Major Drug Tunnel Found From Mexico to Arizona

Nick Kangadis | August 24, 2018
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Typically, tunnels are built in order for people to travel from one place to another with less difficulty. But the tunnel in this story wasn’t just for travel, it was there to poison Americans.

A near 600-foot tunnel was discovered in a closed-down KFC restaurant recently by authorities in Arizona that led to a home Mexico. The tunnel was used to run drugs from the home into the U.S. and vice-versa.

According to CNN:

It all began August 13, when police in the border city of San Luis, Arizona, say they saw the owner of a now-abandoned business bringing several plastic containers outside and loading them onto a trailer, according to court documents obtained by CNN affiliate KGUN.

Officers pulled the man over for an unspecified equipment violation. During the traffic stop, a narcotics dog alerted authorities to the presence of drugs in the two containers.

Inside the containers, police found 239 packages of various drugs, including over 261 pounds of methamphetamine, 14 pounds of cocaine, 30 pounds of white heroin, 13.7 pounds of brown heroin and 6.8 pounds of fentanyl. The fentanyl alone "translates to over 3 million dosage units," Homeland Security Special Agent Scott Brown told CNN affiliate KYMA on Wednesday.

Police listed the total value of the drugs at over $1 million.

The suspect, identified as Jesus Ivan Lopez Garcia, will face federal charges, “including conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute methamphetamine and cocaine.” There’s no word on whether the tunnel was being used by Mexican drug cartels to funnel narcotics into the U.S. or whether Lopez Garcia will be facing subsequent charges for operating an illegal international drug tunnel that led to the former KFC that he reportedly owns.

“This tunnel was very well constructed and would have taken this Drug Trafficking Organization a long time to dig and would have been very expensive," court documents state, according to CNN. "This tunnel necessarily required a combination of several individuals on both sides of the border, engaged in an intricate, risky transnational conspiracy to construct such a secretive structure.”

Here’s Homeland Security video of the tunnel:

 

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