Cartels Are Using Firetruck-Sized Drillers To Make Drug Pipelines

Daniel_Stuckey writes "In the beginning, they used catapults, dune buggies, 'jalapeños,' $1 million submarines, and sophisticated drug tunnels to move drugs northward. Now, Mexican drug cartels are taking to high-end industrial drills to carve out literal drug pipelines into the U.S. It's the next big leap in the evolution of the narcos' ingenious smuggle tech. The future of borderland drug running, it turns out, is boring. Jason Kersten reports on the phenomenon in a great GQ feature that focuses on the Sinaloa Cartel, the international crime syndicate believed to be behind the first known narco pipeline in 2008: '...Mexican authorities, responding to reports of a cave-in and flooding near the [All-American] canal, discovered a tunnel unlike anything they'd ever seen. Only ten inches wide, it was essentially a pipe. The Mexican cops traced it back to a house about 600 feet from the border, where they found a tractor-like vehicle with a long barrel on its side—a horizontal directional drill, or HDD.'"

Comments

Re:Any drones yet?

[Noishkel]

Well hell they have their own submarines and now large tunneling machines. Seems like drones are the next logical step.

If they get to the point where they have their own space program I say we just surrender in the war on drugs and let them run things.

Re:Any drones yet?

[Mithrandir]

If they get to the point where they have their own space program I say we just surrender in the war on drugs and let them run things.

It's when they start taking over pizza delivery franchises that you have to really begin to worry.