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BY MARC CHASE
mchase@nwitimes.com
219.662.5330 | Sunday, December 04, 2005 | (No comments posted.)
It's an illicit narcotics pipeline with tributaries that begin in a violence-ravaged Mexican border town and end in our back yard: Merrillville.
In the small border town of Nuevo Laredo, feuding drug cartels prepare drugs for shipment into the United States while exchanging gunfire and leaving bloody paths in their wake.
From there, drug runners illegally immigrate by swimming the Rio Grande River and dashing into thick reeds on the Texas side or attempting to drive clandestinely through Border Patrol checkpoints -- all to move drugs into the American street marketplace.
"The front line right now is Nuevo Laredo," said Will Glaspy, director of the Drug Enforcement Administration in McAllen, Texas.
And on that front line, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Ramiro Rodriguez scans the sun-reflecting water and grassy banks of the Rio Grande, hoping to spot drug runners as they carry their illegal cargo on the first leg of a journey that sometimes ends in the Calumet Region.
"Sometimes they (the drug runners) just spend the whole day here waiting until we leave," Rodriguez said. "It's very beautiful, but there is so much dope crossing."
The drug runners who make it past Border Patrol continue their circuitous journey up America's highways and interstates. And according to U.S. drug agents, the last major stop for many shipments is in the region -- Merrillville -- for distribution to the streets.
"All we know about Merrillville is we know they are utilizing that area as an off-loading station," said a DEA agent who spoke on condition of anonymity.
In Merrillville, throughout the Calumet Region and in the larger drug distribution hub of Chicago, the violence that began at the border seems to have followed the drugs, law enforcement officials said.
Narcotics have long been tied to gangs, guns and the street violence that follows. They also have been tied to spikes in burglaries, robberies and other property crimes as addicts steal to feed their habits.
And some federal and region law enforcement officials said the narcotics pipeline from Mexico to Merrillville, Chicago and elsewhere in the Midwest continues to perpetuate the crime for which millions of dollars are spent each year to battle.
Though a Times analysis of FBI and Illinois State Police data shows crime rates overall have dropped, the Calumet Region has long been known as a crossroads of crime. Until recent years, Gary led the nation in per capita homicides. And last year, a Kansas-based crime statistics group used FBI crime data to rank Hammond as the 10th most dangerous city in the nation for communities with populations of 75,000 to 99,000 people.
Law enforcement officials said the Mexico to Merrillville drug pipeline puts the region at a new crossroads: an era in which shrinking federal grants for local crime fighting threaten the region's ability to battle the illicit narcotics trade and the violence that accompanies it.
In this special section, The Times analyzes the drug pipeline each step of the way and explores the methods that law enforcement officials use to close it off.
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