"Sherri Hobson, a federal prosecutor in San Diego, told me, “I think it’s a very small group of élite members of the cartel that are doing this. This is highly sophisticated work. A lot of people think that you have a shovel and you dig. That’s not the way it works.”...
Fernando agreed to go with him to look at the job site. From the strip mall, a highway leads north, past the graffiti-covered concrete walls surrounding the Tijuana Airport to the pitted roads of Garita de Otay, where convoys of eighteen-wheelers stir up dust that never quite settles. The warehouses, bland and beige, resemble cardboard boxes.
They stopped in front of a structure with no identifying marks except the street address, stencilled in black. Inside, behind a rolling gate, was a loading bay big enough to accommodate a dump truck. Inside was a storage room with cinder-block walls. Fernando didn’t see anyone else in the storage room—just a deep hole and sacks of dirt. The man told Fernando that things had changed: he would be digging a tunnel, not cleaning a store. If he tried to leave, he and his family would be killed...
The red beam of a laser pointer, running through the dusty air in the center of the passageway, kept the diggers on course. In humid, confined spaces, oxygen can drop to fatal levels. With pipe clamps, the men affixed a black plastic tube to the top of the tunnel for ventilation. They laid two metal tracks, which enabled them to ferry debris back to the elevator in a miner’s cart. Later, the rails could carry drug shipments to Otay Mesa...
In 2005, the U.S. government funded the Tunnel Detection Initiative, which recruited academics, industry specialists, and military engineers to detect excavation near the border. “It seemed like a really simple problem,” Nedra Bonal, one of the geophysicists who worked on the initiative, said. “You have a hole in the ground, and I thought I’d look at the seismic data, and that would be that.” But, according to a government report, the proposals yielded “massive amounts of data and unacceptably high false alarm rates.”
So the Tunnel Task Force agents patrol the Otay Mesa district on foot."
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/03/underworld-monte-reel
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