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 Six people were arrested as authorities in San Diego moved on
Monday and Tuesday to shut down the tunnel, the 13th underground
passageway discovered along California's border with Mexico since
2006.
The 870-yard-long tunnel, one of the narrowest found in the region,
also yielded an unprecedented cache of drugs.
"This is the largest cocaine seizure ever associated with a tunnel,"
said Laura Duffy, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of
California.
The northern end of the tunnel, like most of the others, emerges in
a narrow industrial expanse between the Otay Mesa port of entry and
the California Highway Patrol's border facility. The area, known for
its heavy clay soil, is primarily traversed by trucks hauling tons
of legitimate cargo between the two countries every day.
 The latest tunnel, excavated 46 feet beneath the surface, ran from
the bottom of an elevator shaft built into a house in Tijuana to a
hole in the ground on the U.S. side enclosed within a fenced-in lot
set up as a pallet business. The hole was concealed under a
trailer-sized trash dumpster that smugglers used to move the drugs
off the lot, federal officials said.
"They put the drugs in the dumpster and then hauled the dumpster to
another location to unload it," Duffy said. Federal agents followed
a truck that carted the dumpster to a central San Diego spot about
25 miles north of the border and watched as the cargo was loaded
onto a box truck, which drove away.
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San Diego County sheriff's deputies who stopped the truck seized
2,242 pounds of cocaine and 11,030 pounds of marijuana, and arrested
three men, Duffy said. Federal agents searching the pallet lot and
the tunnel recovered an additional 3,000-plus pounds of marijuana
and arrested three more suspects, she said.
The suspects were all jailed on various drug-trafficking conspiracy
charges.
Federal agents who patrol the Otay Mesa area immediately north of
the border began watching the pallet company, its yard stacked with
grimy, wood-frame racks, in October, Duffy said.
"The investigation began with an astute border patrol agent who
identified this business as suspicious," Duffy said. "They began
monitoring this location and saw the people here conducting dry
runs."
(Editing by Steve Gorman and Andrew Hay)
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