Union Pacific freight trains travel through some of Mexico’s most-prized drug territory on their way to California. Moving up the West Coast, they traverse the state of Sinaloa, where poppy and marijuana fields have fueled the narcotics trade for decades, and pass by receiving ports for cocaine shipments from Colombia. Finally the trains cross the border at Calexico, entering into the drug-world’s Mecca, the most prized territory of all, the United States of America.

The Calexico route is a smuggler’s dream, which explains its popularity. Border agents at the Calexico crossing found a total of 4,200 pounds of marijuana stashed in Union Pacific trains on 37 different occasions between 2001 and 2006. The seized amounts ranged from just under a kilo to 468 kilos (and their corresponding fines from $16,579 to $8.3 million), suggesting that small timers and serious operators alike were taking advantage of the often slow-moving and unsecured trains. Each time the UP refused to pay the penalty, saying it has no way to police the cars when they’re inside Mexico and that border inspectors are the first ones to touch them after they cross. Arguments to this effect went on with the federal government for years until finally, on March 18, the U.S. Justice Department sued the largest railroad company in the United States for nearly $38 million.

The Justice Department based its lawsuit on the Tariff Act, which requires transporters to submit manifests identifying all their cargo. UP failed to manifest the marijuana on its cars, it says, because it didn’t know it was there. In a countersuit, the company laid out why it can’t inspect the trains that it contracts from Mexican rail companies such as Ferromex (the company that owns the cars where most of the drugs were found and which UP has a 26 percent stake in)—citing reasons from the “risks of murder and mayhem at the hands of Mexican drug cartels” to “potentially running afoul of Mexican law” to having to turn confiscated property over to “authorities who may be involved in the drug trade.” But it was a single sentence in the complaint that summed up best the logical problem with the government’s lawsuit: “If CPB [Customs and Border Protection] and the full power of the United States government cannot effectively seize drugs in Mexico, there is no reason to believe that UP could.”

The fact that a U.S. transport company has become such an important yet unwilling partner in the trans-border drug exchange just goes to show what a difficult thing it is to stop. Northbound freight trains carry auto parts, food, beer and consumer goods in dozens of cars that stretch as far as two miles. Depending on the quality of the tracks they might go 60 miles per hour, but they frequently slow or stop to move through small villages and to change crews. “Those are the vulnerable spots,” Tom Judge, the editor of Railroad, Tracks and Structures magazine, explained over the phone recently. “Railroads go hundreds of thousands of miles. What are you going to do, put a soldier with an automatic rifle on top of every car?”

That probably wouldn’t matter anyway. The Mexican narcotics industry is worth an estimated $25 billion a year, and a lot of that money goes to bribing officials in the country’s famously corrupt law enforcement apparatus. Just last year both the head of Interpol and the drug czar were arrested on corruption charges—the latter accused of taking $450,000 a month to tip off traffickers. “The people who are buying wholesale in the U.S. can raise their prices just a smidge and put an enormous amount of capital into the market on the other side of the border to incentivize more smuggling,” says Isaac Campos-Costero, a visiting scholar at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies who researches Mexico’s drug history. “They can increase their prices say 1 percent in the U.S. and they can double the bribe they offer the cop on the other side.” With 2,000 miles of porous border standing as the only barrier to a rich and insatiable clientele, drug mafias will always find a way across.

Of the many that do, marijuana smugglers are some of the most active. Nearly 60 percent of the pot seized worldwide in 2006 was seized in North America, according to the United Nation’s 2008 World Drug Report. Reliable estimates on U.S. domestic cultivation weren’t available, but what isn’t grown there ships in mainly from Mexico, where pot sales account for 40 percent of the drug trade. That means exporting marijuana earns Mexican cartels at least $10 billion a year. And never mind that the product is bulky and smelly, hard to transport because it’s so easy to detect. That’s where UP trains and other large-container modes of transportation come in.

Because of the lawsuit, U.S. Customs won’t release figures on cross-border train traffic or recent seizures, but UP’s earnings last year give a decent idea of how much business is going on along the frontier. The company made $1.6 billion from its Mexico operations, up 13 percent from 2007. That was a fraction of the $17 billion in total revenue but far too much for the company to consider dropping out of Mexico because it keeps getting fined at the border. “It’s a good area for us to be doing business,” said Donna Kush, a UP spokeswoman. “We certainly see continued growth and opportunities there.” No doubt smugglers do, too.

Mary Cuddehe is a freelance writer based in Mexico City. She has written for The Associated Press, The New Republic and The Miami Herald, among other places. Sometimes she also produces videos.

Copyright Last Exit 2009