Dales, get downwind of this!!!
Posted: Sat Jul 16, 2011 9:18 pm
Fifty-eight people are being held in Mexico after soldiers discovered the largest marijuana plantation in the country's history, hidden under black cloth in the middle of the desert.
Two men were caught in the camp and 56 others were rounded up in the area around the 300-acre plantation, which is four times larger than the previous record discovery by authorities.
The towering pot plants sheltered under black screen-cloth in a huge square on the floor of the Baja California desert, more than 150 miles south of Tijuana, across the border from San Diego.
Army officers said the vast farm just one and a half miles from the main federal highway in Baja California state appeared to be the work of the Sinaloa cartel.
The same gang was tied to Mexico's largest bust of marijuana packaged for sale last fall and sophisticated underground border tunnels discovered in November, both also in Baja California.
No one has been charged in the raid on the huge pot farm late on Tuesday. The suspected workers are still being questioned.
Two of the men said they were from Sinaloa state, headquarters of the Sinaloa cartel led by Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman, Mexico's most-wanted fugitive. The farm was in remote territory of the Baja peninsula, 280 miles south of Tijuana, that is believed to be controlled by Guzman's cartel.
'There are indications that these are zones of the Sinaloa cartel,' said infantry Maj. Bernardo Rafael Sanchez, spokesman for the army's second region, which covers the border states of Baja California and Sonora.
Some areas of the more than half-mile-square marijuana farm resembled a nursery, with small plants.
Other parts were like mature corn fields with neat rows of forest green plants rising more than 2.5 metres tall to a protective mesh shielding the expanse of plants. From the air, it looks like a giant square of asphalt.
The average height of the plants was about 1.5 yards (metres).
Authorities believe as many as 120 men worked the farm, living in four rudimentary, plywood buildings, including a large bunkhouse with long sleeping platforms for up to 60 people, a living room and the kitchen.
Beans, cheese and salsa sat on the dinner table nearly three days after the raid, along with CDs of Norteno music. Women's lingerie and platform heels were found in one of the smaller bedrooms.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1SIzSHn8w
