Mexican drug cartels using children as decoys

by ANGELA KOCHERGA / KVUE News

kvue.com

Posted on November 18, 2011 at 6:39 PM

Updated Tuesday, Nov 22 at 6:15 PM

TOMBSTONE, AZ -- Smugglers are using children in a ploy to sneak drugs past Border Patrol checkpoints. Agents are finding more kids in vehicles loaded with drugs, and the drivers are usually the children’s own mothers.

“As disturbing as it is, it’s not a surprise that they would try to conceal their loads by using children as decoys,” said Border Patrol Agent Colleen Agle who works in the Tucson sector.

It is the latest attempt by drug cartels to try to slip past highway checkpoints.

“They’re having women bring their children along to give off the impression that it’s just a normal family traveling doing their day-to-day to thing doing their day to day routine, “said Border Patrol Agent Agle.

In recent weeks agents at checkpoints in Arizona have discovered at least half a dozen children in vehicles loaded with drugs at checkpoints leading away from the border.

At a checkpoint near Tombstone, Arizona about an hour from the border, a Customs and Border Protection officer asks a man in a pickup truck, “What are you dropping off? A donde va?

Cartels try to exploit the fact agents often only have a few seconds agents to decide whether to wave a motorist through or stop and search the vehicle.

U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints are set up on highways that serve as drug trafficking routes to catch smugglers.

“We had an incident at this very checkpoint,” said Border Patrol Agent Agle standing at the Highway 80 checkpoint near Tombstone.

“We had a woman bringing her eight-year-old child with her in the vehicle, and we discovered that she was carrying 104 pounds of marijuana in the trunk of her car.”

Parents driving through the same checkpoint were disturbed to hear about the trend.

“They’re putting their children at risk,” said Lydia Salenyadia, who was traveling with her baby son and husband from Casas Grandes, Mexico to visit relatives in Phoenix.

Earlier this month, agents seized nearly 50 pounds of marijuana hidden in a spare tire. The driver had her eight-year-old daughter in the car. A canine team working the checkpoint discovered the drugs.

The technique has spread to the Texas border, but this time the smuggler was headed to Mexico. Customs and Border Protection officers doing southbound searches at an international bridge in Eagle Pass on Nov. 8 discovered 273 boxes of ammunition hidden in a pickup truck headed to Mexico. The driver was a young mother traveling with her three children.