The DEA have discovered two tunnels constructed for smuggling drugs into the US. The one tunnel was incomplete, but the other had recently completed and was thought to be used to get meth into Arizona from Mexico.

The story feels like it’s straight out of a film or series. I can just see Walter White from Breaking Bad digging tunnels at the direction of some cartel. The DEA is pretty sure that it is the Mexican Simola cartel who dug the Arizona tunnel. A DEA agent said “another cartel wasn’t going to roll into that area and put down that kind of money in Sinaloa territory.”

Douglas Coleman, special agent in charge of the Phoenix division of the Drug Enforcement Administration said:

When you see what is there and the way they designed it, it wasn’t something that your average miner could put together. You would need someone with some engineering expertise to put something together like this.

The tunnel was completed in a vacant strip mall storefront in the southwestern Arizona city of San Luis; it was reinforced with four-by-six beams and lined with plywood. It showed a level of sophistication not typically associated with drug smuggling tunnels, and makes others look like mere scratchings int the dirt.

Arizona police pulled over a man who had 39 pounds of methamphetamine in his vehicle and mentioned the strip mall.. The tunnel was found beneath a water tank in a storage room and stretched across the border to an ice-plant business in the Mexican city of San Luis Rio Colorado. Investigators believe the tunnel wasn’t in operation for long because there was little wear on its floor, and 55-gallon drums containing extracted dirt hadn’t been removed from the property.

While this tunnel seems pretty smart, it wasn’t nearly as bad-ass as the one found in early December 2009. It too wasn’t finished, but stretched nearly 900 feet into San Diego from Tijuana, and it had a freaking elevator at the Mexican entrance. “Here James, take the Meth. Now down to the tunnel. Thank you.”

[Source: The Guardian]