EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Sixteen passengers, a couple dozen pieces of luggage and 92,000 bullets.
That’s what U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers found inside a charter bus attempting to leave the United States through a port of entry in El Paso last Saturday.
CBP officers converged on the southbound lanes of the Bridge of the Americas around 7 p.m. to conduct a surprise inspection of vehicles headed to Juarez, Mexico. They flagged down a passenger bus coming from Phoenix, Arizona, and questioned the driver and his assistant.
The officers asked some routine questions and lastly inquired if the two men just happened to be transporting firearms or ammo in their employer’s commercial vehicle. Driver Lucio Enriquez Garcia and co-driver Ramiro Antonio Barbosa Resendiz promptly said, “No.”
Court records show the officers still sent the bus to a cargo lot for an in-depth inspection. After the passengers, some traveling with children, got off and retrieved their luggage, border officers noticed nobody picked up 26 black totes from the cargo compartment. Enriquez and Barbosa told officers that cargo was placed there before they got on the bus traveling to Zacatecas, Mexico. CBP instructed the men to remove the unmarked totes from the bus, but they were too heavy.
CBP officers took over and found 1,650 boxes with 33,000 rounds of 7.62 x 39 ammunition typically used in AK-47-style rifles. They also found nearly 3,000 boxes of .223-caliber bullets commonly used in the civilian version of the military M16 rifle.
According to a criminal complaint filed Aug. 19 in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Barbosa and Enriquez initially told Homeland Security Investigation special agents they didn’t know what was in the totes but thought it might be machine parts.
As the questioning dragged on, Enriquez allegedly “changed his story” and told agents he had delivered 18 similar totes on two previous trips to an individual in Durango, Mexico, who paid him $900. Enriquez told agents he was suspicious about the contents of the totes because he was instructed to “offload on the side of the road,” according to the complaint.
Barbosa also deviated from his original statements, according to the complaint affidavit, and allegedly said he had transported totes with Enriquez on at least one previous occasion and took them down on the side of a road in Durango. The assistant driver allegedly said he got paid $300 but never tried to open and look into the totes because he “did not want something to happen to him.”
Both men have been charged with smuggling goods from the United States. The offense carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and fines. A preliminary hearing has been set for Aug. 22 in U.S. Federal District Court in El Paso.
Guns and ammunition are illegal in Mexico except with permits from the Mexican Ministry of Defense. The Mexican government has sued gun makers in Boston and firearms distributors in Arizona for allegedly selling firearms they know will be used by violent criminal organizations in Mexico.
Durango is a state in northern Mexico that borders Sinaloa to the west and Zacatecas to the south. Sinaloa is the base for the Sinaloa cartel, and various criminal groups have been blamed for drug-related massacres in Zacatecas in the past few years.
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