Mexican drug cartel may be to blame for the huge wildfire in California

August 18, 2009 – 12:33 pm – No Comment

It is becoming more apparent that the 87,000 acres of the Los Padres National Forest that were destroyed in a recent wildfire that started August 8th was started by marijuana growers that are linked to a Mexican drug cartel. This would mark the very first major wildfire started in California by drug traffickers.

The fire was not started by the traffickers smoking their product, it came from a cooking fire.

Sheriff’s spokesman Drew Sugars said investigators found tens of thousands of marijuana plants growing in the area. No arrests have been made, he said.

“The suspects are still at large,” Turner said. “We’ve closed the area to the public … so if anyone is likely to encounter them, it would be the firefighters, and of course those people have all been alerted and are on the watch.”

Illegal marijuana growing in California has become a serious problem in the past few years. Federal agents as well as local agencies have had to step up their efforts in getting rid of the growers and their crops.

I would like to know how they tied this one patch of unburned marijuana to Mexican drug cartels. Are there no American drug cartels or a large group of dealers in the area that could have been in the mountains growing their “crop”? Turner said that not all the marijuana gardens could be connected to the Mexican cartels.

Overall, people need to be more careful because these actions are ending up hurting people who should have never been hurt. Of all the wildfires that was burning in the state in recent weeks, this one was the largest. Another wildfire caused the evacuation of 2,000 people near Santa Cruz.

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