Cannabis Cultivation

Media references to Mexican drug cartels are invariably followed by
some variation of the phrase “spill over into this country.” Those five
words are key to the flak currently being sent up by the federal
government—most recently by Janet Napolitano, former Arizona
governor and now head of the Department of Homeland Security.

She wants you to believe the feds have a plan to respond should
Mexican cartel violence “spill over into this country.”

Spill over? It’s already here, in our border communities, as well as
in the 230 cities across the nation where the cartels are active. The
wave of home invasions in Tucson and the kidnappings in Phoenix aren’t
the result of Tupperware parties gone bad.

Even our public lands are being hit, especially in the Tonto
National Forest around Payson, 90 miles northeast of Phoenix.

Between 2006 and 2008, the Gila County Narcotics Task Force took
down 43 pot farms, eradicating 82,904 marijuana plants, says Task Force
commander Johnny Sanchez. All but a handful were on Tonto land.

All of the farms larger than 1,000 plants were apparently operated
by Mexican drug organizations. The workers are usually Mexican
nationals brought across the border for that purpose. They might arrive
at a grow site in April and live there until harvest in October.

These men are considered “high-value assets,” according to a Forest
Service criminal investigator who asked for anonymity. They’re
generally from rural, marijuana-growing areas in Mexico, such as
Michoacán, which means they’re experienced in the drug trade and
capable of surviving outdoors.

But at harvest time, the cartel acquires additional workers,
sometimes by kidnapping them off the streets of Phoenix and hauling
them to Payson to work off smuggling debts. Others are brought across
the border on the promise that they’ll be set up with some unnamed job.
They’re driven out to the forest and—only then—told of
their new “employment.” The forest investigator says these “farm
workers” are often armed. Gunfire has erupted in the Tonto at least
twice.

In September 2005, bear hunters approached a pot farm along Deer
Creek, in the Mazatzal Wilderness, and were fired upon by cartel
guards. The hunters returned fire and retreated to notify police.

The following year, a Forest Service tactical team raided a site in
the same area and took fire from a guard carrying a semiautomatic
rifle. Two men were arrested, and one escaped. The rifleman, a Mexican
national who was shot in the abdomen, was eventually sentenced to 18
years in prison.

The investigator worries about possible encounters in which ordinary
Americans trying to enjoy the outdoors could accidentally walk into
trouble.

“If you’re a hiker or a hunter carrying a gun, and you stumble into
one of these areas, and they mistake you for somebody else, shooting
can easily erupt,” says the investigator. “I wish I could tell you it’s
not dangerous, but I can’t.”

In 2007, officers found a grow site a mile and a half from a Boy
Scout camp 12 miles north of Payson. A Scout leader out hiking spotted
the marijuana and notified police.

Cartel workers live in camps consisting of canvas tarps for shelter
or branch lean-tos set against a canyon wall. They eat rice and beans
cooked on camping stoves and get resupplied by men who march in with
backpacks full of provisions.

The farms, usually at ravine bottoms or on hillsides, are irrigated
by gravity-fed piping systems connected to natural springs or
waterfalls as much as 5 miles away.

“These areas are so remote, it kicks our butts to get into them, and
they usually hear us coming,” says Sanchez, adding that guards
sometimes rig access trails with trip wire strung with spoons or cans
that rattle when disturbed.

So far, Arizona lawmen have not encountered booby traps, as has
happened in California’s national forests. About 57 percent of all
marijuana grown on American public land originates there, according to
the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

In July 2007, John Walters, then head of the Office of National Drug
Control Policy, told the Washington Times: “America’s public
lands are under attack. Instead of being appreciated as national
treasures, they are being exploited and destroyed by foreign
drug-trafficking organizations and heavily armed Mexican marijuana
cartels.”

The Sequoia National Forest, in California’s Sierra Nevada
Mountains, 350 miles from the border, has been a dangerous battlefield
in the drug war. In August 2008, Walters visited Sequoia and said law
enforcement had eradicated 420,000 marijuana plants in that forest in
the previous eight years.

The first pot farms at Sequoia were discovered in 1998. The first
raids on cartel-run grow sites in Tonto occurred in 2002.

But they’ve been found on other Arizona public lands as well. The
Forest Service investigator said the Coconino Forest, around Flagstaff,
eradicated 4,200 plants in 2008.

No farms have been discovered in the Kaibab Forest above Grand
Canyon. “But we had a dramatic increase in activity last year in
Southern Utah,” says the investigator. “If they’re in Southern Utah,
they’re probably in Kaibab, too.”

No farms have been discovered in Southern Arizona’s Coronado Forest,
either, due to the lack of water, says Keith Graves, former district
ranger in Nogales, now border liaison between the forest and the
federal Secure Border Initiative.

The Tonto gets hit hard because of its proximity to Phoenix, where
drug organizations thrive. It also has good water sources; Highway 260,
which cuts through the forest, makes for easy re-supply.

One advantage of growing marijuana in the United States is that it
bypasses border security. But U.S.-grown pot also draws a heftier price
because it’s often a better grade. “And they’re less likely to have to
deal with competing smuggling organizations, so it’s cheaper,” says the
forest service investigator.

But the farms take a big toll on the environment. Cartel workers cut
down trees and brush, causing erosion, and divert streams to access
water. They leave behind piles of trash, as well as human waste and
even banned pesticides smuggled up from Mexico that can wash into
streams after rains.

Task Force Commander Sanchez, who has worked narcotics enforcement
for 20 years, expects the problem to eventually “spill over” onto the
San Carlos and White Mountain Apache reservations, as well as other
reservations well beyond the Tonto.

“I don’t think this will slow down,” he says. “We’re not winning the
war on drugs, I can tell you that.”

This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2009.