The hole in the tile of the former KFC store was small: 8 inches in diameter, barely large enough to fit a 15-piece family bucket. It easily could have been overlooked as just another deteriorating aspect of an abandoned fast-food restau- rant had authorities not known better.
After all, this wasn’t just any vacant KFC, but one in San Luis, Ariz., situated some 200 yards north of the U.S.-Mexico border. A person going through the old drive- up window might have caught glimpses of the 20-foot-tall border fence separating San Luis from Mexico in the rear- view mirror.
Moreover, on Aug. 13, po- lice had arrested the building’s owner, Ivan Lopez, at a traffic stop where he was found with more than 325 pounds of illicit drugs. Records revealed Lopez had purchased the former KFC
in April, paying $390,000 — all cash — for the abandoned restaurant. Soon, authorities from Immigration and Cus- toms Enforcement obtained a search warrant and surround- ed the building.
Once inside, they knew just where to look: Down at the ground. This was no fried chicken joint anymore.
Their suspicions were nearly confirmed with the discovery of the 8-inch open- ing, along a wall in the former restaurant’s rear kitchen area.
Agents chipped away at its sides and, as the concrete gave way, the hole became a shaft. One person shimmied down and turned on a flashlight, scanning the surroundings.
Hundreds of wooden two- by-four planks lined the walls, shoring up a veritable walkway that led due south.
It was an underground tun- nel to Mexico.
The discovery, announced Wednesday, demanded inevi- table comparisons to Breaking Bad and the Los Pollos Her-
manos franchise. Countless news stories relayed the tun- nel’s dimensions — 3 feet wide, 5 feet tall, about 600 feet long — as well as the mind-bog- gling amount of hard drugs that had been found on Lopez, more than $1 million worth of cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl and heroin.
But the tunnel affirmed an- other unspoken rule on Amer- ica’s Southwest border: What can’t go up must go down. Or rather, what can’t go over the wall can and will go under it.
This was hardly the first tunnel, and it certainly wasn’t the most sophisticated one, to be discovered along the bor- der, multiple officials said.
It was simply the latest, in an ongoing game of drug-traf- ficking whack-a-mole that has literally moved underground.
“Unusual? Yes. But surpris- ing? No,” said San Luis Police Chief Richard Jessup, when asked about the presence of these tunnels, a stone’s throw away from a bustling, official port of entry. “I mean, we’re the largest border city in Ari- zona with almost 38,000 peo- ple and growing very rapidly.”
Another tunnel had been found in the city in 2012, al- so close to the former KFC. Jessup pointed out there was already a border wall that spanned far beyond San Luis city limits, comprised of not just one, but two 20-foot-tall fences.
One ran along the actual border and another ran paral- lel to the first, about 50 yards north. Border Patrol agents
kept an eye on the dirt path between the two fences.
“It’s very difficult in our area to get over that wall. You either are going to take a drone and fly it over or you tunnel underneath it,” Jessup said. “Of course, if you can’t go over the wall, you go under the wall.”
And so people have. There have been 203 tunnels discov- ered in the U.S. Border Patrol’s history, and this was the fifth one to be discovered in that region since 2007, said Border Patrol spokesman Jose Gari- bay III.
Tunnels can be difficult to detect without sophisticated equipment or intelligence that keeps law enforcement offi- cers one step ahead of the car- tels that build them. But there are also some dead giveaways.
“One thing is a big pile of dirt,” said Scott Brown, special agent in charge for the immi- gration enforcement agency’s Homeland Security Investiga- tions.
Other times an unwitting resident on either side of the border will report suspicious activity to authorities.
“We’ve had instances where people have come in and said, ‘Hey, I’m sitting in my house at night, and I hear this constant scratch-scratch-scratching, and I can’t figure out what it is,’” Brown said. “Well, again, you tell that to [a Homeland Security] or Border Patrol agent, they’re going to guess somebody’s tunneling under- neath your house or in close proximity to your house.”