Outdoor studies getting riskier, researchers say
Chris Hawley
Republic Mexico City Bureau
Dec. 27, 2007 12:00 AM
MEXICO CITY - Biologist Karen Krebbs used to study bats in Organ Pipe
Cactus National Monument on the Arizona-Mexico border. Then, she got
tired of dodging drug smugglers all night.
"I use night-vision goggles, and you could see them very clearly" -
caravans of men with guns and huge backpacks full of drugs, trudging
through the desert, Krebbs said. After her 10th or 11th time hiding
in bushes and behind rocks, she abandoned her research.
"I'm just not willing to risk my neck anymore," she said.
Across the southwestern U.S. border and in northern Mexico,
scientists such as Krebbs say their work is increasingly threatened
by smugglers as tighter border security pushes trafficking into the
most remote areas where botanists, zoologists and geologists do their
research.
"In the last year, it's gotten much worse," said Jack Childs, who
uses infrared cameras to study endangered jaguars in eastern Arizona.
He loses one or two of the cameras every month to smugglers.
Scientists, especially those working on the Mexican side of the
border, have long shared the wilderness with marijuana growers and
immigrants trying to enter the United States illegally. But tension
is rising because of crackdowns on smugglers by the Mexican military,
increased vigilance in the Caribbean Sea, new border fences, air
patrols, a buildup of U.S. Border Patrol agents and a turf war
between cartels.
Smugglers are increasingly jealous of their smuggling routes and less
tolerant of scientists poking around, researchers say.
Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument stopped granting most new
research permits in January because of increasing smuggling activity.
Scientists must sign a statement acknowledging that the National Park
Service cannot guarantee their safety from "potentially dangerous
persons entering the park from Mexico."
"It's a kind of arms race, and biologists are stuck in the middle,"
said Jim Malusa, who specializes in mapping desert vegetation.
"There's been a chilling effect on researchers."
Higher stakes
Scientists say things have gotten more uncomfortable since 2001, when
the United States began fortifying its border after the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks. In 2006, the Border Patrol embarked on a hiring
spree, with plans to raise its personnel from 12,000 to 18,000 by the
end of 2008.
Smugglers have responded with violence. Assaults on Border Patrol
agents are occurring at a record pace, with 250 attacks reported from
Oct. 1 to Dec. 16, an increase of 38 percent over 2006.
"It's a war zone out there," said Mickey Reed, a research technician
at the University of Arizona's School of Natural Resources.
As crossing the border gets more difficult, the fees that smugglers
charge to guide illegal immigrants through the desert has doubled in
recent years, to as much as $3,000 per person, migrants say. At the
same time, Mexico has been stepping up highway checkpoints and port
inspections, forcing drug smugglers into the wilderness and onto
remote beaches.
To avoid the checkpoints, Mexican drug cartels are moving their
marijuana farms northward, from traditional growing areas in
Michoacan, Nayarit and Guerrero states to more remote areas in Sonora
and Sinaloa states, according to the U.S. government's 2008 National
Drug Threat Assessment.
Marijuana smugglers, whose cargo is smellier and bulkier than
cocaine, are increasingly abandoning the urban border ports of Texas
and California in favor of the Arizona-Sonora corridor, the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration says. U.S. authorities seized 616,534
pounds of marijuana in the Tucson Sector alone in 2006, up from
233,807 pounds in 2001.
Smugglers also are increasingly relying on boats moving through the
Pacific Ocean, the U.S. Coast Guard said this month. The Coast Guard
seized a record 356,000 pounds of cocaine this year, most of it in
the Pacific.
Scientists, who once had the ocean and desert all to themselves, say
they are increasingly rubbing elbows with bad guys.
"They used to take the easier routes through washes and old river
beds, but now, they're moving into the rougher country," said Randy
Gimblett, a University of Arizona professor who studies human impacts
on ecology. "There's a lot at stake because there's a lot of money
tied up in drugs. We're not confronting those folks, but we're seeing
more of that activity."
Close calls
There are no statistics on attacks or threats against scientists,
said Mark Frankel, director of the scientific-freedom program at the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. But among
researchers, drug stories abound.
Michael Wilson, a botanist and director of research at the Drylands
Institute in Tucson, said he avoids some parts of Mexico's Sonora
state since seeing opium poppies, which are not native to Mexico, and
mules carrying loads of marijuana down from the mountains. Opium
resin is used to make heroin.
Wilson said he has noticed an increase of marijuana cultivation in
recent years and more people watching over the fields. Some of his
colleagues now carry guns, he said.
"There are a lot of researchers who have ducked out of doing research
in Mexico," Wilson said.
David Yetman, a social scientist and host of the PBS series The
Desert Speaks, said he had to stand in a marijuana field in eastern
Sonora to get pictures during the filming of a 2004 segment on rural
liquor-making. He hired off-duty policemen with automatic weapons to
protect his film crew during a piece in southern Sonora, an area
known for drug trafficking.
Richard Felger, another botanist, said he stays away from remote
mountains in Sonora since being robbed and threatened on research trips.
"I got kind of allergic to pistols being held to my forehead," Felger
said.
Gimblett, who relies on buried pressure sensors for his research on
park users, said smugglers routinely cut his cables. Childs has tried
leaving notes and pictures of saints - even Jesús Malverde, the
unofficial saint of drug traffickers - to try to persuade smugglers
to spare his jaguar cameras, but to no avail. Each camera costs $450.
Holes in research
The paranoia among drug smugglers is creating serious gaps in
scientific knowledge, researchers complain.
Huge swaths of northwestern Mexico are now off-limits to science,
said Andrés Búrquez, a professor at the National Autonomous
University of Mexico. The worst is Sinaloa state, home of the Sinaloa
Cartel, he said.
"The most serious problem is when you have to visit a specific place
in the countryside, places of geological interest," he said.
"(Residents) will say, 'You can go to A, B and C place, but not D.'
And it turns out that's the place that interests you most."
Childs says he loses one or two months' worth of pictures every time
a jaguar camera is destroyed.
He also is unable to put cameras on the Mexican side of the border
because of opposition from property owners who are fearful of, or
perhaps cooperating with, the smugglers. That has made it harder to
answer a key question: whether endangered jaguars are repopulating
the United States or simply wandering over occasionally from Mexico.
Krebbs hasn't been out to study the endangered lesser long-nose bats
at Organ Pipe in two years. Dean Hendrickson, an ichthyologist at the
University of Texas, says avoiding marijuana and poppy fields has set
back his efforts to study mysterious species of Mexican trout in
Chihuahua state.
"It's going to be hard to do that without comprehensive sampling, and
this sort of stuff definitely puts holes in our sampling,"
Hendrickson said. "There's no doubt: The drug stuff is definitely
affecting research."
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