Native American 'Shadow Wolves' help track drug smugglers along Ariz.-Mexico border

A group of eight Native Americans is helping the U.S. Government hunt Mexican drug smugglers in the rural Tohono O’odham Nation on the Arizona-Mexico boarder. Brian Bennett of the Los Angeles Times reports The Shadow Wolves "spend their days traversing the most isolated parts of the reservation" tracking smugglers in an area where there are no street signs and few paved roads. (L.A. Times map)

The smugglers' operations moved to this desolate region five years ago when the U.S. Border Patrol increased drug searches east of the reservation. Bennett reports "two billion dollars worth of marijuana, cocaine and heroin have moved through the reservation since then, according to Immigration Control Enforcement estimates." The Shadow Wolves use GPS, ATVs, and high-powered radios, but "it is their tracking skills and their feel for the hidden box canyons, caves and seasonal watering holes that make them formidable counter-narcotics agents."

Tohono O'odham Native Americans were first hired by the U.S. government to track smugglers in 1972. To increase numbers, they began hiring from outside the tribe. Bennett reports they are driven not only by a duty to the government, but also by a duty to their tribe because they are protecting ancestral lands and cemeteries in their hunt for drug runners, whom they've become adept at tracking. (Read more)