July 20, 2003
Ciudad Juárez, Mexico -- The battered pink and green bus pulls into a vacant lot at dawn near a neon-lit burrito joint and a cluster of factories. Several dozen men pile out, their clothes wrinkled and their faces covered with stubble, each carrying a tiny sack of belongings.
Within seconds, a dozen waiting cabbies herd the men into taxis and drive off to deposit them at cheap hotels and homes scattered across this rough-and-tumble border city.
The action appears routine. But you won't find this site, two miles from the city bus station, in any tourist guide. The bus stop is one of several in Ciudad Juárez run by human smugglers. The buses stopping here - sometimes a half-dozen a day - are chartered by human smugglers. And the passengers they unload here are undocumented immigrants from across Latin America bound for U.S. destinations from Los Angeles to Long Island.
The bus stop is just one link in the increasingly sophisticated and profitable network of immigrant smuggling, a business that has come under harsh scrutiny since mid-May, when 19 undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans died of heat and lack of oxygen after a smuggler's driver abandoned them in a locked tractor trailer in Victoria, Texas.
Once the work of individuals or small groups, human smuggling across the Mexico-U.S. border has exploded into a multibillion-dollar industry controlled by a handful of international syndicates whose vast size and fluid structure make them tough to crack. Last year, smugglers moved an estimated 1 million undocumented foreigners from nearly 100 countries into the United States through Mexico, U.S. and Mexican authorities say.
"Human smuggling has become a high-volume, high-end money maker," said Bonnie Alexander, acting chief of the smuggling and human trafficking unit for the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Syndicates that ship undocumented immigrants to the United States "grow daily," she said. "We take them out as fast as we can, but there's always someone there to take up the reins."
As U.S. crackdowns along its borders make illegal crossings increasingly difficult and dangerous, demand for such groups has skyrocketed, along with their fees. Last year, the industry grossed $9.5 billion, according to U.S. immigration officials.
In the 1970s, fewer than 10 percent of Mexicans hired a smuggler to guide them across the border, said Javier Montezuma Barragán, Mexico's undersecretary for migration. "Today, I'd estimate more than 80 percent hire a coyote," he said, using the common Mexican term for human smugglers.
Five years ago, coyotes charged as little as $300 to travel from central Mexico to Houston, according to immigration experts and U.S. and Mexican authorities. That trip now costs $1,500, while the cost of transporting an undocumented worker from Brazil to the United States, also via Mexico, has reached $5,000. From China, the trip through Mexico to the U.S. can cost as much as $60,000, Mexican and U.S. officials say.
Immigrants' advocates say U.S. policies are indirectly responsible for the rise in human smuggling bands. Since 1994, and particularly since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. government has sought to stem the rising tide of illegal migration by sealing as many entry points as possible along its border with Mexico, leaving open only the most dangerous and arduous paths, such as a three-day hike through the sweltering Arizona desert.
Yet U.S. businesses continue to eagerly hire undocumented workers at below-minimum wages that to many immigrants seem like manna from heaven. Desperate for those jobs but fearful of crossing on their own, immigrants increasingly seek experts to guide them through the thicket of U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints, high-tech surveillance, including unmanned drones and thermal scanners, or rough desert terrain.
"As long as there are jobs in the United States and few jobs in Mexico or Central America, migrants will cross the border," said the Rev. Leonardo Lopez, a Roman Catholic priest who runs a migrants' shelter in Nuevo Laredo, a Mexican border city south of Laredo, Texas. "Building walls and increasing patrols only makes the coyotes indispensable." U.S. authorities counter that coyotes lure migrants into making the journey by glossing over the dangers. They note that many of the 2,000 migrants who've died crossing the border in the past five years were abandoned or led astray in the desert by their smuggling guides. Coyotes insist the death rates would be even higher without them. "I was helping people," said Ruben Patrick Valdes, a convicted human smuggler who operated out of Ciudad Juárez until his arrest last year, during a jailhouse interview in Odessa, Texas. "It's a lot better than letting people walk by themselves through the desert." Besides, Valdes added, smugglers rely on good references for their next haul: "You don't get repeat business if you don't take care of people."
Valdes, 33, a U.S. citizen, admits he worked for four years in the human smuggling business in Ciudad Juárez, arranging for U.S. tractor-trailer drivers to haul undocumented workers along with their legitimate cargo from across the border at El Paso, Texas, to various U.S. destinations. He said he worked for five different smuggling bosses in Ciudad Juárez and ran his operation out of strip clubs in a seedy tourist section of the city.
In April, he was convicted in U.S. District Court of conspiracy to smuggle aliens and transportation of aliens, including one haul last July in which two Mexican men died of heat exhaustion inside an unventilated tractor trailer in Anna, Texas. Valdes denies he arranged that load.
His 27ź-year sentence - the longest handed down to a human smuggler in U.S. history, according to his prosecutors - is part of a series of recent efforts on both sides of the border to get tough on coyotes.
Since the Victoria trailer incident, Mexican authorities have arrested about 30 alleged coyote ringleaders and dramatically beefed up counter-smuggling intelligence units.
In the United States, federal prosecutors in Texas last month indicted Karla Patricia Chávez, a Honduran national, as the ringleader of the group transporting the immigrants who died in Victoria. Thirteen of her alleged underlings were also indicted.
U.S. authorities also are setting up X-ray machines at checkpoints on some highways north of the border that can detect people hidden inside passing vehicles. That equipment would have spotted the 77 immigrants packed into the tractor-trailer bound for Victoria, which a busy Border Patrol agent waved through a checkpoint without searching.
But only a handful of those X-ray machines are in use north of the border, and inspectors at checkpoints without them don't have time to search every vehicle, said Reynaldo Garza, assistant chief patrol agent for the U.S. Border Patrol sector in McAllen, Texas.
And more than 100 coyote rings are still operating in Mexico, where human smuggling is second only to drug trafficking for illegal gains, according to Miguel Angel De la Torre, chief of tactical support for Mexico's Federal Preventative Police counter-smuggling unit.
Of those 100 groups, about a dozen are large syndicates, U.S. and Mexican officials say. Mexican Interior Minister Santiago Creel calls them "international mafias." Many of the groups share subcontractors who operate safe houses, shuttle services and border-crossing guides, making them difficult to track and crack.
Eight of those groups control up to 40 percent of the movement of Latin Americans smuggled into the United States via Mexico, De la Torre said. Another handful of groups specializes in importing Chinese, Eastern European or Middle Eastern immigrants, some of whom are flown or shipped into Mexico via Ecuador.
Many smuggling groups are family affairs, sometimes spanning two or three generations, Mexican authorities say.
In a bust last month in Altar, a northern Mexican hamlet that has become a staging area for coyotes who guide migrants through the Arizona desert, federal police arrested resident Lorena Trevino Cabrera on charges of running out of a flower shop a million-dollar smuggling ring catering to Mexicans and Central Americans. Police said Trevino and her sister, who is still at large, had taken over the ring from their mother, Eunice, who'd been nabbed 10 months earlier on the same charges.
Some coyotes have key operatives in U.S. cities such as Houston or Los Angeles, as well as in Mexico and other economically troubled countries that immigrants leave in droves, seeking a better life in the United States.
Prosecutors say Chávez, the alleged ringleader of the Victoria disaster, lived outside Harlingen, Texas, but shipped immigrants from six Latin American countries.
Mexican authorities estimate smuggling bosses clear at least $1,000 per immigrant. Lower-level employees make only $50 a head for such jobs as recruiting immigrants for their bosses at bus stations or border bridges. (At the pedestrian bridge to Ciudad Juárez on a recent visit, young men sporting baseball caps, golf shirts, oversized shorts, designer sneakers, cell phones and beepers called out "Trips to El Paso, no documents needed!" with the zeal of afternoon newspaper hawkers.)
"The big money goes to the bosses, not to the guys at the bottom like me," said a coyote in Nuevo Laredo who wouldn't give his name.
A small number of coyote rings also smuggle drugs, but for the most part, migrant and drug hauls aren't combined because of their different shipping requirements, Mexican and U.S. officials say. Drugs can be stored for long periods and don't have to be transported in ventilated containers. People, as the incidents in Victoria and Anna, Texas, illustrate, are more perishable.
Like drug traffickers, human smugglers protect themselves through a vertical chain of command in which employees in the chain know only the names - often false - of the person who reports to them and the person they report to, according to experts ranging from university professors to government investigators and coyotes themselves. The immigrants they haul know even fewer of the names.
Jaime Morales Castillo, an undocumented immigrant from a village outside Mexico City, said, "I only knew the name of the gancho [hook]," using a Mexican term for the broker in his village - virtually every Latin American community has one - who would lead him to a coyote.
The gancho last summer directed Morales, a wall plasterer, to a contact in Irapuato, a 3˝-hour drive north of Mexico City, where he waited in a safe house until a friend in the United States wired half his $1,500 coyote fee to another ring member. Then a chartered bus transported him and about 40 other undocumented workers to Altar, where he was loaded into another safe house for a few hours before a guide began walking them across the desert.
Morales would have stayed at yet another safe house in Arizona until his friends in the United States wired the coyotes the remaining half of his fee. But his guide got lost and he and his group almost died from dehydration before they were picked up by Border Patrol and deported. "We thought it was the end. We were drinking our own urine," Morales said.
Morales is out his $1,500, but authorities say some rings offer discounts for second and third crossing attempts.
To avoid the perilous desert trek, high-end coyote rings offer stolen documents and training sessions in which they coach immigrants on assuming a fake identity so they can openly drive, walk or fly into the land of opportunity.
Less sophisticated outfits sometimes resort to more creative ruses. Border Patrol agents recount tales of immigrants dressed as U.S. soldiers or priests trying to talk their way through immigration checkpoints in Texas. Last year, a group of would-be immigrants posed as marathon bicyclists pretending to race their way into Arizona. Two months ago, a smuggler from Tijuana, dressed as a nun and armed with a fake visa, was nabbed trying to drive into California with an undocumented immigrant stashed in a secret, hydraulically operated compartment inside the dashboard of her van.
Once on U.S. soil, immigrants usually are moved to their final destinations in cars, buses, vans, freight trains, tractor trailers or - particularly if they have high-quality forged documents - airplanes.
Cracking these rings will require weeding out corrupt officials on both sides of the border, Mexican and U.S. authorities say. Payoffs to police and immigration officials to look the other way are common, particularly in Central America and Mexico.
Sometimes, though, unscrupulous officials appear to be working with coyotes to deport immigrants once the smugglers get their fees.
As they waited for help in the courtyard of a migrants shelter in Ciudád Juarez on a recent day, Ciro Mendez Arciniega, 52, a waiter from Acapulco, his wife, Elpidia, 44, and their son Emanuel, 14, described how a coyote ring had cheated them of their $4,800 fee with what they suspect was the help of crooked officials.
Their coyote, a woman who'd been recommended by their relatives in Wichita, Kan., had members of her ring drive them across to El Paso with fake documents, Mendez said. Before the crossing, the Wichita relatives had wired the coyote $3,000. Upon reaching El Paso, however, the coyote's workers dumped the family in a cheap hotel. The coyotes then called the Wichita relatives and told them to fork over the remaining $1,800, claiming the Mendez family was almost in Kansas.
As soon as the coyotes received the money, they vanished. U.S. immigration officials appeared at the Mendezes' hotel room immediately after, as if on cue, and deported them.
"These polleros are liars and thieves," Ciro Mendez fumed, using another common term for coyotes. "But I don't know that I'd dare cross the border without them."
Des Moines firefighters cut a hole in the side of a rail car at the Union Pacific rail yard in Des Moines, Iowa. On Oct. 14 the car was found to contain as many as 11 badly decomposed bodies, which were found by workers flipping open the lids of rail cars so they could be cleaned before loading them at a grain elevator west of Denison, Iowa. (AP Photo)
Agresio Sanchez holds a receipt given to his stepson, Pedro Amador Lopez, from an alleged "coyote" named Ramon Moradel Calix in the amount of 50,000 Honduran lempiras (roughly $3,000). (Tribune Photo)