It's August of 2019 and you’re a DEA Agent, patrolling the Southern border after reports
of drug activity in the area.
To be a little more specific, they’re reports of activity from the Sinaloa Cartel – one
of the most powerful drug cartels in Mexico.
They’ve been moving literally tons of product here in the last several years, and you just
can’t figure out how.
They’re slipping right past you, almost like they’re invisible.
That’s when it hits you: They’re not moving past you; they’re moving under you.
That’s because, right under your feet, there’s a 4,309 foot (1,313 meters) cartel smuggling
tunnel, stretching from Tijuana to a warehouse district less than twenty miles South of San
Diego.
And we’re not talking about a Shawshank Redemption-style tunnel with only enough space
to crawl through – the tunnel, on average, is 5.5 feet tall and two feet wide.
It’s 70 feet (21 meters) below the surface, and comes with a number of sophisticated features.
These features include a state-of-the-art ventilation system to keep the subterranean
tunnel well-aerated.
An impressively effective rail-cart system.
A drainage system to prevent any potential flooding in the tunnel.
An elevator to the surface, and even a series of high-voltage cables to power the operation.
That’s because drug cartels seem to excel as three things: Drug trafficking, murder,
and covert civil engineering.
And this is far from the first time drug cartels have used DIY smuggling tunnels to ply their
trade.
According to the US Department of Homeland Security, one-hundred-and-eighty-three cross-border
tunnels have been built since the start of the 1990s, with many more likely remaining
undiscovered out there.
The tunnel problem is so pervasive that the Drug Enforcement Agency, Homeland Security,
Border Patrol, and Customs Enforcement have created Tunnel Task Forces to deal with the
issue.
These task forces perform sting operations in tunnel hotspots – such as warehouses
in the Otay Mesa commercial district in California, where a number of these drug trafficking tunnels
terminate.
They’re a complex and extremely expensive problem to deal with.
Before we get into the history of these tunnels, first, let’s get technical.
Most illicit cartel tunnels are colloquially known as “gopher holes” – these are
more like the aforementioned Shawshank escape tunnels.
They’re typically less than a hundred feet long, and a tight fit.
They’re only really big enough for a single person to crawl through.
Tunnels like these have been used by everyone from drug smugglers to the Viet Cong, but
the Sinaloa Cartel elevated the smuggling tunnel to an art form.
They create what law enforcement agencies refer to as “Supertunnels.”
These tunnels have been found as deep as seventy feet/twenty-one metres beneath the surface,
and are typically tall and wide enough for a person to comfortably walk through.
Like the tunnel found in 2019, they’re often also technologically advanced.
You can expect to find electrical lights, elevators, ventilation systems, and sometimes
even built-in tracks for vehicles and carts.
Constructing a Supertunnel is an intense, months-long process, and can often cost upwards
of one million US dollars to fully complete.
This might seem like a costly investment, but considering the Sinaloa cartel is estimated
to make billions of dollars every year, it’s practically chump change.
This, however, doesn’t stop the actual tunnel-building process from being dangerous and labour-intensive.
The cartel typically lures in low-paid Mexican laborers eager for paying work, then forces
them to work night-and-day digging shifts under threat of violence and even death.
Dig teams work with electric shovels, working typically in teams of three.
They use an impromptu elevator system to lift excess dirt and sand out of the mineshaft.
Working at full efficiency – typically achieved by workers being sufficiently terrified for
their lives – they can extend the tunnel by five metres/sixteen feet a day.
The more workers, the quicker the process tends to go.
Experts are then brought in to install the more technical aspects of the Super Tunnel:
Like hydraulic pumps, electrical lighting and ventilation systems, and tracks for subterranean
smuggling vehicles.
After a few months of meticulous planning and back-breaking labour, voila, you have
yourself a Supertunnel.
Now, how might you use your brand new Super Tunnel?
Let’s take a look at some examples.
The first recorded sophisticated cartel Supertunnel – also known, by the way, as a narcotúnel
– was reported to the public in May of 1990.
It was a relatively quaint three-hundred feet/ninety-one metres, running from Agua Prieta, Sonora,
all the way to Douglas, Ariz.
The entrance to this tunnel was hidden underneath a pool table in an unassuming Mexican household.
In true Breaking Bad style, the exit point was a secret hatch inside a false drain in
an abandoned warehouse.
While it wasn’t nearly as advanced as a modern-day Supertunnel, it still featured
an impressive level of craftsmanship for a first attempt: The tunnel contained an advanced
hydraulic pump system that opened the tunnel’s secret entrance by making a portion of the
ground to rise up by around eight feet.
The plan was effective, too – it’s believed that, at the lowest estimate, around 2,250
lbs (1,020 kgs) of cocaine was smuggled through this tunnel before it was discovered and decommissioned.
The mastermind behind this tunnel – and a name you’re definitely going to hear again
in this video – was Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as “El Chapo”: The legendary
ex-leader of the Sinaloa cartel, and the man who put smuggling tunnels on...err, under
the map.
The 1990s were a heyday for drug smuggling tunnels.
Here are some of the Sinaloa cartel’s greatest pre-millennium hits.
In May of 1993, a partially-completed 1,452 foot (442 meter) tunnel was discovered in
Otay Mesa, California, once again coming all the way from Tijuana.
This tunnel was more advanced than their first offering: It included air conditioning and
electrical power.
Three more tunnels were found in Nogales, Arizona, in 1995 and 1999.
In an act of cartel theatricality, the 1995 tunnel lead to an exit hidden inside an abandoned
church.
In 1999, the latter two tunnels were found by law enforcement on the same day.
Nogales served as a popular location for the exits of cartel smuggling tunnels, with another
one found in a storm drain several months later, and even more scattered throughout
the early 2000s.
The smuggling tunnels being constructed by the cartel grew significantly more advanced
in February of 2002.
A 1,250 foot (381 meter) tunnel was discovered behind the fireplace of a ranch house in Tierra
del Sol, California.
This was the first tunnel to feature rails for small electrical cars, as well as lighting
and ventilation.
296 lbs (134 kilos) of marijuana were found in the tunnel, but nobody knows exactly how
much was transported before the operation was discovered and shut down.
The Sinaloa cartel is surprisingly creative in its tunnel placement, with some entrances
and exits to these covert passages feeling like they were ripped straight out of a prime-time
drama or a bizarre dark-comedy.
In addition to being hidden behind fireplaces and in abandoned churches, other locations
include empty graves in Mexico, water wells, built directly into rocky hillsides, and even
below a seemingly-innocuous mattress laying in a Mexican junkyard, which lead directly
into San Ysidro, California, in 2004.
Storm drains, like the one in Nogales, are also an extremely popular exit for cartel
smuggling tunnels – where drug packages are fed up into the bottoms of parked cartel
vehicles for easy and innocent-looking transport.
So remember: Next time you’re near a storm drain in Arizona, Texas, or California, you
don’t have to worry about evil clowns, but you may have to deal with an angry member
of the Sinaloa cartel.
Jury’s out on which is worse.
The international drug trade is a multi-billion-dollar business, and – as a result – the cartels
are highly motivated to get their high-demand product across the border by any means necessary.
In the early 2000s, the use of electrical rail carts in these tunnels spiked, massively
increasing the quantity of product the cartel personnel were able to move.
Drug cartels may be vast and dangerous criminal organisations full of vicious killers, but
they really know how to double down on a winning formula.
No matter how aware US and Mexican law enforcement became these tunnels, more kept popping up.
Considering the expenditure of money and effort on building these tunnels was dwarfed by even
a fraction of the profits the cartels could make from using them (even for a short period)
it hardly mattered when they were found and shut down.
In short, cartels make more than enough profit from these tunnels that they can afford to
lose them.
Law enforcement is playing a losing game of whack-a-mole with the Sinaloa cartel – they
can build and abandon tunnels faster than the police can find them.
To give you some perspective on the sheer extent of the cartel’s use of drug smuggling
tunnels, it would be impossible – and honestly pretty boring – to give you a complete,
exhaustive list of all the tunnels created and used since the early 1990s.
The cartel has used this technique countless times – and these are just the tunnels that
were actually found.
There’s no way of knowing the true extent of the cartel’s tunnelling activities.
It’s through this sheer amount of practice that the cartels have been able to refine
their tunnelling methods to the infrastructural heights they’re achieving today.
In September of 2018, US authorities even found an uncompleted tunnel that utilised
a solar-powered lighting system.
So, they may have killed over 60,000 people since 1964, but at least they’re environmentally
conscious.
However, the uses of these tunnels aren’t limited to just smuggling drugs across the
US-Mexico border.
One of their most famous uses in recent memory didn’t actually involve drugs at all.
This brings us back to infamous drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the kingpin
of the Sinaloa Drug cartel.
As this video has already shown you, El Chapo invested heavily in the advanced tunnel-building
techniques of his underlings, and in 2015, this investment really paid off.
In February of 2014, El Chapo had finally been captured by Mexican law enforcement.
Because of his notorious history of disappearing into thin air during raids, and escaping from
low-security prisons, he was held in the Altiplano prison in Almoloya de Juárez, Mexico – one
of the highest security prisons in the country.
It seemed like El Chapo’s number was finally up, and the Mexican government had struck
a devastating blow against the Sinaloa Cartel.
It was grounds for celebration.
He was under twenty-four-hour surveillance, with cameras in his cell, and a tracking bracelet
around his ankle.
The Mexican authorities had El Chapo on lock.
Until, about a year into his sentence, when El Chapo decided to take a pleasant evening
shower.
Incidentally, the shower was one of the two legally-mandated camera blind spots in the
cell.
Guards at the prison noticed he was taking unusually long in there, so decided to check
in.
El Chapo was nowhere to be found – instead, they found a two-feet-squared hole in the
ground.
This was the discovery of one of the most spectacular and absurd prison breaks in Mexico’s
history.
Thirty feet/nine metres below the surface, El Chapo’s goons had secretly built a 4,921-foot
(1,500 meter) long tunnel beneath the prison over the course of several months.
El Chapo had cut off his ankle bracelet and descended into his personal escape tunnel.
Like many of the more modern tunnels, this one was fitted with electrical lighting and
ventilation.
It also featured a motorcycle fixed to a built-in track, which El Chapo rode to freedom, breaking
the lightbulbs above him as he passed – hours before anyone even realised he was missing.
The whole plan was perfectly orchestrated to buy him and his men plenty of time, as
he surfaced in an empty cinder block house and made his final escape.
The whole plan went off without a hitch.
Once again, a secret cartel smuggling tunnel was the answer to El Chapo’s prayers.
El Chapo has since been recaptured, and extradited to the US to serve a life sentence at the
ADX Florence Supermax Prison.
Sadly, for him, that’s a little too far for even his devoted underlings to tunnel.
But under the Sinaloa Cartel’s new leader, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, it’s unlikely
that the tunnelling activities will stop any time soon.
After all, why give up on a winning formula?
Thanks for watching this episode of The Infographics Show.
Already hungry for more Cartel action?
Why not check out “Insane Way El Chapo Escaped Prison” and “Crazy Moving Submarine Drug
Bust.”
Keep watching – we’re sure to tunnel into your heart.