Photos: The ingenious feats of engineering that feed America’s appetite for drugs

When they go low, we get high

Mexican federal agents stand at the entrance to a hidden smuggling tunnel in 2004, in Tijuana, Mexico. The tunnel, which starts in an abandoned house in Tijuana, crosses under the U.S. border wall. (AP/David Maung)

The Mexican drug tunnel occupies a peculiar place in the American imagination. Invisible, save for law enforcement photos accompanied by a drugs-on-the-table press conference, these ingenious feats of criminal engineering are both marvelous and terrifying to consider. Since their emergence in the early 1990s, the consistent discovery of man-size wormholes along the border have been a testament to the resources and determination of drug cartels—a reminder of the vitality of a cross-border drug trade supplying millions of Americans with their fix. More than 200 narcotúnels have been discovered since the early ’90s, the longest of which can stretch for half a mile and are rigged for lighting, rail tracks, and ventilation.

As a symbol of the entrenched but invisible menace of cartels, images of narcotúnels are highly effective. Among other things, the implications of such pictures are a reckoning with the nature of perception—clandestine subterranean movements taking place beneath our feet, their entrance and exit points cloaked in the banality of Southland sprawl. It’s a dizzying notion, criminals boring themselves north through sediment, and one well suited to the America-under-siege messaging of our government’s war on drugs. In this way, glimpses of empty tunnels further the binary narrative of Mexican pushers vs. American victims. The cartel as infestation, a tenacious hydra intent on penetration. Much rarer is the argument for our own complicity as consumers.

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent looks down a shaft of a tunnel that leads from the U.S. into Mexico in 2006. (AP/Denis Poroy, File)

(left) The entrance to a cross border tunnel lit by a lamp after it was found underneath a bathroom sink inside a warehouse in Tijuana, Mexico in 2012. (AP/Alejandro Cossio) | (right) Inside a tunnel leading from Tijuana, Mexico, to the United States border in 2016. U.S. officials say Mexico’s failure to fully seal up border tunnels poses a security risk. Mexican authorities say they lack the funds to fill the tunnels completely on their side. (Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office via AP, File)

The entrance to a newly-found tunnel in an old abandoned Methodist church, within yards of a U.S. Customs office, on the U.S. side of the border in Nogales, Arizona, in 1995. (AP Photo/John Miller)

(left) Mexican and American drug agents hold a news conference at a Tijuana warehouse on June 3, 1993, after authorities found an underground tunnel 1,452 feet long leading into the United States. (AP/Joan C. Fahrenthold) | (right) Michael Turner, special agent with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, speaks to the media while crews work on excavating a possible drug tunnel near the border in Calexico, California, in 2004. (AP/Sandy Huffaker)

A member of the media descends a shaft into a 1,452 foot tunnel that Mexican drug agents discovered leading from Tijuana into the United States in 1993. (AP/Joan Fahrenthold)

A smuggling tunnel connecting warehouses on either side of California’s border with Mexico in 2010. (AP/Guillermo Arias)

A Mexican policeman stands at the entrance to a tunnel that was covered by a fireplace in the bedroom of a ranch house near the border city of Tecate, Mexico in 2002. (AP/David Maung)

A Mexican federal police officer stands guard as others lift bundles believed to contain drugs through a shaft that reaches down to a sophisticated clandestine tunnel passing under the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana, Mexico 2006. The tunnel, which is about 2,400 feet long and around 60 feet underground, is accessed through a large concrete block shaft in a warehouse south of the border wall. (AP/David Maung)

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, left, and San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders look down at the exit end of a tunnel discovered in the Otay Mesa area of San Diego in 2006. (AP/Lenny Ignelzi, Pool)