WELDON, Calif. — A few minutes after 4 a.m., agents in camouflage cluster in a dusty California field in Kern County. “Movement needs to be slow, deliberate and quiet,” the team leader whispers. “Lock and load now.”
They check their ammunition and assault rifles, not exactly sure who they might meet in the dark: heavily armed Mexican drug traffickers, or just poorly paid field workers camping miserably in the brush.
Twenty minutes later, after a lights-off drive for a mile, the agents climb out of two pickups and sift into the high desert brush.
The granite faces of the Southern Sierra are washed in the light of a full moon. Two spotters with night-vision scopes take positions on the ridge to monitor the marijuana plot, tucked deep in a cleft of the canyon.
The rest of the agents hunker down in some sumac waiting for the call to move in. The action has to be precisely timed with raids in Bakersfield, where they hope to capture the leaders of the organization.
They have no idea how many people are nearby. The thermal-imaging aircraft circling high above was not detecting anyone on the ground. And trail cameras hadn’t captured images of men delivering supplies for more than a week. Maybe the growers have already harvested and cleared out.
Word comes on the radio to go into the site.
The agents fan out in the gray of dawn. A U.S. Forest Service agent unleashes a German shepherd and follows it up a piney slope. After several minutes, the dog begins barking furiously.
“We have movement,” shouts the Forest Service officer. “Hands up.”
A SURGING PROBLEM
Such raids have become commonplace in California, part of a costly, frustrating campaign to eradicate everbigger, more destructive marijuana farms and dismantle the shadowy groups that are creating them.
Marijuana cultivated on public lands surged in the past decade, a side effect of the medical cannabis boom. In 2001, several hundred thousand plants were seized in the state. By 2010, authorities pulled up a record 7.4 million plants, mostly on public land.
Law enforcement long called these marijuana crops on public land “cartel grows” and hoped to work from the drug busts in the forest up the drug hierarchy, maybe all the way to the Sinaloa Cartel or the Zetas.
But after years of raids and work with informants and wiretaps, agents realize that the operations seemed to be run by independent groups of Mexican nationals, often using illegal-alien field hands from their home regions.
Tommy Lanier, director of the National Marijuana Initiative, part of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said there was scant evidence that the cartels exerted much control over marijuana growing in the national forests.
“Based on our intelligence, which includes thousands of cell-phone numbers and wiretaps, we haven’t been able to connect anyone to a major cartel,” he said.
Lanier said authorities have long mislabeled marijuana grown on public land as cartel endeavors because Mexican nationals are arrested in the majority of cases, and the narrative of fighting drug cartels helps them secure federal funding.
He doesn’t rule out that some of the cash flowing south of the border makes its way to members of those groups. He just doesn’t believe they are actively directing activities in the United States.
“We’ve had undercover agents at the highest level of these groups, breaking bread and drinking tequila,” says Roy Giorgi, commander of the Mountain and Valley Marijuana Investigation Team, a multiagency organization headquartered in Sacramento. “Even at their most comfortable, the leaders never said, ‘Hey, we’re working for the Zetas.’”
MICHOACAN CONNECTION
In Giorgi’s jurisdiction, the majority of the people arrested or investigated are originally from the Mexican state of Michoacan, where marijuana growing and immigration to the U.S. are entrenched.
In their hometowns, growers have to sell their marijuana to cartels for a fraction of what they could make in California. When they travel north, they see opportunity in the state’s vast wilderness. They have the knowhow and perseverance to set up clandestine farms and live for months at a time in extremely rugged spots. Often weekly supply runs are made in the middle of the night, carrying in food, beer and fertilizer. The workers wear camouflage, often sleep in brush-covered tents, cook on propane stoves in crude kitchens and supplement their food by poaching deer and other wildlife.
Giorgi says those organizations can still be well-financed, heavily armed and dangerous.
Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman realized at a community meeting in 2010 how bad the situation was in the Mendocino National Forest when five of the eight people who went to the microphone said basically: “I was out in the national forest herding cows or sheep or hiking or fishing. And someone shot at me. So I’m not going into the national forest.”
The following summer, Allman helped lead a task force on a three-week purge of marijuana from the area. They pulled up 632,000 plants, 42 miles of irrigation lines and 52 tons of garbage. Agents arrested 132 people and confiscated 38 guns.
Is the forest safe today? “I’ll put it this way,” Allman said. “I’d go camping in the national forest, but I wouldn’t let my sister go.”
Would he camp unarmed? “No.”
A Mexican-born grower working just outside Mendocino National Forest said the cartels may not run the operations, but the criminal ties to Mexico are vastly complex and dangerous. He hears stories all the time of druggang shakedowns and workers held captive in the forest with threats to their families back home.
“There was a guy working right here,” he said, pointing over the hill from his patch, “he thought he was working in Texas.”
The grower operates in the quasi-legal medical marijuana world and has contacts on the public-land crops. He asked to remain anonymous because he feared for his safety.
He said he thinks law enforcement officials have little grasp of what’s going on because no one arrested will put his family at risk to speak with them, even for a lighter sentence.
Lanier said agents are making progress. This season, they have seized about 3 million plants, less than half the number of last year. But with such a shadowy enemy, success is hard to gauge.
It’s not clear whether the numbers mean fewer plants are being grown on public land or just fewer are being found. Since the state Campaign Against Marijuana Planting was disbanded last year, agents spend less time on aerial surveillance. And local sheriffs in marijuanagrowing counties like Mendocino and Humboldt have far less resources devoted to seeking out and eradicating plants than they had in the past.
“It’s hard to know if there’s less being grown if you’re not looking,” said Humboldt County Sheriff Lt. Steve Knight.
TRACKED TO BAKERSFIELD
The investigation into the Kern County plantings, just south of the Sequoia National Forest, began when a game warden spotted spilled fertilizer at a road turnout that had been a drop-off spot for marijuana growers four years before.
The warden set up surveillance and saw a Jeep Cherokee dropping off supplies several times. Two wardens pulled over the driver, Francisco Barrazarivas, for speeding one night in July. While one officer conducted a field sobriety test, the other placed a GPS device on his car, according to an affidavit filed with the search warrant.
Barrazarivas drove to a house in Bakersfield and was seen transferring two dark bags to a sedan, which was unloaded five houses up the block.
That second house was associated with a man named Ignacio Gomez, an illegal alien from Michoacan suspected to be the leader of a group that grows marijuana on public lands in Kern and Tulare counties, according to a Forest Service report included in the affidavit.
The raids were carried out early on Aug. 3.
Two aircraft, 43 agents, seven scientists and land managers, and eight volunteers took part in the joint operation — at a cost of $35,000 to $40,000.
Two young men in camouflage were pulled out of a brush-covered tent. A Glock pistol was found in one of their sleeping bags, but neither man tried to grab it. They were the field workers.
ECOLOGICAL MESS
Game wardens trudged down the canyon with their guns drawn. They passed another tent and kitchen area overflowing with trash. Some type of salted game meats hung from sticks.
About 50 yards down in the canyon, they found 450 brilliant green marijuana plants all but glowing amid the dry summer brush. Many more stalks had already been harvested.
The scene was an ecological mess. Cottonwood trees and willows had been cut down to let in sunlight. Bags of fertilizer and trays of rat poison were strewn about. A dead hawk lay on one footpath. A coyote carcass was rotting up the hill.
A volunteer cleanup crew started pulling up the hoses and rubbish. A helicopter arrived with a net to lift the marijuana out. It took two more flights to get the trash out.
Word crackled on the radio that no one at the Bakersfield houses was arrested in the case. Gomez and Barrazarivas were gone.
The two men arrested in the woods were Cruz Soria, 27, of Bakersfield and Mairo Correa-Garcia, an 18-year-old illegal alien from Michoacan.
Correa-Garcia’s lawyer said later that the young man told him he had been in the United States for a year and was working in Washington state, then went to Bakersfield when he heard there were better opportunities.
He was recruited to work for $100 a day, great pay for farm labor, and had been up on the site for a month.
Soria is now awaiting trial. Correa-Garcia pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in federal prison.
Neither one told investigators who they were working for.
They said they didn’t know.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 12/30/2012