Otay Mesa

My, my story goes back.

I'm a CPA and I, a few years ago I was working at a, for a CPA firm and I had some work I had to do out at a prison in California, in Otay Mesa, right on the border with Mexico.

And every time I would leave, I would go to the prison from my hotel.

Of course I had my card that gets me in and out of the hotel and out of my room.

After I get done with my job, I get back home here.

And about a month later, I'm watching the Today Show.

And they start talking about a drug tunnel that's been discovered under a hotel in Otay Mesa, California.

And it turns out it's the hotel I was staying at.

Down at the border, we have about a 20-minute wait at San Ysidro.

It's clear at Otay Mesa.

And a reminder, we do have a mob of people outside of the Hildegarden F building at 32nd and University causing a little bit of a traffic tie-up.

San Diego police are out there with a SIG alert, so don't worry, everything's under control.

Okay, now let's get back to that top story about our journalists who went into a narco tunnel with the elite Tunnel Rats.

Now, the steady rumble of semi-trailer engines is broken only by the screeching and hissing of air brakes along the northbound lane approaching the Otay Mesa Port of Entry.

There, US Border Patrol agents descend by ladder eighteen feet into the narrow shaft of a narco tunnel once used to smuggle drugs from Tijuana to San Diego.

The commotion on the surface fades to silence as a couple of agents guide two of our reporters down into the tomb-like darkness.

Gutierrez told us, "The rail carts are used to transport narcotics and to haul dirt out of the tunnels when they're being built." Sablon said although this rail cart wasn't motorized, others are equipped with electric golf cart motors to easily glide along the tunnel tracks in forward or reverse.

Now as one goes deeper into the recesses of the tunnel, spray-painted graffiti along the walls tags it as the subterranean territory of the Sinaloa cartel.

The cartel used the tunnel to smuggle narcotics from Tijuana to a warehouse in Otay Mesa, an industrial, commercial, and residential area in the southern exclave of San Diego along the US-Mexico border.

The underground route was used for about two years before it was discovered in twenty thirteen.

Again, El Paso peaked in early July at about 24%, 25% tender rejections.

San Diego or Otey Mesa, when you think about that year over year, we went from about 3.9% tender rejections to 8.6%.

In that same timeframe, the national tender rejections went from 5.7 to 13.8.

So not higher necessarily than the rest of the United States when you average that out, but certainly a large increase.