Submitted by: Nancy Battle
Murder on the Pipelines: Drug Cartels Turn Texas Oil Routes Into Killing Zones
By Joe Carroll
Linda Vickers fed her horses and was walking back to her house on a
secluded Texas ranch when she saw her German shepherds tussling over
what looked like a sun-bleached volleyball. When she got close enough to
scatter the dogs, her stomach turned: Their toy was a human skull with a
shock of red hair, its flesh and lower jaw missing.
What was left of the dead woman lay just yards from Vickers’ front door,
obscured by thick stands of oak and mesquite on the 1,000-acre MV
Ranch, about 75 miles north of the Mexican border. The victim’s name,
home, and intended destination remain mysteries, but two things are
certain. She died violently:
Her shinbone couldn’t have been fractured
naturally in such soft, sandy soil. And she was traversing one of the
oil pipeline rights-of-way that Mexico’s drug cartels have turned into
smuggling highways and killing grounds. “Somebody beat her up and left
her to die,” says Michael Vickers, Linda’s husband.
The Vickers’ ranch is crossed by a steel pipe as thick as a man’s calf.
It delivers crude oil from a cluster of south Texas oilfields known as
the Vicksburg Fault Zone to refineries in the subtropical waterfront
city of Corpus Christi. Like thousands of miles of similar pipelines
sprawling across the U.S. Southwest, it has been seized upon by
traffickers and smugglers as a good way to evade police and the Border
Patrol agents who watch the state highways.
These unpatroled, unmonitored corridors make ideal execution sites for
errant couriers, business rivals, informers, and unwitting migrants who
stray into the wrong place at the wrong time. The Border Patrol finds an
average of one corpse a day in the badlands near the U.S.-Mexico
border; in the past 15 years, the toll has reached 5,570, exceeding all
U.S. combat deaths for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. While
the Border Patrol says it doesn’t break out what proportion of the dead
have met their end along the pipeline trails, anecdotal evidence
suggests the figure is high. Authorities say beatings, kidnappings, and
rapes are already rising as pipeline networks expand and new conduits
are installed to handle surging oil and gas output from the Eagle Ford,
the largest shale oil formation in the U.S.
The mayhem is about to get worse, according to the Border Patrol, now
that Mexico has opened its energy industry for the first time in 75
years. Chevron (CVX) declared its intent to drill for Mexican oil in
May, when it disclosed talks with the national oil company, Petroleos
Mexicanos, or Pemex. Less than four weeks later, Pemex Chief of Staff
Carlos Roa said lawmakers were close to finalizing rules governing
foreign ventures that are expected to pump $30 billion annually into new
wells, pipelines, and processing plants. Many of those pipes will carry
Mexican oil to U.S. refining centers and ports such as Corpus Christi
and Houston, at the same time creating an ever-widening matrix of black
market trade routes.
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State laws require pipe operators to clear wide paths through the
vegetation, allowing aerial inspections and letting work crews reach
damaged lines quickly in the event of an explosion. Some pipes are owned
by companies that lease space on them to oil producers, and others are
directly owned by the energy explorers. The pipes are generally
underground, but the paths atop them can be more than 100 feet wide.
In south Texas, such rights-of-way often present smugglers with the only
easy byways through snake-infested, thorny bushes and razor-sharp
grasses. The footpaths are too vast for either the pipeline owners or
border agents to monitor constantly. And ranchers have learned that
fences pose no deterrent.
For Michael Vickers, a 64-year-old veterinarian, the wave of violence
has been overwhelming. In the past two years, 216 corpses have been
found near the pipeline pathways within 15 minutes of his doorstep. It’s
certain that many more haven’t been found: The wild, unforgiving
terrain and fauna hide much evidence. “The wild hogs gobble up a lot,”
he says.
His wife, Linda, a 57-year-old Texas A&M University-trained range
scientist, never leaves the house without her Public Defender, a
pocket-sized .45-caliber handgun made by Forjas Taurus (FJTA4:BZ), or
her pack of dogs—three muscular German shepherds and their leader, a
silent, imposing Portuguese cattle dog-Italian mastiff mix named
Tinkerbell. Michael packs a larger version of the same handgun, called
the Judge, plus a .380-caliber pistol with a laser sight tucked in his
shirt pocket and a .22-caliber handgun with a 30-round clip that he
keeps within reach as he tours the ranch, looking for signs of
encroachment. Two rifles stretch across the backseat of his Chevy (GM)
Silverado.
Less than 100 yards from where a pipeline right-of-way passes near the
main gate of the family’s property, Michael Vickers finds a “crawl hole”
under the fence. Smugglers and immigrant guides have learned that the
top of his galvanized metal fence is electrified, so they go underneath
it. A further 20 feet along the fence line, someone has chopped a
3-foot-by-2-foot passage, just the right size for squeezing through
while backpacking 80-pound bales of marijuana. Ribbons of torn cloth are
tied to the fence at various points—marking a trail for allied
smugglers.
Some people traverse these routes without malice. Still, it’s usually
impossible to discern mild-mannered migrants heading to Houston and
points north from the hired guns hauling anything from cocaine to
marijuana to methamphetamine. In any case, no one comes this way without
explicit permission from—and having paid a fee to—the cartels. A
Guatemalan man who froze to death on the ranch in February during a rare
south Texas cold snap was probably a migrant, though there’s no way to
know for sure, Vickers says. Like most corpses that have lain in the
brush for more than a few hours, his eyes were plucked out by the
crested caracara falcons that locals call Mexican eagles, for their
resemblance to the bird on Mexico’s flag.
Tattoos that signal gang affiliations typically serve as the best
indicator of which organization a smuggler works for. Since last summer,
Vickers and his neighbors say they have been finding more and more
trespassers (living and dead) sporting a large pistol tattooed across
one hip, the mark of the Hermanos de Pistoleros Latinos, a Texas prison
gang linked to the Gulf Cartel. That’s a troubling development: This
area has been Los Zetas territory for years. An all-out turf war would
turn an unimaginably bad situation into a catastrophe, Vickers says.
Follow the same Corpus Christi-bound oil pipeline from the Vickers’
property to the other side of Highway 281 and you reach the Tepeguaje
Ranch, a Manhattan-sized spread of scrubby grasses and oak trees. In a
spotless white denim jacket, white cowboy hat, and sunglasses, ranch
manager Ronnie Osburn looks the part. “All I ever wanted was to be a
cowboy,” he said. After a few indifferent semesters at college, he
abandoned his studies to pursue his passion.
Thirty-three years later, the interior of Osburn’s Chevy pickup truck
practically clanks with weaponry, including a .40-caliber Beretta and
two AR-15 rifles. The ranch faces a constant struggle to keep its 200
cattle from wandering into highway traffic because of the damage wrought
on fencing by smugglers who follow the pipeline or a second
right-of-way beneath a high-tension power line. In one four-mile stretch
of fence, Osburn counts 189 separate repair jobs. Several holes have
opened up since he patrolled the area a day earlier. Empty water jugs
are everywhere, discarded by drug and migrant smugglers eager to travel
as lightly as possible.
Early last year, Osburn came across the body of a 14-year-old girl
partially eaten by buzzards. The condition and location of her clothes
indicated she’d been raped before being murdered and thrown aside by her
coyote or his associates. Osburn’s jaw clenches when he talks about it.
Like Vickers, he keeps a thick portfolio of color photos of the gore,
in part because visitors are disinclined to disbelieve the extent and
viciousness of the butchery around him.
“It’s continuously getting worse every day,” the 63-year-old says. “When
I’m setting, watching TV, I have my gun with me. When I get up to go
the bathroom, I have my gun with me.”
Ranchers and farmers aren’t the only ones in danger. Oilfield workers
fear assault, or worse, from smuggling gangs that can demand money,
valuable drilling gear, or the keys to their vehicles. Weatherford
International (WFT), a Swiss company that helps oil explorers drill
wells and hook them up to pipelines, has been warning crews in south
Texas since the end of 2010 to be wary, especially when traveling state
highway FM 755, which it calls “a main corridor for drug and human
trafficking.” The road cuts through the county in which the Vickers and
Osburn reside.
The Tepeguaje Ranch includes an idyllic, shady hunting camp that can
accommodate about a dozen lodgers. Osburn worries that the rising tide
of violence along the smuggling routes will scare off deer and dove
hunters, who pay big money to lease the ranch for a few weeks a year.
Hunting leases are a major source of income for ranch owners in this
part of south Texas, especially after a multi-year drought made it
tougher to raise cattle.
With oil explorers expected to drill tens of thousands of wells in the
Eagle Ford over the next decade, smugglers’ travel options will only
increase, says Border Patrol Agent Robert Fuentes, a Chicago native
stationed 20 miles from Mexico. Every rig site needs a new road carved
out of the clay to make way for equipment and crews, and the opening of
Mexico to foreign explorers from the U.S. and elsewhere will mean many
more roads.
For the time being, a struggle for dominance among cartels on the
Mexican side of the border has caused the amount of marijuana moving
into the U.S. to dip, says Chief Patrol Agent Rodolfo Karsich. But while
the drug lords have diverted manpower and resources to combat rivals,
the carnage along the pipelines continues unabated. It’s gotten so bad
around Vickers’ ranch and the nearby town of Falfurrias that the region
was singled out for special mention in a state-commissioned study of the
border situation by retired U.S. Army General Barry McCaffrey and
retired Major General Robert Scales: “Decaying human remains litter the
landscape.”
Eighty miles southeast of Fuentes’ outpost, currency shops with gaudy,
flashing signs touting peso-to-dollar exchange rates dot the streets of
Laredo, Tex., close to the international bridge coming from Mexico.
Sandy Leyendecker, who operates an animal hospital in this arid border
city of a quarter-million people, lives on a 650-acre ranch 45 minutes
outside town.
Leyendecker moved to the ranch in 2003 after a divorce. She keeps 20
head of cattle, though her real passion is breeding whitetail deer and
black bucks. So far, she’s been lucky. She has never come across a human
body on her land, with damage limited to wrecked fencing and lots of
trash.
Still, the cartels that oversee the smuggling routes frighten her. “You
can’t get out here without a weapon,” she says. During a ride around the
ranch, she keeps a rifle on the dashboard of her truck, with nine
bullets stuck into a Velcro sleeve on the butt.
Leyendecker says three separate paths run though her land, including an
electricity transmission line that stretches from the Rio Grande to San
Antonio. Each is favored by a separate coyote. A fourth smuggling route
is likely to open as soon as the intruders notice a pipeline that was
installed a few months ago to connect a neighbor’s natural gas wells to a
larger conduit. ”They haven’t found it yet,” she says. “But they will.”
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