Word: mexicans
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...Forest Service rangers stealthily approach, an unsuspecting Mexican laborer named Pedro Villa Garcia, 51, stands in a clearing. All around him the hillside is freshly terraced, irrigated by black plastic hoses and dotted with iridescent green cannabis. Villa Garcia peers down the path. Is that a black bear--a common local species--emerging from the morning mist? Suddenly he sees the rangers and dashes off through the brambles. But the police dog, a Belgian Malinois, catches up quickly, sinking its teeth into Villa Garcia's arm. Two rangers wrestle him to the ground and handcuff him. "We're good...
...encounter as they head for their summer vacations in America's national parks and forests. But drug smugglers, methamphetamine cooks and cannabis cultivators are invading federal lands as never before. A U.S. Park Service ranger in Arizona's Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument was gunned down by a Mexican pot smuggler last August. In Missouri's Mark Twain National Forest, 192 meth labs have been dismantled over the past three years. And marijuana farms are infesting Kentucky's Daniel Boone National Forest and Alabama's Talladega National Forest...
...most explosive conflicts--and the biggest hauls--are taking place in California. As enforcement tightens along U.S. borders, especially since 9/11, it is getting harder to transport drugs into America. So Mexican traffickers have turned to creating vast marijuana plantations Stateside, that much closer to their main customers. Thanks to a mild climate, rich soil and a lengthy, March-to-October growing season, California cultivators routinely produce 10-ft.-high specimens worth up to $4,000 each. Some of these California pot farms stretch over several hundred acres and have as many as 50,000 plants. Last year...
...when he is caught in the Tahoe forest--probably, rangers say, because it is early in the season. If they had already matured, the 3,500 plants he was tending would have yielded some $8 million worth of pot--an investment worth protecting. In the fall, when scores of Mexican workers arrive to harvest and process the pot, shoot-outs occur between law-enforcement agents and camouflage-clad growers toting AK-47s. Sometimes the pot pirates mistake innocent tourists for thieves or cops. Last year kayakers on the Salmon River in the Klamath National Forest were held at gunpoint...
Squirming in his handcuffs, the white-bearded Villa Garcia looks more like a kindly grandfather than a drug trafficker. He says he has been in the U.S. poquito--only a short time. A stranger came to his village in the Mexican state of Michoacan and brought him across the border, along with four others. One of them was with him on the Tahoe farm but managed to escape. "I did not know what kind of work it would be," he says in Spanish, adding that he was paid $200 a month. Villa Garcia was arraigned on narcotics-cultivation charges, pleaded...