver Spring, Md., address where Mr. Barrios lived."

"Federal authorities and homeland security experts said the Guatemalan drug smuggling group’s exploitation of the mail and parcel systems showed a sophisticated understanding of the holes in post-Sept. 11 border security. The sheer volume of mail and packages — the Postal Service alone processes billions of packages a year — makes it next to impossible for every item or cargo to be searched for drugs, experts say."