NYTimes | While traffickers have also continued to try to push drugs through ports of entry, the American authorities have detected at least one particularly dramatic shift in tactics in the profile of smugglers caught at those border crossings.
Before the pandemic, the cartels would frequently hire foreign-born smugglers who would cross the border from Mexico into the United States under the pretense of tourism or a shopping trip.
But because the pandemic-related border restrictions have blocked entry to many foreign visitors, the trafficking groups have been recruiting a greater number of American citizens and Green Card holders, who are not bound by the restrictions, to smuggle drugs into the United States, American officials said. These smugglers are most often discovered with the narcotics hidden inside their bodies, officials said.
Guadalupe Ramírez Jr., director of field operations for Customs and Border Protection in Arizona, recalled that when he was director of the ports of entry in Nogales from 2009 to 2016, “internal carriers,” as such smugglers are known by border officials, were rare.
“Now it seems like almost on a daily basis we’re getting internal carriers,” and most are American citizens or permanent residents, Mr. Ramírez said.
The challenges of getting drugs into the United States also appears to have spurred the development of clandestine laboratories in the United States for the production of synthetic drugs, said Celina Realuyo, professor at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies at the National Defense University in Washington.
And law enforcement agencies around the world have also detected an acceleration in the use of cryptocurrency and the so-called dark web for drug transactions and money laundering during the pandemic, she said.
“They’re adjusting,” Ms. Realuyo said of the drug trafficking groups. “They already had kind of a wherewithal, and what they’re doing is they’re just adapting quicker to their context.”
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