Site Notice: Dangerous Day – Update: We Have Returned – FRIDAY UPDATE: THE REPORT, WITH PHOTOS, VIDEO SOON

Aug 5, 2010 36 Comments ›› Pat Dollard

Second Update, What We Saw: Our trip down the road was successful. The terrain was hilly, 4×4 mandatory, and we spotted several likely spotter and sniper positions in the rocks above. It was quite clear that this road was neither designed or used for any sort of “normal” civilian traffic. Given that it was day, we didn’t run into any apparent narco-insurgent activity. We preserved the GPS coordinates of several positions. There is a second road that we will be scouting either tomorrow or Monday. We took some prep video, but had a field battery issue that prevented any taping down the road itself or what we saw, at a different location, later. As soon as I process and edit the video, we’ll post clips. After the second scout, we’ll make a decision as to how much of the information about the roads we should make public at this early moment, given a variety of factors such publicity will affect.

As for what we saw later, let me say that it was entirely unexpected and entirely stunning. I (of all people) was left speechless for nearly a minute. We were scouting a very hot (in terms of insurgent and illegal immigrant activity) area about halfway between Nogales and Sasabe , when we came to a gate as the rocky trail we were traversing crested at the top of a hill. We had just detected several trails, along with campsites strewn with layers of illegal immigrant debris. At one point, we moved several obvious markers used by the immigrants for directions. We were on the hunt to trace this network of trails back from the points where it joined the roads in this ranch area, to its source across the border. This gate was the next obstacle in this rubik’s cube of an organized illegal immigrant route system. As always, we took the liberty of opening it, crested the top, and at the instant we flattened out, we slammed into the stunning vision of the mothership of the illegal immigrant invasion that nightly pours across the 40-mile stretch between Nogales and Sasabe. On the sweeping Mexican hills ahead of us, was something that might be described as the foot version of a large international airport, a massive staging ground and its system of highways dug wide and deep into the hills by the feet of an unending horde of foreign invaders; and on a visceral level I instantly felt that what I was seeing was wrongful, a threat, dangerous, hostile. In my mind, I was now, for the first time, squarely facing at its very source, the full and final evidence of a large-scale and years-old foreign invasion, because if the army that had scarred the vista ahead of me was supposed to be here, and if its presence had been vetted and welcomed, then I would not be seeing in front of me, what I was seeing.

And to me, it was if the Age of the Conquistadors, whose dawn had been presented in the final scene of Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto”, had come full circle. For just as in that scene, as our hero burst out of the jungle onto the open beach to be overwhelmed by the site of the Conquistador’s alien and threatening ships, so had the same happened to us, as we rounded that corner and saw this modern Mexican army’s own alien and threatening vehicle of invasion, the tables turned, as the descendants of “Apocalypto’s” natives were now threatening the United States, the bastion of the new world that the Conquistador’s had founded.

Here’s a shot of typical illegal immigrant trail, to give you a sense of how much larger the source trails dug in on the hills across the valley actually are

The following three photos represent just sections of the trail network:

I’m awaiting a return phone call from the Border Patrol to discuss these trails.

Update: We have returned, mission accomplished. And just as important, we found something that stunned us….full report to follow…

SAFE Mission: We have discovered a dangerous dirt road that was made and owned by the narco-insurgents. It is used almost exclusively at night to run fast cars full of fat drug cash south into Mexico. It’s out in the wilds, nothing around it. It’s about a 20 mile stretch.

We are going to do the run ourselves today, right to the very border, and then back to civilization, as a recon and scouting operation. We have exhausted all feasible advance intel resources, and come up with precious little, so we are flying into this op much more blind then I would like, or normally allow. Long story, but its important we get this scout done asap.

I didn’t want to ask team members to go out on a mission this dangerous without being willing to go myself, so the site will be updated only on the highway to and from the area by the road today, until we return.

Till then…