'The agents are bought': A cartel enforcer says US border agents are on his payroll

Smugglers have long made use of the expansive US-Mexico border to avoid American authorities posted along the frontier.

But official border crossings in places like El Paso and San Diegoare still focal points for illegal narcotics transiting the border headed to points north.

Traffickers have developed a variety of ways to obscure and conceal their wares, but, according to USinvestigations and the word of a cartel enforcer operating just across the border from Texas, USagents charged with patrolling the border are frequently abetting the trade they're meant to stop.

"The agents are bought," Jorge, an alias for a mid-level cartel boss in La Línea, the armed wing of the Juárez cartel, told Mexican newspaper El Universal in an interview late last month.

Jorge, according to what he said in his interview, acts as a link between the Juárez cartel and Barrio Azteca, a gang that started in Texas prisons in the late 1980s, joined up with the Juárez cartel around 2000, and now operates in the US and Mexico. He also purportedly handles recruiting people for various jobs in the US, including Customs and Border Protection agents.

"The large loads pass by the checkpoint, pass by Migration, they are well arranged," Jorge told El Universal. "The car greets them and it gives them an envelope with a lot of money, and already they are told what color and what brand is the car coming with the load and they let it pass."

It would be hard to verify to what extent Jorge's organization has infiltrated and co-opted US border authorities in the Ciudad Juárez-El Paso area, but numerous investigations and convictions handed down over the last several years indicate that it's not uncommon for US border agents to cross the line into criminal activity.

The Center for Investigative Reporting documented 153 cases of corruption investigations against USborder officers, the majority of them members of US Customs and Border Protection.

The vast majority of the cases cited by the CIR involved agents with 10 or fewer years of service, with drug trafficking the most common crime, followed by bribery and human smuggling. Texas, California, and Arizona, respectively, had the most incidents.

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