International borders are places of economic disparity and crime. There will always be an illegal way to make money where there is a wall dividing two countries. Drugs and illegal aliens are smuggled between Mexico and the United States in immeasurable quantities. And laundered money and guns flow back and forth across the border, with the ebb and flow of the tide of greed. The term “secure border” is an oxymoron , because the enterprising criminal will always find a way to dig under the border, fly over the border, or simply go around the border. Where sparrows can pass, men and drugs can too.
If you follow the tangled roots of any border crime, it can be traced back to the trunk of money. A kilogram, or approximately 2.2 pounds of pure cocaine, can be purchased in Bogota, Colombia, for $100.00. By the time it makes its long journey, first by boat from a port such as Buenaventura, Colombia, to later arrive at the coast of Mexico, and then to be transported by truck to the US-Mexico border at Tijuana. Mexico, its value will have jumped to $10,000, a one-hundredfold profit. Then, the simple act of crossing of the kilo from Tijuana, Mexico to San Diego, California, will more than double its price again. By the time the product arrives in New York, it will have a wholesale value of approximately $45,000. Drug smuggling is nothing more than receiving a part of that astronomical profit.
. . . The official line of the United States government is that blind mules do not exist and that every driver of a vehicle is responsible and in fact knows of the presence of drugs in the vehicle—in other words, “guilty.” Ironically, the signs posted by the United States Government at the border belie its own position, because they all inquire of drivers whether “they have been asked to another to carry any packages” or if “they have had their vehicle out of their control at anytime” and, if so, that they “should report these facts immediately” because they might unknowingly be carrying drugs.
. . . Blind mules do exist. Human nature and the lust to make money are enough ICE is an acronym for “Immigration and Customs Enforcement”, the criminal agents who work under the Department of Homeland Security to enforce border laws. alone to insure that many, especially the naive and uneducated, may be duped into unknowingly transporting drugs across the international boundary.
. . . The story that follows is fictitious. Any resemblance of the characters in this book to people in real life is purely coincidence. This story, though, could be
real, and is real, for the hundreds of blind mules who blunder into a trap and face the most powerful adversary in the world, the United States Government.
