Word: bordered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...other federal agents trying to police the 8,426 miles of deeply indented Florida coastline, through which most drugs sneaked into the U.S. come, and the 2,067-mile border with Mexico, gateway for much of the rest. The smugglers they are up against have almost unlimited funds. "They can afford to lease an entire ranch for one drop," says Marion Hambrick of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Houston. They can also buy the best equipment: advanced fiber boats that elude radar, scuba-diving gear, "voice privacy" scrambler radios and single-sideband transmitters, which are hard to intercept, and light...
...divided between Customs, DEA and the Immigration and Naturalization Service -- are also improving their capability. Those in Florida have acquired souped-up boats with catamaran racing hulls, called stingers, and radar operating out of tethered balloons to keep watch on low-flying planes. The feds along the Mexican land border have long felt neglected, but that is supposed to change under Operation Alliance, an ambitious interdiction plan announced in mid-August by Vice President George Bush. The Customs forces along the border are to be strengthened by 350 new officers, a 30% increase, and INS will get new equipment such...
Lawmen on the border have high hopes for Alliance. "We will take the battle to the smuggler," pledges William Logan, Customs commissioner in the area. But others voice skepticism as to how soon they will get the promised men and gear. Some wonder whether much can be accomplished without a stronger crackdown on the largely unregulated casas de cambio that exchange dollars for pesos and are thought to often launder drug money along the Mexican border. Sixty or so have sprouted on the main street of San Ysidro, Calif., alone...
...biggest obstacle to interdiction, of course, is the simple length of the coastline and border. Both are so honeycombed with hiding places that searching for incoming drugs will always be a needle-in-a-haystack operation. Though seizures are way up, that is probably an index to the greater volume of smuggling rather than the efficiency of interception. The Government, says Lee Dogoloff, once drug adviser to President Jimmy Carter, "has been interdicting the same 10% since Harry Anslinger," who was appointed U.S. Narcotics Commissioner in 1930. Operation Alliance may increase the percentage, but the greatest optimists have no hope...
...country, it seems, is awash with drugs. Fine white powder pours past the border patrol like sand through a sieve. On busy street corners and in urban parks, pushers murmur, "Crack it up, crack it up," like some kind of evil incantation, bewitching susceptible kids and threatening society's sense of order and security. The public is outraged; opinion polls show that drug abuse has surpassed economic woes and the threat of real war as the nation's No. 1 concern. For a nation whose penchant for righteous crusades can surpass even its tolerance for libertine individualism, the crackdown against...