Wild
West: Drug cartels thrive in US national parks
SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, CALIF. – Even Br'er Rabbit couldn't
make it through this briar patch. With their M-16 rifles and their backpacks
snagging on every bramble, three national-park rangers in commando gear
spit out mosquitoes on a pathless mountainside of manzanita thickets
and dense brush. Gun barrels raised to give each other cover, they advance
using hand signals, pausing only to sip water in the 100-degree heat
and gasp for air through mesh masks.
After 2-1/2 hours,
one mile, and a thousand-foot gain in altitude, they come across evidence
of large-scale activity that officials call the biggest threat to
national parks since their creation over a century ago. Beside an
abandoned camp scattered with trash and human waste, lie empty bags
of fertilizer, gardening tools, irrigation tubing - and spent rifle
casings. Illegal marijuana farming, once the province of small-time
growers, has become big business on the nation's most visited public
land: national parks.
"This is massive-scale agriculture that is threatening the very
mission of the national parks, which is to preserve the natural environment
in perpetuity and provide for safe public recreation," says Bill
Tweed, chief naturalist at Sequoia National Park. "[Growers]
are killing wildlife, diverting streams, introducing nonnative plants,
creating fire and pollution hazards, and bringing the specter of violence.
For the moment, we are failing both parts of our mission, and that
is tragic."
For decades, park
rangers have stumbled into small cannabis stands. But now, desperation
and opportunity have combined to move larger-scale illicit marijuana
farming to Sequoia, Glacier, Big Bend, and other jewels of the American
landscape.
'Now
there is the specter of violence'
Since the late
1990s, marijuana cultivation has escalated dramatically in the more
remote public areas such as national forests - many of which permit
mining, forestry, grazing, and other activities - and areas under
the stewardship of the Bureau of Land Management. Marijuana seizure
in California national forests has jumped tenfold, from 45,054 plants
in 1994 to 495,000 plants last year.
But since Sept.
11, drug farming has increasingly spread from remote forests to more-public
national parks. Tighter security on US borders has raised the incentive
for domestic cultivation. That makes for more armed growers - and
potential clashes with those traipsing into the wilderness for nature
at its most pristine.
As well as growing
more common, the enterprise has become more organized. International
drug cartels - made up largely of Mexican nationals - seem especially
drawn to the bounty. And their harvests can be huge: last year, officials
here seized the biggest stash of all, with 34,000 plants in five locations
at an estimated street value of $140 million. Complicating the task
for law enforcement is the strain on resources. Park budgets have
tightened, and many of the available rangers have been shifted to
more popular haunts.
"The most
[visitors] used to worry about is running into a grizzly bear. Now
there is the specter of violence by a masked alien toting an AK-47,"
says David Barna, chief spokesman for the National Park Service (NPS).
He and others say the problem is national, but most pronounced in
California, Utah, and Arkansas, and in parks with international borders
such as Big Bend in Texas and Glacier in Montana.
Here in California,
the biggest problems have been at Sequoia, Whiskeytown National Recreation
Area and Point Reyes National Seashore. Officials say the accouterments
of cannabis farming - black tubing, drip-irrigation techniques, terraced
gardens, booby traps, look-out posts, and weapons - are so similar
across the plots that the same organizations are probably at work.
"Intelligence gathering ... up and down the state suggests these
are the same groups expanding their operations into different areas,"
says Steve Prokop of Whiskeytown, near Mount Shasta.
Sequoia officials
began concerted efforts to comb remote areas in 2001, when a fisherman
reported meeting masked operatives toting automatic rifles. Since
then, officials have discovered five camps and several acres of marijuana
stalks, typically in areas with natural water sources. Last year,
officials destroyed eight tons of crops and counted thousands of plants
that had already been harvested - and they surmise that many other
plots exist undetected. Eight Mexican nationals are due for trial
in September.
A
heavy toll and an arduous task
For years, drug
enforcement in national parks was focused on scouting out methamphetamine
labs. Marijuana gardens were few in comparison and were rarely large-scale
enterprises, according to Holly Bundock, chief NPS spokeswoman for
California.
"We used
to find smaller gardens every once in a while, but what is going on
now is far more organized," says Al DeLaCruz, chief criminal
investigator for Sequoia. "The impact [on] resources is very
dramatic in terms of the refuse left behind; the damage to vegetation,
soil, and water."
Besides clearing
trees and brush to plant marijuana, growers often terrace the land,
stirring up soil - and attracting plants that wouldn't otherwise take
hold. Officials fear those exotic newcomers and the havoc they could
wreak, reminiscent of an influx of star thistle on California ranch
land that rendered millions of acres useless.
The diversion
of water can also debilitate wildlife, especially in the dry season
when many species come from far afield for summer's paltry trickles.
Without water, animals will migrate elsewhere or die. And fertilizer
in water is a major problem. When polluted runoff flows into lakes
and streams, varying nitrate levels can kill fish species, launching
a domino effect on the food chain.
"We have
found evidence of insecticide contaminating groundwater, which can
be devastating," says Colin Smith, a ranger at Point Reyes National
Seashore.
Beyond agriculture's
toll, there's the wear and tear of humans fending for themselves.
DeLaCruz and others have found the remains of deer and bear that growers
killed for food and of snakes and rodents they killed for sport.
To rangers, the
most galling part of the story is that the National Park backcountry
where marijuana is cultivated is designated wilderness by the 1964
Wilderness Act. Unlike the portions of national parks with campsites,
roads, and restrooms, such areas are supposed to "retain their
primeval character," preserve solitude, and keep man's imprint
unnoticeable. Even rangers can't use saws or other motorized tools
here. Regulations forbid clearing brush for campsites or fires, and
guns are prohibited.
"Wilderness
Designation is the highest possible protection for land under US law,"
says Ms. Bundock.
A hike through
dense underbrush to the most accessible of the illicit camps gives
a taste of how hard it is for growers to haul food and equipment.
The sites are so remote, in fact, that harvests often must be helicoptered
out.
Besides ammunition
and guns, there are tents, cooking utensils, propane cylinders, and
stacked 50-pound bags of fertilizer. Though a 10- to 15-foot canopy
of dense trees conceals the camps' whereabouts, growers take the added
precaution of camouflage tarping.
One ranger, who
asked to remain anonymous, marveled at "how impossible this is
to find from above. There is no other way to find [it] except on foot.
And we don't have the staff or resources to ... scour these regions."
Rangers say that cartels hire illegal immigrants to work and live
in the camps, probably for months on end. They use public roads to
access parks by night, scurry into the underbrush with supplies, and
lug goods up steep hillsides by moonlight.
The
search for security, strategies, and solutions
One advantage
for authorities is that they believe marijuana grows best at elevations
of 3,000 to 5,000 feet, eliminating most of the park's 15 million
acres as optimal sites. Still, that leaves 100 square miles to monitor
in Sequoia.
"Law enforcement
is spread thin already," says Mr. Barna. Parks and memorials
nationwide are transferring 200 rangers - mostly from Western parks
- to help meet the general security demands of the summer surge in
tourism. Nor does policing the park system come cheaply: The recent
terror-alert switch from Code Yellow to Code Orange cost the Park
Service $63,500 a day.
And the forces
left behind are stretched ever thinner. DeLaCruz says he spends a
significant portion of his time on the marijuana battle, and two rangers
accompanying him on a recent day say their time for other duties,
from search and rescue to interpretive work, is dwindling. "There
are people all over the park who want to find a ranger for all the
usual reasons, from historical questions to what kind of flora and
fauna they are seeing," says one. "It's sad that we are
frequently out of sight for them, because we're off chasing marijuana
growers."
Given the growth
of marijuana farming in national parks over the past decade, officials
fear the problem will worsen before it improves. "The whole trend
is that these groups are moving around more and head[ing] to areas
which are more populated," says Laura Mark, an agent for the
US Forest Service. "They are going after public land meant for
families, where they threaten people and cause untold damage. And
they don't care because they are making more money than [most] will
see in a lifetime."
Marijuana growers
keep themselves heavily armed, officials say - partly out of worry
about rival growers, partly because the street value of marijuana
can be so high. Several shootouts have erupted between growers and
law enforcement. A hunter and son were shot in El Dorado County recently,
and a hunter was killed two years ago in Butte County. Last year,
officers were shot in Tehama and Glenn counties in the Central Valley.
"One of our primary concerns is for our employees," says
Sequoia's Mr. Tweed.
Officials say
public exposure is one of the only solutions. They hope more citizens
will pressure lawmakers for funding and personnel to stop covert cultivation,
in part so that perpetrators' fears of capture might curtail the activity.
Though park officials are reluctant to reveal the number of staff
assigned to ferret out marijuana plots, estimates at Sequoia are in
the dozens. For the clearing of debris and plants, the Park Service
has had to rely on other organizations, from the National Guard to
the California Highway Patrol to the Tehama County Sheriff, using
up to 60 people per operation.
"This is
everyone's problem," says Tweed. "It's not just a question
of the moral and legal issue of marijuana. It's an issue of commercial-sized
agriculture devastating the mission of national parks to preserve
land ... for generations.
