U.S. Customs

U.S. Customs is presented through its agents’ role in the traffic across the United States–Mexico border: some can be bribed to let shipments pass, while others participate in a coordinated federal response to a smuggling tunnel. The agency’s place in the story is therefore double-edged. Its checkpoints are obstacles the Federación works to manage, but they are also sites of active government control and potential intervention.

Checkpoints and Smuggling

The Federation’s smuggling network treats border crossings as operational chokepoints rather than guaranteed routes. U.S. Customs agents are paid $30,000 per carload to look the other way, regardless of whether the cargo is cocaine, marijuana, or heroin. Yet a bribe does not secure a clean passage: agents are transferred unpredictably, and other officials monitor radio traffic. The smugglers use lookouts in condominium buildings overlooking the crossing stations to communicate with drivers and direct them toward lanes believed to be more favorable.

The limits of that system are expressed in its odds. When a dozen cars are sent through the crossings at San Ysidro and Otay Mesa, the expectation is that nine or ten will make it through. The operation accepts that some vehicles will be stopped; surveillance and payments reduce risk without eliminating it. U.S. Customs thus figures in a logistics system built around probabilities, alternate routes, and the management of losses.

Corruption and the Wider Network

Bribery of Customs agents is one part of a broader effort to purchase information and cooperation in the United States. The same account describes payments to municipal police, state police, and sheriff’s departments, as well as to secretaries and typists at the Drug Enforcement Administration who can provide information about investigations and technologies. It distinguishes those arrangements from the much rarer prospect of turning a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, whose agency remains locked in a violent feud with Mexican cartels after the killing of Ernie Hidalgo.

That distinction matters: the book depicts compromised individuals and institutional pressure, not a Customs agency acting as a unified partner of the traffickers. Payments can make some crossings passable, but the shifting assignments and radio monitoring show that the network cannot command the institutions it seeks to penetrate. Its influence is real and practical, yet incomplete.

The Border as an Economic and Political Space

The smuggling system’s larger logic is that the border itself is a valuable asset. In Art Keller’s assessment, the intended suppression of Sinaloan trafficking through Operation Condor instead dispersed it, while traffickers recognized that their durable advantage was the ability to move contraband across the long United States–Mexico border. A product worth little on one side could command far more just across the line. Customs checkpoints become important not simply because they inspect cargo, but because control over passage shapes the price and profitability of the trade.

Later, the narrative links the relaxation of border security under the North American Free Trade Agreement to an easier flow of traffic in both directions, including drug shipments north and money south. This does not mean the border ceases to matter. Rather, the same infrastructure that facilitates ordinary movement also becomes part of the conditions traffickers exploit, while checkpoints remain places where inspection, bribery, and evasion meet.

Federal Enforcement and Narrative Function

U.S. Customs also appears on the enforcement side of the border. When investigators approach a tunnel running across the international line, a large contingent of American federal agents, including Customs, is positioned opposite it and prepared to converge once the tunnel party radios its location. Customs is one agency in a broader operation involving the Drug Enforcement Administration, immigration authorities, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The juxtaposition resists a simple picture of a border either controlled by the state or surrendered to crime. At the crossings, bribed agents and surveillance leave the traffickers with a high, but never certain, rate of success. At the tunnel, federal agencies coordinate to act on specific intelligence. U.S. Customs embodies that tension: an institution whose agents can be part of the vulnerabilities of enforcement, and whose personnel can also join the effort to close a route.