Goat Canyon is a dry valley of crystalline rocks in the east of San Diego county named after the desert bighorns that roam. It was the perfect spot, Border Patrol agent Noe Lopez told his contact, to move dope through. “Honestly, the thing is that there aren’t—there aren’t any cameras,” Lopez said. “Nothing, nothing, nothing.”
Lopez went himself to the store and purchased three backpacks for the smugglers to use. On the first night, he collected one at the border fence with a glint of crystal meth inside. He stashed it in his Border Patrol truck, drove to base, switched it to his private car and then handed it to his connect in a parking lot in exchange for three grand in cash.
The second night he grabbed a bag with seven kilo bricks with the markings of cocaine. His source gave him $7,000 but said the smugglers were uneasy about going over the fence. Lopez said there was nothing to worry about. “If I’m saying, ‘cross now,’ that means that I am taking the responsibility for them to cross.”
But Lopez never made it to the third drop. He was arrested and charged with attempted cocaine and meth trafficking. The source, he discovered, was a DEA informant who had him on tape and the drugs were fake. He plead guilty and got seventy months in prison in 2017.
It was no freak case. In 2023, a judge sentenced agent Oberlin Cortez Peña for waving cars of cocaine through a checkpoint north of McAllen, Texas. In 2014, customs agent Lorne “Hammer” Jones got seven years for letting trucks of dope through San Ysidro. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.
Since the Department of Homeland Security was created in 2002, incorporating Customs and Border Protection, well over a hundred agents and officers have been convicted of trafficking dope or running undocumented migrants. This usually means working with cartels and their affiliates who control drug and human smuggling over the border.
Hellbound and Down 