When the flow of drugs regained momentum, the transportation hurdles resulted in a sharp drop in the frequency of shipments, with cocaine from the Andean countries of South America arriving in Mexico once every two weeks, instead of a few times a week, as had been the case before the pandemic, Sinaloa Cartel associates and a Mexican Navy official said.

The slowdown caused the wholesale price of cocaine in Mexico to double, the cartel bookkeeper said in an interview in Culiacán, a city in northwestern Mexico where the organization is based.

Disruptions to the drug trade were particularly notable across the southwest border of the United States.

NEW MEXICO

ARIZONA

TEXAS

Nogales

MEXICO

SINALOA

Culiacán

Gulf of

California

100 MILES

By The New York Times

The vast majority of illegal drugs that enter the United States from Mexico arrive through legal ports of entry along that border — hidden in passenger cars and commercial vehicles or smuggled by travelers arriving on foot, often masquerading as tourists or as day trippers on a shopping expedition.

But pandemic-related limits imposed by the Trump administration on all “nonessential travel” have meant that fewer passenger cars and non-American pedestrians pass through the ports of entry, which has increased the exposure of smugglers.

“Having less traffic coming through the checkpoints, then it would make sense that agents have more time to focus on what’s going on at the checkpoints,” said John R. Modlin, interim chief patrol agent for the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector.

The drug cartels quickly adjusted to the evolving landscape.
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Drugs seized by Panama from a boat in the Caribbean. As tried trafficking routes were cut off, cartels turned to new methods, or innovated on old ones, including sea routes.
Drugs seized by Panama from a boat in the Caribbean. As tried trafficking routes were cut off, cartels turned to new methods, or innovated on old ones, including sea routes.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Amid the severe reduction in air travel and the hindrances to land border crossings, drug traffickers in Latin America have been relying more on sea routes, including using more semi-submersible vessels and go-fast boats, which are low-profile craft outfitted with high-powered outboard motors, according to reports from the Colombian Navy as well as American and Mexican law enforcement officials and Sinaloa Cartel associates.

The trafficking groups have also increasingly hidden drugs among legal merchandise packed in shipping containers and transported on freighters, particularly on routes connecting South America with Mexico and Latin America with Europe, according to American, Mexican and Colombian officials.

In another apparent shift in methodology, officials and analysts said, some traffickers have been sending fewer loads, though in larger amounts than in the past — perhaps as much a strategy to reduce risk as a reflection of more limited transportation options.

Along the southwest border of the United States this year, the drug trafficking organizations appear to have made greater use of tunnels to smuggle their goods from Mexico, sometimes reactivating dormant ones, according to Mr. Donahue of the D.E.A., and to associates of the Sinaloa Cartel.

The Sinaloa Cartel bookkeeper estimated that the organization’s use of tunnels had increased by about 40 percent during the pandemic.

Traffickers, in some places, have also increased their use of drones to get drugs over the border, American officials said.

“We are detecting drone smuggling attempts and interrupting drone smuggling attempts with regularity, and that certainly wasn’t the case a year ago,” said Mr. Brown, special agent in charge for the Homeland Security Investigations office in Arizona. “Across the southwest border, rare is the day that there isn’t a drone smuggling attempt.”

“And I’m sure we’re not picking up on all of them,” he said.
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The border between Sonora, Mexico, and the United States. Homeland Security officials in Arizona have noted more drone smuggling attempts than in previous years.
The border between Sonora, Mexico, and the United States. Homeland Security officials in Arizona have noted more drone smuggling attempts than in previous years.Credit…Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

While traffickers have also continued to try to push drugs through ports of entry, the American authorities have detected at least one particularly dramatic shift in tactics in the profile of smugglers caught at those border crossings.

Before the pandemic, the cartels would frequently hire foreign-born smugglers who would cross the border from Mexico into the United States under the pretense of tourism or a shopping trip.

But because the pandemic-related border restrictions have blocked entry to many foreign visitors, the trafficking groups have been recruiting a greater number of American citizens and Green Card holders, who are not bound by the restrictions, to smuggle drugs into the United States, American officials said. These smugglers are most often discovered with the narcotics hidden inside their bodies, officials said.

Guadalupe Ramírez Jr., director of field operations for Customs and Border Protection in Arizona, recalled that when he was director of the ports of entry in Nogales from 2009 to 2016, “internal carriers,” as such smugglers are known by border officials, were rare.

“Now it seems like almost on a daily basis we’re getting internal carriers,” and most are American citizens or permanent residents, Mr. Ramírez said.

The challenges of getting drugs into the United States also appears to have spurred the development of clandestine laboratories in the United States for the production of synthetic drugs, said Celina Realuyo, professor at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies at the National Defense University in Washington.

And law enforcement agencies around the world have also detected an acceleration in the use of cryptocurrency and the so-called dark web for drug transactions and money laundering during the pandemic, she said.

“They’re adjusting,” Ms. Realuyo said of the drug trafficking groups. “They already had kind of a wherewithal, and what they’re doing is they’re just adapting quicker to their context.”
The New York Times