By Mario Presents
Cartelville, USA is a documentary created by Palmdale resident Jorge Ventura and Produced by the Daily Caller. It highlights the scope and vastness of the illegal marijuana operations happening in our own backyard. While filming the documentary, local Congressman Mike Garcia said, “The magnitude of the problem is what shocks me.”
Local home prices have steadily increased in recent years due to Los Angeles residents fleeing the big city for a smaller more affordable community where they could safely raise a family. Home prices skyrocket when all cash buyers lure locals with up to $100,000 over asking price and a short escrow. Sellers bid their former neighbors goodbye and those left behind soon notice increased traffic and strange structures.
Rural parts of Palmdale, Lancaster, Rosamond, Acton, Juniper Hills, Lake Los Angeles and Littlerock hold the allure of remoteness, and homes with 200-400 amp hookups to the electrical grid provide power where solar cannot. Within days of purchase, or simply squatting at the edge of a large property, with readily available components, illegal growers set up operations for up to 1,000 plants per site in as little as three days. Residents complained to authorities wondering what was going on with their community. Mayor R. Rex Perris responded, “These cartels are multibillion dollar organizations. They rival Amazon. Let’s be clear about the scope of these operations. They run them like businesses.”
Local realtors have taken note that a new demographic is moving in who are not asking the usual questions about the neighborhood. Instead, they are asking questions about water availability, solar hookups, high quality electrical grid service, large outdoor buildings, or remoteness. These all cash offers provide the perfect instrument for illegal cannabis farms. Armenian cartels are purchasing homes in communities like Acton, gutting the home and turning it into an indoor growing facility, while Chinese and Mexican cartels are growing massive outdoor operations in the desert. Are there bad agents acting with these criminal agents for profit in the local real estate community? The answer is, yes absolutely.
Along with the detrimental effect it has on our home prices, the environmental effect can linger for generations as these outdoor operations use outlawed pesticides to keep their crop safe from local pests. High concentration fertilizer seeps into the soil and the resulting waste is often disposed of in trash piles, built up as walls, to hide the view from the busier street. It eventually trickles into the water table.
Cartels from China and Mexico traffic people imported through the porous southern border to tend to their product. Workers are housed in squatter-like living conditions with simple wooden panels formed together to make a box shelter from the desert sun with a mattress inside. Most often a winnebago or pull along trailer houses these victims for portability to various sites. Child trafficking is rampant as their small hands quickly and nimbly trim the plants to pay off their debt to the cartels. Jorge Ventura, who’s been to the southern border on another story, has noted that the same wristbands used to identify people moving across the US/Mexico border by cartels were present in the victims he saw in the Antelope Valley.
Escapees have talked to neighbors about what was happening on the property; others were not so fortunate. Residents have been told that laborers are under pressure to work or be eliminated. This is not about humans; it is about the product.
Locals who have been out for a hike, or enjoying the desert on off terrain vehicles have come across illegal grow operations. Some of these people have been followed home by several men questioning why they were out there, and warned not to wander there again. One resident claimed to have been shown a picture of a red truck with three bullet holes and a dead man in the driver seat while being told, “This is what happens to you when you come out here.” Sheriffs report having been shot at by unknown persons and bodies have been also found in the desert most likely connected to the human trafficking element of these farms.
Authorities who raid properties take the plants as evidence but must leave the man made structures behind. Cartels repair and replace the raided operations in as little as two weeks and resume their illegal operations. In July of 2021 sheriffs from Riverside, Ventura, Los Angeles, and members of the DEA and the DOJ conducted a 10 day raid. They collected $1.4 billion of illegal product. The majority of the 131 arrested were undocumented persons most likely connected to trafficking and cartels.
The decriminalization of marijuana in California has reduced the penalty for an illegal growing operation from a felony to a misdemeanor with a possible $500 fine. All other states with legal recreational use of marijuana make it a felony to grow illegally. Estimated yield on the smaller growing operations is close to $1 million so the risk vs reward is heavily slanted in the criminals favor. California has made illegally growing marijuana easy.
The State of California allows for 6000 licensed legal high volume operations for the production of marijuana, of which only 1000 have been issued. The hope of legalization is to allow the people to benefit from the legal sales of cannabis, however the state has penalized people who want to play by the rules through endless red tape. Legal cannabis operations can not even deposit money into banks normally due to the Federal position on cannabis. When it arrives at the store front, all the dispensary cares about is the product, not the source. Meanwhile, cartels are doing what they do best, making money.
Leadership has failed to create a good policy to enable affordable legal cannabis use and California is witnessing a vacuum for cheaper weed. There’s nothing cheaper than a product made with stolen water and free sunshine 360 days of the year. Moving product to the east coast triples the value. Legal growers are simply unable to compete with the underground market while the State of California sees a monumental loss in tax revenue.
A single cannabis plant uses 3-6 gallons of water a day. With thousands of plants in single operation and an estimated 500 grow operations in our valley alone, the water loss is astronomical. According to estimates, water theft by illegal marijuana farms is estimated at 3 -9.6 million gallons daily. Charles Bostwick, Antelope Valley Assistant Field Deputy for Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger says, “One water board has stopped selling to these entities while another has been selling to water truck haulers for years”.
One local water board had surplus(or hydrant)sales of water to be trucked out, up 347.9% as well as residential water sales that increased 52.9%. When the Water Board was asked why they hadn’t stopped the sales entities removing large amounts of water from the community, they responded “We’re not the Police”. The Antelope Valley, as a district, is allotted a certain amount of water per year and anything over the allotment is purchased at a premium price. Stealing water from a hydrant in the middle of the night, damaging the hydrant, or jamming the system comes at a cost to the local residents and the thieves are getting their water for free. The High Desert also has a deep aquifer that entices the theft of water from private wells and illegal drilling into the ground.
Mysterious trucks connected to hydrants & private wells, reports of residents held at gunpoint, and yet the marijuana abatement teams have been all but eliminated from the law enforcement budgets because they are a branch of the controversial gang unit. The cartels are not threatened by law enforcement or the county and are brazenly setting up shop in our neighborhood. The District Attorney in Los Angeles needs to take action as soon as possible to prevent these sites from reappearing over and over. Illegal out of state growers, and more importantly, drug cartels have moved into resident’s backyards not only to steal water but sometimes their land too. To date, elected Attorney General, George Gascon, has not prosecuted anyone connected to illegal grows in Los Angeles County. Residents have been left to fend for themselves as they wonder, will the water be there when our children grow up? Will it be contaminated along with the soil?
Cartels and their illegal activity is wreaking havoc in the Antelope Valley. One resident noted that because of the cartels and their ever encroaching presence, “We are very very close to driving down the freeway and seeing bodies hanging from the overpass. That is what is coming.” Local residents should always stay safe by not approaching these sites and notifying authorities instead. Contact the local sheriff department at the non-emergency line if you see water trucks at hydrants, increased vehicle traffic on dirt roads, or trash walls hiding properties from view. Some companies have permits for water collection at hydrants, but not all. Visit www.carteldoc.com for the entire 30 minute feature.
