MCALLEN, Texas — Mexican cartels’ smugglers continue to cause car crashes in various cities along the Texas border in their failed attempts to elude authorities. The smugglers are driving vehicles filled with drugs, or stuffed full of illegal immigrants.
Over the weekend, at least two separate cartel smugglers crashed into vehicles or homes in their efforts to elude authorities, court documents obtained by Breitbart Texas revealed. In both cases, drivers employed by Mexican cartels tried to elude authorities but crashed along the way.
In the border cities that make up the Rio Grande Valley, drug cartels employ individuals on the U.S. side of the border who drive down to the banks of the Rio Grande to collect freshly smuggled marijuana bundles. The drugs are loaded into vehicles that the driver moves to a stash house. At the new location, the narcotics are kept before they are smuggled north past an immigration checkpoint near the town of Falfurrias, about 80 miles north of the border.
In one of the recent cases, U.S. Border Patrol agents using video equipment on remote surveillance tower spotted a group of smugglers carrying marijuana bundles near the border town of Roma. The smugglers dropped the bundles in a parked Ford Focus driven by 47 year-old Ramon Garza Reyes, court records filed in the case against the Mexican citizen revealed. Agents responded to the area and tried to pull over the vehicle that Garza Reyes had been driving.
The man tried to flee but ended up crashing into a fence. After the crash, he tried to run away but shortly after, stopped running and gave up. Inside the vehicle, authorities found six bundles with about 300 pounds of marijuana inside. Garza Reyes had agreed to drive the drug load in exchange for $300 dollars to feed his cocaine addiction, documents revealed.
In another case, a Border Patrol agent in the border city of Alamo spotted a car filled with bundles that was moving fast along a busy road. The vehicle crashed with others motorists at a busy intersection, there other agents managed to arrest the driver.
Authorities later identified the driver as 23-year-old Miguel Lechuga, a U.S. citizen from the area. The various bundles in the vehicle weighed a little less than 300 pounds of marijuana. The man claimed that he would be paid $3,000 for the driving the drugs.
While the two crashes did not result in severe injuries or fatalities, Breitbart Texas has reported on various other cases where fleeing cartel drug smugglers or human smugglers have caused major wrecks with various fatalities. A woman died and 12 other illegal immigrants were injured near the border city of Palmview in November 2015 after a vehicle being used by human smugglers crashed while trying to avoid authorities.
In September of that same year, six illegal immigrants from Honduras and Guatemala were killed following a high speed chase northwest of Victoria Texas.
A 14 year-old teenager was driving a van full of illegal immigrants when he tried to escape from authorities in 2012. As Breitbart News previously reported, the teen wrecked the van during the chase resulting in the death of 9 immigrants.
Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas you can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.
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