99% Invisible - 339- The Tunnel

Episode Date: January 30, 2019

In May of 1990, law enforcement raided a warehouse in Douglas, AZ and a private home across the border in Agua Prieta, Mexico. Connecting the two buildings, they found a tunnel, more sophisticated than anything anyone had seen before. The tunnel in Douglas became a kind of prototype for many tunnels afterwards and a hallmark of the Sinaloa Cartel. The Tunnel

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Back in the 1980s, Kyoki Skinner was a reporter with a newspaper called the Arizona Republic. He covered the drug trade and the border, and it's been a lot of time in different parts of Mexico. But he was getting tired of traveling and being a stranger in every place he went. He wanted to actually settle down in Mexico and to make a life. That's when I thought about, well, I would like to be part of a community in Mexico. But if I lived here and knew what was going on here, I could probably file some pretty good stories.

So Kyoki moved to Agua Prieta, a town right on the border where he'd done some reporting before. Agua Prieta sits just across the line from Douglas, Arizona. The two cities are contiguous, one urban area that spans the border, divided by a towering rust-colored metal wall, a steep concrete ditch, a line of concertina wire, and a mesh fence. And Kyoki did what he'd set out to do. He settled down and made a life there. That's our own Delaney Hall.

He built a house, married a Mexican woman, continued mastering the slingy Spanish of Northern Mexico and ended up having five kids. Awa Prieta became his home. And the thing I liked about Awa Prieta, it wasn't tourism oriented at all. It was a very Mexican community. And I was very intrigued by the town for that reason.

Kyoki ended up scaling back his full-time reporting job Mexican community. And I was very intrigued by the town for that reason. Kyoki ended up scaling back his full-time reporting job so he could open a smoothie shop and juice bar. What better way to get to know this city than to have a business here where people will come in and hang out and talk. He could listen and observe and probably pick up a few good ideas for the occasional freelance story that came his way. He named his smoothie shop, El Mito Te.

Which in Spanish, it means like a gossip spot, or there's a ruckus going on, for example, the sirens going down the street. Everybody kind of runs out to see where the cop cars are going. And that's like, well, where's the Mito Te? What's going on? It's a hub hub type thing. Kyoki picked the name because on occasion,

he'd been accused of being a mytho-theodle, meaning a nosy person, someone who prize. He wasn't working as a full-time journalist anymore, but that didn't mean he wasn't a reporter at heart. He loved collecting bits and pieces of information and asking questions, figuring out what was really going on. And so that's how I got the name for my business and it stuck. It stuck in fact to this day and how many years later I'll run into people like at a gas

station and they'll see me and they'll yell at me in Spanish. Hey, Guero mi totero which means hey you know blonde gossiper. They don't know my name but they know I had the mi toter. It's kind of perfect, though, because it's also where you first started to see evidence of this big conspiracy that was going on. Yeah, there was things going on there that wasn't hard to start picking up stuff. Stuff that would eventually lead Kyoki to one of the biggest and strangest stories he'd ever cover. You know, the news today, something that one customs agent called something out of James Bond.

The story involved the cocaine trade. Only last week, another 600 pounds of cocaine were found concealed in a truck. El Chapo Guzmán. He has been the most wanted man in Mexico. Marijuana, cocaine, meth, heroin and murder are all part of his business. And an incredible feat of engineering and architecture that would change the drug trade forever. It was 1989 when Kiyoki first started noticing some new customers in the juice shop. With guys he hadn't really seen before.

They had a certain swagger and attitude and he says they often had bodyguards with them. Which is not typical for an outing to the juice shop. Kyoki described them as senolua cowboy types. So just when you say these senolua cowboys would come in, like what do they look like? What do they act like? Real high-end cowboy boots, the Levi's, the leather vest, the white hats that they wear, pick up trucks with senoloa plates.

They all feel like they were kind of above the law. They double park out in front of my place and they didn't give it damn. Everybody just kind of stayed away from them because they knew what was going on that these guys were in town for some something. Back in the late 80s, the Cinaloa Cartel wasn't quite the sprawling dominant criminal organization. It's become today, but it was headed in that direction. The Cartel controlled a lot of the drug trafficking quarter that ran through the Mexican states of the Sinaloa and Sonora, then across the border into Arizona and onto big distribution points like Phoenix and Los Angeles.

Our Prieta fell right along that corridor. Kyogu suspected that these guys in his juice shop, buying their smoothies with $100 bills, were part of the cartel. He began observing them, caut from a distance, but he also wasn't above marketing to their sensibilities. And the big thing we hyped with them was we had drinks that we called AR-15. They love that one. And then we had an alfalfa drink.

We hyped it as being real good for hangovers. So they would come in and drink fresh alfalfa mixed with pineapple or whatever. They bought into my advertising schemes, and that's what they would have. This Kiyoki says is one of the rules of border towns. Even if the theory of trickle-down economics doesn't really hold up in other places, it kind of works here. You're dealing with border towns and drug trafficking. Trichle down economics is a valid idea because in Mexico, these guys don't hoard the money.

It gets spent. On stuff like big houses and fancy cars, not to mention bribes to local cops and politicians and businesses where the narcos launder their money. In general, Kiyoki says, drug traffickers tend to be pretty flashy. But there was one new guy that stood apart from the Sinaloa Cowboys with their leather vests

and high-end boots. This guy dressed more like a businessman. His name was Francisco Rafael Camarena-Maccias. And one day, he offered Kiyoki his business card and told him a little about what he was doing in town. Coming in, it claimed to be a lawyer at a Wadala Hada. The story that I got from him when he came into my jispar at one time was that he was a contractor and he was going to build houses in Awa Prieta. Kamadena also told Kyoki that he was pursuing some

business opportunities just across the border in Awa Prieta's sister city, Douglas, Arizona. And at that point, I didn't know what the score was. I thought he was pretty legit. It wasn't yet clear to Kiyoki that Kamadena was also in the drug trade. And it would take almost a year for that to become apparent to the entire city of Douglas as well.

And by then, Kamadena had already turned the little town upside down. Douglas is small. About 14,000 people lived here back in 1989 when Kamarena first showed up. It doesn't have a whole lot of attractions. One of the main ones is the Gadson Hotel, which was first built back in the early 1900s

when the area was more of a magnet for cattlemen, ranchers, and mining tycoons. It has a grand marble lobby, and these gorgeous Tiffany-style stained glass windows. They depict the surrounding Sonoran desert, with its Suwara cactus, Ocatillo, and Creosot bushes. Today, that desert landscape is heavily surveilled. A network of towers equipped with cameras and sensors watch the southern border and all of Douglas

pretty much 24 hours a day. Border patrol trucks with tinted windows cruise the streets. There's so much history here because this all started with Mr. Douglas, are you already taped recording me? Yeah, is that okay? On the north side of town, there's a shop called Douglas Diesel. It's a big brick warehouse with peeling stucco filled with truck parts.

And it's owned by this guy, Gary James. Maybe we better just start all over. Well, first of all, what's your name and when were you born? My name is Gary James, I was born 131-51. Gary grew up in Douglas and his live here almost all his life. He helps fix and service the semis and trucks that pass through the port of entry, hauling clothes, electronics, window blinds and car parts, manufactured in Mexico. About 145,000 personal vehicles and more than 2,000 trucks cross the border every month.

So a lot of my business is from Mexico. In fact, I would say probably 80% of my business is from south of the border. And Gary says that when your customers are people who work in the cross-border trucking business, a certain number of them will have ties to smuggling. When you have a foreign country that butts up to the United States and the drug problem that we have in America, you're going to have these kind of transactions all the time. In all kinds of businesses, and so many of times I know people coming in my shop may not be legit 100%.

But it's still a business. I'm legit, so I sell them the parts. But when Gary first met Rafael, Kamarena out at a local bar, he says he didn't suspect that Kamarena was involved in any smuggling. I remember him being dressed very well, was very professional.

Never looked like he ever got excited or upset and never said anything that would make you question who he was. Excuse me. Doggie's diesel. Camadena was outgoing and social and he became friendly with some of Douglas's most prominent citizens. That included the chief of police and the local justice of the peace who owned a lot of land. Kamadena actually bought a plot of that land near an industrial part of the border,

and he also bought the local business that sat on it. The business was called Douglas Reddimix, and it sold sand, gravel, and concrete for construction projects. Kamarena hired Gary to help service his trucks. And so I was seeing Mr. Kamarena, at least on a weekly basis. At least to Gary, Kamarena's business appeared to be above board. So the Davis Reddy Mix was actually bidding on federal contracts, city contracts, state contracts for all kinds of materials that are needed in road building, a bridge building, and so it looked like a very

very legit business. I mean he was employing people and so we were all happy because at that point in time there wasn't much industry in Douglas Arizona. Arizona. So it's really right downtown. Not far. Real close to where all the DEA and customs people were stationed. It's right under their nose pretty much. Kyoki Skinner is giving me the Douglas tour in his 1973 VW Bug, which has a flapping canvas roof and a bumper sticker on the back that says

make America Mexico again, with a map showing the US territory that used to be part of our southern neighbor. Okay, this is this warehouse right here. Right now the city has been using it to store some of their buses and their bands that run around Douglas. In front of us is a beige warehouse surrounded by a chain link fence. Kamadena constructed this building for his ready-mixed business back in the late 80s. He stored his trucks and equipment and material here.

The border fence is about 100 pieces away. Mexico is right there. And through the fence, just over the line, we can see another property that used to be Kamadenas. It's a ranch-style home in a wealthy neighborhood of Awa Prieto. Kamadena built the house on a vacant lot, which he reportedly bought for $90,000 cash. It was a little bit over and above market price to say the least.

It raised some eyebrows. This guy was throwing around a lot of money. And then there was the enormous hole behind the home. Kamarena told his neighbors it was going to be a swimming pool. But as time went on they realized it was starting to fill up with dirt again. And so one day I was a sudden the neighbor told me, you know that big hole up was behind that, well it's all filled in. No pool had materialized, even though there was a lot of construction activity at the house with

trucks going in and out and hauling dirt. And at this point, because Douglas and Albert Prieta are both relatively small towns and everyone knows everyone else. Rumors were beginning to circulate. Mito Tez, as Kyoki would call them. People were saying that Kamarena wasn't just building a warehouse on the U.S. side and a nice residential home on the Mexico side. He was building some kind of tunnel between them. At dirt that slowly refilled the swimming pool hole, apparently it had been dug out of a passageway

that ran under the border. US customs officials in Douglas and then in Phoenix eventually received a number of tips from informants. They learned that Kamadena was using the passageway to smuggle drugs from his home in Awaprieta across the border to his warehouse in Douglas. But before law enforcement could go into the warehouse to search for the tunnel, they needed to establish that the smuggling was actually happening.

So they staked out Kamadena's warehouse. Kamarena's business was located one block away from the US customs headquarters. This was later chronicled in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. It was very dramatic. Early 1990, we initiated a 24-hour surveillance of the Douglas Reddy Mix Company. I think we've got something. Agent staked out Kamarina's business for over two months. Yes, Kamarain, alright.

Law enforcement eventually followed a flatbed truck that they'd seen leaving Comerainers warehouse. And they trailed it to a property outside of Phoenix, where they conducted a raid. Lawyers has raided a farm where Comerainers truck had been seen. You guys come to the search warrant. Agent seized over a ton of nearly pure cocaine. There it is.

Street value over $100 million. The cocaine had been transported inside a hidden compartment beneath the truck's bed. The raid confirmed that the drugs had come from Camarena's warehouse. In May of 1990, law enforcement rated Camarenaorant as warehouse and Douglas and his home in Aguapriata. They'd heard there was a tunnel, but they didn't really know exactly what it would be like. The first reaction was like, okay, a tunnel.

Does it sound like some little bitty hole, like a go-for-hole, if these guys are crawling through? This is Terry Kirkpatrick. He worked with the U.S. Custom Service at the time, and he was there the night of the raids. First agents entered the warehouse on the U.S. side. And in the middle of the floor, it was probably about a two-foot by two-foot grate. Well that grate just happened to be the shaft leading down into the tunnel.

Once they'd found the tunnel entrance in the Douglas warehouse, some of the agents headed over to Aua Prieta, where they were joined by the Mexican Federal Judicial Police. They discovered that Kamadena and his family had already fled. His house was empty. No one was there, but there was no access to the tunnel they couldn't figure it out. We weren't sure how to get into it either. The agents went into what looked like a recreation room with a pool table in it. And when they pulled away the carpet, they could see there was something unusual about the floor.

It looked as if there was a separate concrete slab underneath the pool table, a kind of enormous trap door. The agent started looking around for some kind of button or lever that might open it. And someone also pulled out a jackhammer. And I just happened to be the one that took the jackhammer and started jackhammering the floor on top of where the pool table was. As I'm standing there jackhammering it all was sudden it moved and started to go up, and then it stopped. And so everybody kind of froze and we said, okay, who touched what?

Well, it just so happened that one of the policemen outside was trying to get a drink of water out of an outside water spiket. And when he turned that spiket, that's what was a control lever that allowed the pull table to go up. The valve triggered the pull table to rise up to the ceiling on huge hydraulic lifts. Like something in a mechanics garage, revealing a set of stairs underneath which descended into the tunnel. The same one they'd found in entrance to on the Douglas side of the border. The tunnel was located about 30 feet underground. Once agents had the bottom, there was a passageway.

About 270 feet long, four feet wide, if five feet high, just tall enough that a person could walk through slightly stooped, pushing a wheeled cart full of bundles of cocaine. The tunnel had concrete walls and a curved concrete roof. There was a ventilation system and rudimentary lighting. So this wasn't just a go-for-whole. This was clearly a sophisticated engineering project. Just the complexity to this whole tunnel was something that had been unseen before unheard of and no one I think in the United States government,

especially in law enforcement, realized any of the things ever existed. Well, federal agents on patrol along the Mexico Arizona border said today that they discovered a major drug smuggling route where they had never looked before. An estimated $2 million worth of construction discovered last night, concrete steel reinforcing bars, electrica zona five feet high four feet wide the length of a football field customs agents say the discovery of the tunnel was pretty much the biggest thing

that had happened in Douglas everybody was paying attention I mean everybody and we had congress people come out to Douglas Arizona and you know America's most wanted and unsolved mysteries and we just had a lot of activity here for at least the first year after the tunnel was discovered. It was constant. It was just constant. I'd hear the helicopters, the black hawks landing all the time. Well who is it today?

You know John McCain. It was like Grand Central Station in that place. Kiyoki started reporting in between shifts at the JuShop. Gary kept servicing semis, but was also hired by the federal government to help maintain and secure the warehouse site so law enforcement could come and go. The Custom Service undertook a massive investigation, and people started printing t-shirts and bumper stickers, which said, I saw the tunnel and selling them to all the visiting politicians and journalists.

And everyone, government officials, reporters, law enforcement, ordinary citizens of Douglas, they were all asking the same questions. First, who provided the money to build this tunnel? It was estimated to have cost one to two million dollars to create, so the project clearly had the financing of a much bigger operation. And the other question was, who had the expertise? Someone with engineering know-how had been involved. Someone who knew how to build a tunnel, undetected, that stretched the length

of a football field, and ran under the massive border fence and concrete drainage ditch that separated Mexico from the US. So right away everybody was talking like, who invested in this? Who is the kingpin of this operation? And of course his name started coming up. The name was Joaquin El Chapo Guzman. And eventually, as the investigation progressed, someone

else started coming up too. An architect. The arrival of the architect. After this. Right now, in New York, a massive trial is underway. Joaquin Guzman-Loeira, better known as El Chapo, is one of the most powerful drug kingpins ever to face prosecution. This trial is a huge deal for the U.S. government, which tried unsuccessfully for decades to capture El Chapo and hold him accountable.

El Chapo escaped from Mexican prisons not once but twice before finally being arrested again and externated to the U.S. Now when he's being transported from the federal prison in Manhattan where he's being held to the courthouse in Brooklyn where his trial is happening, he's locked in what basically sounds like a coffin. The drug lord is said to be locked inside a security capsule, which is fixed to the floor of an armored vehicle, protected inside by a team of officers with automatic weapons,

and escorted in a commando-style convoy capable of repelling attack. In an effort to prevent an assault on the caravan and risk another chopper escape, authorities are closing the Brooklyn bridge while delivering him to court. Early on in the trial, back in November, as prosecutors began to lay out the scope and scale of the Cinaloa Cartel's operation, jurors were given a video tour of the Douglas Tommel, one discovered back in 1990. The footage released to the public doesn't have sound,

but it shows agents walking stooped through the concrete passageway, and it shows the concrete slab below the pool table, floating up from the floor on its hydraulic lifts. Under the leadership of El Chompo, the Cinaloa Cartel became known for their creative smuggling methods, especially their tunnels. The one in Douglas became a kind of prototype for many tunnels afterwards. And the person who oversaw its construction was a man named Felipe de Jesus, Corona Verbara. The tunnels really started with a guy named Felipe de Jesus, Corona Verbara, who was an

architect. He graduated from the University of Guadalajara in 1980 with an architectural degree. And there's not much known about his early life beyond that fact. This is Monterey. He was the South America correspondent for the Washington Post, and he's written about transporter tunnels for the New Yorker. And he says that while Rafael Comet and I may have been the frontman for the tunneling project, behind the scenes it was Kuronavid Beta, who provided technical expertise. Kuronavid Beta did not eyes this. We'll get into that a bit more later, but he was convicted

of conspiracy and drug smuggling in his own federal trial in 2006. And a lot of what we know about him is based on testimony from that trial. Stories that have been collected from contract workers who helped him with certain construction projects and also from testimony from former cartel members. Cartel members like Miguel on Hill Martinez, who worked as a pilot and later as a lieutenant-fraile chapo before turning state's witness and entering witness protection. Back in the 1980s and 90s, Martinez helped to manage El Chapo's business. For a time he coordinated cocaine deliveries from Colombia to Awa Prieta.

And when he testified against coronavirus, he described him as being, The only guy that he ever knew within the Centelo cartel who addressed Choppa with the pronoun two instead of the more formal and deferential instead. So he was considered a guy who just was very close friends and very familiar with Gussmann. But I'm not sure if anybody really has the story of how they met. We may not know that story, but we do know, generally speaking, how some architects come to work for drug traffickers. Basically it's like in any business community.

This is Yoan Grillo, a British journalist based in Mexico City. He's covered the drug trade and the drug war for almost 20 years. Like if you're going to build a house and you say you need an architect, you might ask around, you know, who knows a good architect, and it's a marketplace. And if you have somebody coming up and offering very good money, above what you might normally make, it can be an offer that's hard to refuse. And because cartels are such extensive and elaborate operations, they need many kinds of sub-specialists. They end up hiring not just architects and engineers, but also accountants, lawyers, IT experts, and even musicians who write ballads about the exaggerated exploits of certain arcos.

Many of these people are employed for one-off jobs, like contractors. So you have professional killers who are hired and paid a wage or paid for a hit. You have people who are walk over the desert with the backpack flow drugs and are paid normally per backpack they take over and you have people who are paid to build tunnels and so they they paid for the job. According to Miguel Angel Martinez, the former cartel member, the architect, Coronev Edberta, worked on a number of building projects for El Chapo

before embarking on the Douglas tunnel. And his first projects were just kind of construction jobs within Mexico that weren't related to tunnels. He had built a couple of residential homes for Guzman and he had helped design a farm with a zoo where Choppo kept some of his exotic pets. And he designed a grocery store where the Cinaloa cartel had some offices up in the top floor of it. And all of these projects, whether a farm or a home

or a grocery store, had a certain flare. The one thing that all of those projects had in common was that they featured hiding places that were all accessed by these hydraulic systems. There's a playfulness almost to the sort of systems that coronavirus was designed. He was very creative in developing ways to access these secret passageways that somebody who walked into a house would never really guess. In 1988, coronavirus moved from Guadalajara, Mexico to the Douglas, Awa Prieta area with

his wife and three kids. And in the federal trial, his defense team maintained that it was to work on legitimate projects. They argued that, like a lot of people in the area, coronavirus inadvertently got caught up doing business with people who had cartel connections, but that he didn't actually design or build the tunnel. They brought in an expert to testify that the tunnel looked more like the work of a structural engineer and not an architect.

The trial transcripts get very detailed and jargony, with references to things like control joints and curing compounds and inlet structures. The defense says corruption in the area was rampant, and it was coronavirus misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And there is some evidence that there were other specialists involved with the tunnel. A senior customs agent told me that one of the informants who tipped him off to the tunnel was a Mexican engineer. The engineer claimed he'd been hired by the Cinaloa cartel to research possible tunnel locations

and to create tunnel designs Which were then handed off to coronavirus. That detail is hard to fact check, but it comes from a credible source Even after being convicted and serving more than a decade in federal prison coronavirus still denies being involved with the tunnel His attorney told us that he also denies involvement in any previous Chapo Guzman projects. We asked coronavirus barra for an interview, but through a friend he told us that he's not willing to speak at this time. Despite pleading not guilty, coronavirus was seen at key tunnel locations, including both the warehouse on the US side and the residential

home on the Agua Prieta side. A number of local contractors and workers reported interacting with him at those construction sites. They described him as somebody that they would talk to all the time, who was always around, and it's funny, a lot of people actually describe him in glowing terms. For instance, there was a contractor who described seeing the plans that coronavirus had for the warehouse. And he kind of paused in his testimony and said they were beautiful plans.

So they kind of respected this guy as an architect. He kind of had this air about him that people looked at him as somebody who knew what he was doing. But there were also a few signs that this wasn't an ordinary construction project. For instance, the drains in the floor of the warehouse. One worker raised questions about their size, and the fact that they didn't appear to lead to a clear drainage system. This was because they were actually going to lead into the passageway,

the connected to the tunnel. And one of the workers said, these drains, they don't, there's something not right with them. Where does the water go? He was kind of questioning the design and coronavirus. Basically, said, mind your own business. I'm in charge here.

The Cinaloa cartel had hand picked the Aua Prieta Douglas border as a tunnel site for a few reasons. For one thing, the cartel was already operating there. They had established networks and have established operation, and they'd already been moving drugs across the border, above ground, mostly in fans and trucks, with hidden compartments. And they were able to move about three tons per month across the border that way, but Guzman wanted more efficiency.

And understand why El Chabo Guzman wanted more efficiency, we need to take a little side trip to Miami. Back in the early 1980s, most cocaine was coming into the US not from Mexico, but from Colombia. And the Colombian cartels preferred smuggling drugs into the country on boats and small plains through cities in South Florida, like Miami. Miami is the source that supplies two thirds of America's drug habit, and the drug trade was helping to fuel a surge in crime. And so the Reagan administration started something

called the South Florida Task force to fight it. It looks like a war. Customs agents on assignment ready for combat. High-speed Cobra helicopters from the Army with marijuana leaves painted on the side, each leaf a successful drug bust. Reagan's goals for the task force were very ambitious. Our goal is to break the power of the mob in America and nothing short of it. We mean to end their profits, imprison their members and cripple their organizations. But the reality is the harder we make it for smugglers to get goods across the border, the more money ends up getting pumped into the system.

Militarizing our border over many decades has an ended illegal trafficking. It's just helped professionalize it. The more you crack down on it, the harder it gets. Yo and Grillo again. The harder it gets, the price goes up. The more the price goes up, the more money is made. The more money is made, the more criminals want to do it. so the criminals that adapt to it and are richer are more powerful organizations. And the Mexican cartels were about to get a lot richer and more powerful. Thanks in part to Reagan's strategy of increased enforcement in South Florida. Because when the Colombian cartels saw that they were losing their product in drug busts

in Miami, they just looked to a different border and new criminal collaborators. So they turned to Mexico. There's a agreement made where they would pay the Mexicans to take the cocaine from them. Mexico already had a big trafficking route into the United States. So all the Colombas I have to do is bring it up to Mexico. Mexicans could take it and then take the United States and deliver it to them at a price, per kilo, or per ton, or they're negotiating. So suddenly, a lot of the cocaine that had been traveling around or over Mexico was now traveling through it, and then across the southern border into the US, which meant a lot of new money pouring into the Mexican cartels.

Border agents in Arizona, like Terry Kirkpatrick, could see the effects of this on the ground. When it hit, it was just like every car in Santa Marijuana had coconut, just like a thousand pounds at a time, four thousand pounds. We got overrun so fast. And as the U.S. continued to crack down on cartels in Colombia, it eventually opened up

new opportunities for Mexican cartels to become more than just careers. That eventually come to dominate the entire cocaine supply chain. So the big cartels were taking out in Colombia, first Pablo Escobar, and the Ci Cartel were taken down and the Mexican cartels grew and grew particularly the synologues. I'm telling you, I was only like 12 or 13 years old back then and my classmates and I, we were like, I don't want to be as a superhero, like most kids around the world. I want to be a true trafficker because they do have the money and they can do whatever

they want. This is Miguel Angel Vega. He grew up in Culea Constinoloa, which by this time had been the epicenter of Mexico's heroin and marijuana trade for decades. But with the rise of cocaine, Cinelo and drug traffickers were getting even more powerful. And Vega watched that happen as he was growing up. And some of his classmates became immersed in narco culture. El Chapa was seen as a modern day robin hood, helping churn the Cinalo and economy with

drug money. And some of those glass, glass mates ended up being drug traffickers. And all I can tell you about that is some of them are imprisoned or dead. Much of the blood is spilled here in Kulia Khan, the violent nerve center. Instead of joining the Norkos, Vega became an investigative journalist focused on organized crime. He's chronicled the violence and chaos of the drug war, which has done so much over the years to destabilize the country, corrupted institutions, and turn some of

its most vulnerable people into asylum seekers. Violence seems like these, bodies stuffed in garbage bags, police executed, and journalists assassinated, are directly connected to the wrath of a Sinaloa cartel. And Vega explains that a lot of this violence and chaos was seeded back in the late 80s. Not only because the cocaine trade was being rerouted through Mexico, but also because the cartels were undergoing an internal reorganization. A whole generation of older narcos was leaving the scene. They were getting arrested, they were dying, and a new generation was coming up. And they were dividing up the old territory, forging new alliances and

rivalries. That generation included El Chapo Guzmán, an enormously creative, brutal, and ambitious narco. He was eager for power. Let's just smold the whole world. Let's just conquer the entire world, and that's like his ultimate goal. And Chapo had some new ideas, like this tunnel in Douglas, which according to some estimates allowed the Cinaloa cartel to triple the amount of cocaine they were moving across the border.

So do you think what role did this tunnel play in Chapo kind of becoming Chapo? I think it was a big role. Here's Kiyoki Skinner again, the journalist and juice shop owner from Awa Prieta. I think it really launched a manduous career. The Colombians couldn't believe how fast he got the cocaine to Los Angeles, and they kind of jokingly nicknamed him Speedy. In addition to helping El Chapo make his name, the tunnel created a new kind of notoriety for Douglas Arizona, which had formerly been

a sleepy border town. Suddenly, it was synonymous with the biggest drug trafficking story of the early 90s. And there were a lot of questions about how a smuggling operation of that magnitude could have happened without at least a few local collaborators. Oh, well, which is dated one June 10th. Would you read just the first couple graphs of that? Sure. The specter of a man who called himself Francisco Rafael Camarena still stalks the homes of

the wealthy and the influential here who entertained him in lavish style. In the aftermath of the tunnel's discovery, Kiyoki got to work. He wrote a series of articles for his old newspaper, the Arizona Republic. Chronically, Raphael Comet and his connections to various prominent people, not just in Mexico, but in Douglas. He was always out of the country club and making the right connections, getting to know the right people here before he got this tunnel underway. got this tunnel underway. I mean, it seems like there were a lot of implications in these articles about local officials profiting

from this whole scheme. But did anybody in local government ever do any time for this or anything like that? No. No, nobody on the Douglas side. There were also allegations about how agents from the Custom Service may have colluded in the Tunnel scheme. And while again, no one was ever charged, there was a lot of corruption going on within the agency around this time. Here's Terry Kirkpatrick again.

At that time, a corruption was so rampant that the U.S. government started a blue ribbon campaign trying to stamp it out and we were so busy trying to work the corruption in trying to weed out our own with these inspectors because they were passing a thousand pounds in the trunk of a car right through the port of entry. It was just a lawless kind of area back in 1989. A senior agent in the Custom Service told me that the tunnel was probably an operation for at least six months. And he said that, quote, everyone would have had to know about the passageway for it to be in regular use for that length of time. After the discovery of the tunnel, El Chapo Guzman came up with new ways of getting drugs across the border, packed in cans of jalapeno peppers or inside coils of insulated wire. Both Francisco Camarena and Felipe Codona Veda fled to Mexico, and it took a long time

to get them back to the United States. Camarena was eventually extradited in 2001, and a couple years later, he pled guilty for his role in the Douglas smuggling conspiracy. He received a sentence of 10 years in federal prison. Coronavirus was extradited in 2003 and tried in 2006. It was released from federal prison in September 2018. But that wasn't the end of the tunnels. The Douglas tunnel was like a prototype.

Even though it was eventually discovered, it was so efficient and effective during the time it was in operation that it paid for itself many times over. It was a successful experiment that proved the viability of underground smuggling. And so... The tunnels after this one, they almost became a nightmare. And it was one tunnel after another tunnel after another tunnel... Tunnel from San Diego to Tijuana. They found a so sophisticated being called a super tunnel.

The tunnel is over a quarter of a mile long and nearly 70 feet underground, part of it through solid limestone. There's even a phone system. The phones still work. We already say without specific information about where the tunnels are located or just plain luck, they're virtually impossible to find. Ron Clayborn, ABC News on the US, Mexico, board. Most tunnels show up along the Arizona and California borders, in places where the ground

is soft enough for digging, but not so soft it will cave in. Some of the tunnels are pretty rudimentary, but some, like the Douglas tunnel, are highly engineered and sophisticated projects with elevators and rail cars. A tunnel discovered in Baja Mexico last year included solar panels to power its ventilation and lighting systems. Most illegal drugs actually come into the country through legal ports of entry. That fact and tunnels are two reasons why Trump's proposed border wall probably wouldn't do much to

stop drug trafficking. But the US government still sees tunnels as enough of a problem that they've started tunnel task force groups along the border. The groups exist solely to monitor, investigate and prevent tunneling. But tunnels are notoriously difficult to detect, and they keep showing up. When I was in Douglas, I tried to get into the old tunnel, which has been kept open for occasional training sessions by the Border Patrol. Kiyoki Skinner worked his connections and got us into the warehouse where the entrance is, but the tunnel is dank and unmaintained and I was seven months pregnant at the time of the visit. A city worker took one look at me, probably imagined me trying to clamber down the rusty ladder in

the dark and then wouldn't let us in after all. But if we couldn't see the architecture of the drug tunnel, then at least we could see the architecture the drug trade has helped to build across the border. So you see it was a pretty nice neighborhood. Once again, we're driving around in Kiyoki's rattling little VW bug. We're exploring the part of town where Awa Ptieta's business people tend to live.

It's the neighborhood where Kamadenas Ranch home with the hydraulic pool tables still sits, although that's now been converted into a community center. And Kiyoki points out a house on the corner. It's a nice place, with a raw iron fence. The house is made of brick. This is clean money. This is cattle money. This guy's been a cattle guy rancher for years. Because Kyoki has lived here for decades, he's picked up a lot of information about how people make their money.

As we go around the corner. Look at this place up on the right. Look at the columns on that place. My goodness. It goes over the limit, isn't it? The house takes up the entire block. It has enormous white greco-room and columns and a chandelier dangles over its soaring entryway. Kiyoki says a local narco lives here. It's one of many extravagant narco mansions in the area.

Kiyoki now leads local tours of these places, bringing tourists and snowbirds from Arizona and other parts of the southwest down to Gawk. I said, I'm going to show you what bad habits in the United States has built for us down here. All this money from drug consumption in the United States, this is how it's been spent down here in these houses. And not just these houses. When you stop to think about everything that's funded, directly or indirectly, by American drug consumption,

can make your mind spin. The money finds its way to the people who drive, track, or fly the drugs across Mexico. To the hitmen who battle over cartel territory. To the architects and engineers who build the tunnels for smuggling and the mansions for the kingpins. And to the bribes that pay off cops, politicians, and border patrol agents, so that they'll turn their heads

and look the other way as this vast and complex system grinds along. And of course, the money also trickles down into the rest of the economy, to the grocery stores and the clothing shops and the gas stations, even to the local juice shop that sells the narcos. They're AR-15 smoothies. 99% Invisible was produced this week by our senior editor Delaney Hall, who finished this story just under the wire. I think that's it.

I also think I was like literally in labor when I tracked the stuff, so if there's anything that doesn't work very well, let me know. And I'll do it again. Okay, bye. You went above and beyond, congratulations. Enjoy your much harder job for the next six months. Mix and Tech Production by Sheree Fusef,

Music by Sean Riel. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Cole-Statty is the digital director. The Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colestad, is the digital director. The rest of the team is Avery Troubleman, Joe Rosenberg, Emmett Fitzgerald Vivian Lee, Taren Mazza, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Kiyoki Skinner, Andy Becker,

and the clerks at the US District Court in Tucson, Arizona. To find out more about Kiyoki tours of Aguaprieta, Google his name. That's KEOKI Skinner. We are a project of 91.7 KLW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, in the world. You can find the show in Joined Discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org.

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