Brayan Valle: 21-Year-Old Planning To Smuggle Drugs By Drone Across Borders Gets Three-Year Sentence
Brayan Valle, 21, was sentenced Thursday to three years in prison for transporting over 30 pounds of heroin by remote-control drone. The case of smuggling drugs over the U.S.-Mexico border using drones has become a regular occurrence. U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel said, “the use of drones appear to be on the horizon…the court needs to be clear these cases present considerable danger to our communities.”
As The San Diego Tribune reports, law enforcement authorities disclosed this was the third drug smuggling by drone incident that they had come across. Recently, a drone load that was carrying 30 pounds of marijuana near Yuma, Arizona, in January was stopped. However, some observers believe that this method of smuggling drugs will not gain serious steam because they can only transport drugs in small quantities.
Valle recruited a partner-in-crime, someone who he had only been friends with for less than a month, Jonathan Elias. Elias played driver and was meant to take Valle to and from the drop-off point. The hi-tech smuggler provided Valle with a cell phone to help close the drug transaction using an encrypted Whatsapp messaging app as well as the remote control for the drone. The remote control would have allowed Valle released the drugs in the drop zone.
Valle’s lawyer said that Mexican traffickers had leveraged on a “young malleable man” who was just looking to score marijuana for personal use. The prosecutor countered by saying that Valle was fully aware of what he was doing and that it would be wrong to portray him as a victim. The judge said Valle’s criminal history of threatening his girlfriend and a battery conviction went a long way in determining his sentence.
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U.S. Attorney, Laura Duff in a statement said that “with border security tight, drug traffickers were thinking of every conceivable method to move their drugs over, under and through the border..We have found their tunnels, their Cessnas, their jetskis, their pangas and now we have found their drones.”
Lauren Mack, spokesperson for San Diego U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, said they had received a tip that drug smugglers would be adopting the drone tactic, noting that they seemed to be only test runs at the moment.
Recently, a drone crashed into a Tijuana shopping center just two miles from the U.S. border. It was hauling seven pounds of meth. Mexican authorities suspect it was ferrying drugs from neighborhood to neighborhood and not across borders.
Drones are easily accessible and are equally affordable. They can fly as far as five miles and stay in the air for as long as an hour. The more sophisticated ones come with preset coordinates, though media sources say that drug cartels are having custom-made drones built with additional features built for them.
[Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images]
