A Mexican truck driver will spend three more years behind bars after he was sentenced in Tucson federal court for trying to smuggle thousands of bullets from Arizona into Sonora.
The 42-year-old man has been in jail since last May.
Prosecutors wrote that Jorge Armando Lopez Espinoza knew he was working for a drug cartel when he tried to take handgun ammunition into Mexico.
Agents had tracked bullets bought with a stolen credit card and sent to Nogales, Arizona, according to court documents. They intercepted eight boxes and replaced the bullets with other weight. When Lopez drove into Nogales, Sonora, police found the decoy boxes in his tractor trailer.
The defense wrote that Lopez got paid $500 for a similar ammo delivery he’d made in Mexico the day before, and was supposed to get the same payment when he was caught.
The money would have been enough for Lopez to catch up on house payments, court records show.
