Underground Harvest: As growing season nears end, marijuana flow into U.S. spikes

BROWNSVILLE - Thanksgiving Day originally was a time for celebrating the harvest, however for law enforcement officers, harvest is a time of heightened alert.

Harvest season also applies to marijuana and it's a time when drug dealers increase the movement of the product into the United States, according to U.S. Border Patrol officials.

The Rio Grande Valley sector has been seeing an increase in marijuana traffic because of the harvest season for the illegal plant, said Border Patrol spokesman John Lopez. Harvesting typically runs from October to late November or early December.

"Right now we're in the middle or the end of marijuana harvest season," Lopez said. "The same way farmers grow and harvest their crops, narcotics dealers have fields of marijuana hidden away and they harvest it the same way a farmer would."

The second reason for the added drug traffic relates to the success Mexican authorities have had in their war on drugs, Lopez said.

"The cartels feel threatened to lose what they have and take every chance to get past our border," Lopez said. "They try to get rid of their stored drugs and cross it rather than leave it stashed and run the risk of it being discovered by police or the army."

The increased traffic of narcotics has faced stiff opposition as Border Patrol agents have stepped up their presence with their Operation River Freedom Denial, he added.

Lopez said that in past years, the majority of the drug traffic went through the western part of the Rio Grande Valley. However, the crackdown has made drug smugglers deviate from their regular paths and instead utilize the eastern part of the Valley.

The agency seized 77,673 pounds of marijuana - valued at $62.1 million - in the Rio Grande Valley sector, which extends as far north as Corpus Christi, from Oct. 15 to Nov. 19, Lopez said.

The overwhelming majority of those seizures came from Starr County, the McAllen area and the Falfurrias checkpoint.

Capt. Javier Reyna of the Cameron County Sheriff's Department said that while marijuana is a very common street drug, authorities see a seasonal increase and respond in kind.

"We do see an increase around this time and we step up our interdiction duties," Reyna said. "We have more patrols out and our narcotics units step up their efforts. Sometimes we get lucky and our seizures are in the tons."

U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Eduardo Perez said the agency doesn't differentiate between harvest season and other times of the year. It is vigilant at all times.

"We are looking for any kind of narcotics 24/7 year-round," Perez said.

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Monitor reporter Ryan Holeywell contributed to this report.

Ildefonso Ortiz is a reporter for The Brownsville Herald.