WASHINGTON — The discovery of an elaborate 270-foot tunnel built under the Mexican border by drug traffickers to haul large quantities of cocaine to an Arizona warehouse was revealed Friday by federal officials.
Flabbergasted Customs Service agents described the million-dollar passageway as "something out of a James Bond movie," replete with electric lighting, concrete reinforcement and a hydraulic system that raised a game-room floor in a Mexico hide-out to provide entry to the secret border crossing.
Discovery of the tunnel--dug near an official border crossing in Douglas, Ariz.--confirmed the emergence of a long-rumored new dimension in international drug smuggling. Bush Administration officials said they now suspect that the Southwest border may have been breached by several such underground passages.
"We believe there are other tunnels, and we are working to find them," Customs Commissioner Carol Hallett said. "This shows how brazen they are."
Rumors of a smugglers' tunnel had swirled within the anti-drug community for months. But sources said that a painstaking federal search had turned up nothing until Army geologists, using advanced seismic profiling equipment, detected a suspicious hollow area about 30 feet beneath the Earth's surface near the Douglas border crossing.
The 5-foot-tall passage linked a luxury home in Agua Prieta, Mexico, to a warehouse across the border in Arizona, where tractor-trailers and other rigs apparently were loaded with thousands of pounds of cocaine and dispatched to delivery points elsewhere in the United States.
Federal agents, who had recently begun surveillance of the site, seized more than a ton of cocaine and arrested two men near Phoenix on May 11 after following a truck from the suspect loading dock.
Armed with jackhammers and torches, agents raided the warehouse and discovered the sophisticated tunnel late Thursday night. In a parallel strike, agents of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police raided the Agua Prieta home, owned by Mexican businessman Rafael Francisco Camarena.
The Mexican attorney general's office said two people were arrested in the house. Camarena is not in custody, and officials refused to say whether there was a warrant for his arrest.
He owns the Douglas Building Supply warehouse and a firm called Douglas Redi-Mix Concrete. Authorities said they believed he had used his own expertise to engineer the link between his home and warehouse.
