19 American Indians track smugglers for Customs
By Ignacio Ibarra
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
SELLS - They call themselves the Shadow Wolves. Their job is to track their prey the old-fashioned way - through a broken twig, a hair snagged by a mesquite branch, a fiber left behind by a bulging burlap bag.
Hour after hour, these silent clues lead the Shadow Wolves to their quarry: smugglers who haul loads of marijuana, cocaine or heroin on foot or horseback across the desert between Mexico and Tucson.
A U.S. Customs Service crew of just 19 American Indians, the Shadow Wolves seize more than 70 percent of the drugs the agency finds on the 3-million-acre Tohono O'odham Reservation west of Tucson.
In the last six months alone, they've kept 40,000 pounds of marijuana and cocaine off U.S. streets.
The Indian trackers accounted for nearly a third of the 180,000 pounds of marijuana seized by Customs throughout Arizona last year, including the border ports of entry.
They use the skills of a lost culture to attack one of the most pressing modern crimes on our borderland.
In doing so, they're preserving a link to a warrior past - even exporting it, as they train forces in the Balkans and Russia to protect borders and to guard arsenals from terrorists.
Rene Andreu, resident agent in charge of the U.S. Customs Office of Investigations in Sells, said the Shadow Wolves are highly efficient in the midst of high-tech law enforcers.
"We have the new technology, but that doesn't mean the new is better than the old," Andreu said.
"As of yet, they have not devised a scanner or anything that can electronically or mechanically detect the tracks of somebody going across rough, harsh terrain."
On the scent
The narrow trail was clearly visible in the early morning light as Gary Ortega moved quietly through a dense stand of catsclaw, palo verde and saguaro earlier this month.
A jumble of footprints marked the path as it descended toward a wash along a slope of the Quinlan Mountains, just west of Three Points.
But the specific shoe prints the U.S. Customs agent was searching for - a running w undulating pattern, a shoe with two ovals at the heel and another with a long wavelike pattern called a lazy s - were nowhere to be seen.
Suddenly, Ortega stopped, bent low for a better look at the ground, then pointed with the toe of his boot to a tiny shoeprint.
"The trail looks fresh, but it's illegals. We see a lot of them coming through here. Sometimes they've got kids. We don't see many packing dope," the 27-year-old tracker said.
He headed back to his truck, abandoning the trail of these illegal entrants to keep searching instead for a group of suspected drug smugglers. Another team member had spotted the smugglers the day before, about 10 miles north of the border with Mexico.
Ortega and his partner, Jason Garcia, 27, decided to try picking up the trail farther south on a corridor west of the Baboquivari Mountains that has become a popular route for drug-packers and migrants alike.
One of the biggest routes winds its way from the border west of Sasabe, cutting through craggy ridges and deep washes of a desert lush from good winter rains.
The trail is so heavily traveled and so visible from the air that Customs officers call it the "Hootchie Man" or Ho Chi Minh Trail - "you know, like the one in Vietnam."
Crisscrossing a vast desert
The 18 men and one woman of the U.S. Customs Service's only American Indian tracking unit patrol a reservation that shares 76 miles of border with Mexico.
Tohono O'odham land, the second-largest Indian reservation in the country, has been a crossing point for smugglers moving goods and people into the United States since the international border was created by the Gadsden Treaty in 1853.
Chinese immigrants in the late 1800s, bootleg liquor during the Prohibition era, and more recently cocaine and marijuana and huge numbers of illegal entrants have poured into the United States along hundreds of footpaths and dirt track roads that crisscross the rugged landscape.
Today's Customs trackers have night-vision equipment, high-powered radios and Global Positioning Satellite locators to assist them in their work. They are backed up by the Customs Service's helicopters and airplanes based in Tucson.
But these officers rely most on their ability to detect even the slightest signs left behind by people and animals as they move across the land.
In the first 15 days of March alone, the Shadow Wolves tracked down at least seven loads totaling more than 2,300 pounds of marijuana. About 600 pounds of the pot was seized from a group of nine human pack mules, all Mexican nationals.
Last month, the Shadow Wolves put their skills to work in the search for a Tohono O'odham toddler who wandered away from his village with the family dog.
Search-and-rescue teams backed by aircraft and tracking dogs scoured the desert. But it was a pair of young Tohono O'odham trackers, Ortega and Garcia, and a veteran tracker of nearly 30 years, Lambert Cross, who found the boy's faint trail and stuck with it until they found him.
Last of a breed
The trackers' skills - first honed by mankind's hunter- gatherer cultures at the dawn of human history - are fading. But the Customs Service is working hard to ensure they don't disappear.
Congress authorized the all-Indian Customs patrol unit 30 years ago to foster better relations with the Tohono O'odham, a close society that distrusts outsiders and intruders on their land.
When the first of the original members began to retire a few years ago, Agent-in-Charge Andreu said, the agency realized it faced a critical brain drain.
Membership was opened up to members of other tribes and Customs stepped up recruitment. Today the patrol unit includes Navajo, Lakota, Pima, Chickasaw, Oto Missouri, Yorock, Kickapoo, Sacafox and Omaha.
The native trackers' skills are also being shared with other law enforcement agencies in this country and in places as far away as Kosovo, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
Late last year, Ortega and two other members of the unit traveled to Eastern Europe to train border guards in the Balkans. Ethnic nationalism has torn apart the former Yugoslavia, creating new and contested borders.
They also traveled to Asia, to the former Soviet states of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where the concern is protecting the former Soviet weapons arsenal from international terrorists.
Ortega said the Europeans and Asians seemed surprised when instead of high-tech tracking techniques, the American experts taught them to use an ordinary stick and keen observation skills to hunt a man down.
"In some parts of those countries they pretty much have the same problems we do, as far as smugglers," Ortega said. "In Uzbekistan, parts of the country look just like ours, a lot of mountains. A lot of their concerns dealt with weapons of mass destruction and terrorists from adjoining countries.
"But just like the smugglers we have here, they have to walk the terrain to get where they're going," Ortega said.
Back on the trail
By midmorning, Ortega and Garcia have spotted the running w and the lazy s on the Hootchie Man Trail where it intersects Fresnal Road south of Little Tucson. But the signs soon disappear inexplicably.
The two officers are joined by veteran tracker Cross and by Charmaine Harris, 32, who had first spotted the tracks they were following near the end of her shift the day before.
Within a few moments, Harris, the first woman on the team and its newest member, confirms that these appear to be the suspects' tracks.
And as she moves up the trail, she finds something else she'd seen the day before - a long white fiber. It was a thread from a Mexican sugar sack, which the drug smugglers like to use, along with burlap bags, for their temporary backpacks.
After looking at the crushed stems of plants disturbed along the trail, Patrol Supervisor Marvin Eleondo suggests the group isn't too far ahead.
But the smugglers were now "walking underneath" a group of illegal entrants moving along the trail behind them, hiding the important tracks.
"We'll try to jump ahead of them," said Eleando, a 28-year veteran of the Shadow Wolves.
Solving mysteries
Like Eleondo, Lambert Cross got his first tracking experience as a child, sent out to gather the family's farm animals as part of his daily chores. From the tribal elders he learned techniques and skills that had been passed down generation to generation.
Cross said he has enjoyed his 30-year run as a tracker, hunting down drug traffickers by recognizing the telltale signs - a broader stance, a shorter gait, a deeper heel strike from the weight of the load.
Occasionally he saves a life.
But the greatest thrill remains pitting his skills against those who don't want to be found, who brush out or conceal their tracks.
A few years back, Cross and his co-workers started coming across an unusual sign that was not so much an impression as a disturbance on the ground. When they examined it more closely they began to notice a texture pattern, and an occasional fiber.
They discovered that the tracks were those of drug smugglers who wore chunks of carpet strapped to their feet to eliminate footprints.
These days, the smugglers are making creative use of the flood of northbound migrants, running loads ahead of large migrant groups, and occasionally even mixing their backpackers into a group of entrants to obscure their passage.
To the Shadow Wolves, the tactic, like that of the carpet walkers before them, is just another trail.
Persistent pursuit
Packing handguns, radios, and 100 ounces of water each, Ortega and Garcia make their way along the trail looking for the three elusive footprints.
The afternoon sun is behind them and the white domes of Kitt Peak Observatory are visible up ahead. Garcia slows and carefully examines the ground. He sees signs that people stepped off the trail to rest.
A bit farther up the path, the trail descends down the steep bank of a wash. At the sandy bottom, the remains of a fire still smolder. All around there is garbage.
Garcia studies the banks along the wash. "Sometimes, you can see where they set their backpacks down to rest."
About a mile later, the two emerge from the trail and step onto a dirt road where Eleondo and the others are waiting to hear what they saw.
The trackers agree the group is still up ahead somewhere. But they started the day at 4 a.m.; now it's 5 p.m. With the overtime hours piling up, the men call it a day.
But the Shadow Wolves aren't disappointed.
"The other day we followed a trail for nearly 30 hours before we broke off. Yesterday, the officers came up on the group and got 589 pounds and made nine arrests," said Eleondo.
And like their namesakes, they will be back on the hunt tomorrow.
* Contact Ignacio Ibarra at (520) 432-2766 or at nacho@primenet.com.
