Thread: Brutal drug gang takes over migrant smuggling

Brutal drug gang takes over migrant smuggling
Posted Thursday, Aug. 11, 2011
By Tim Johnson

McClatchy Newspapers

ARRIAGA, Mexico -- One of Mexico's most powerful criminal gangs has muscled into the migrant-smuggling racket, changing what had been a relatively benign, if risky, industry of independent operators into a centralized business that often has deadly consequences for those who try to operate outside it.

Los Zetas, who earned a reputation for brutality by gunning down thousands of Mexicans in the battle for drug-smuggling routes to the United States, now control much of the illicit trade of moving migrant workers toward the U.S. border, experts in the trade say.

They've brought logistical know-how, using tractor-trailer trucks to carry ever larger loads of people and charging higher prices, as much as $30,000 per head for migrants from Asia and Africa who seek to get to the United States.

They've also brought an unprecedented level of intimidation and violence to the trade. Los Zetas or their allies often kidnap and hold for ransom poor migrants who try to operate outside the system. If relatives don't wire payment, the migrants are sometimes executed and dumped in mass graves or forced into jobs with the criminal group.

Changing business

Nearly a year ago, Zetas gunmen were implicated in the slaughter of 72 migrants at a ranch near San Fernando in Tamaulipas state, barely a 11/2-hour drive from Brownsville.

Other mass graves discovered in northern Mexico may also be the work of Los Zetas pushing to control smuggling to the United States.

Alejandro Solalinde, an activist Roman Catholic priest who runs a migrant shelter in the town of Ixtepec, in Mexico's Oaxaca state, said Los Zetas had been merciless with migrants.

"Los Zetas control the trafficking of persons," he said. "They are crueler and kill more easily. ... They are voracious. They ask for more and more and more money."

The ascendancy of Los Zetas in migrant smuggling, formerly the preserve of relatively small independent operators known as "coyotes," who smuggled groups of 20 or fewer migrants north, has transformed the business.

Mexican officials report regularly finding tractor-trailer trucks loaded with as many as 250 migrants. The heavily armed drivers, who travel with escort vehicles, make payoffs at police and immigration checkpoints.

Two such tractor-trailers were detained at a checkpoint May 17 near the Chiapas state capital of Tuxtla Gutierrez. X-ray equipment revealed the ghostly outlines of human cargo, and when officials opened the trailers they found 513 people from El Salvador, Ecuador, China, Japan, Guatemala, India, Nepal, Honduras and the Dominican Republic -- a United Nations gathering of migrants.

Each migrant had paid at least $7,000 to travel through Mexico to the United States, Mexico's attorney general said, making the cargo worth more than $3 million.

Coyote fee

Trucks carrying large numbers of migrants have been found repeatedly this year. On Jan. 26, authorities found 219 migrants in the back of a tractor-trailer near San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas. On June 12, 202 migrants were discovered in Veracruz state, and 117 were found June 23 in Oaxaca state.

Los Zetas now have intermediaries in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador who recruit migrants and send them along established routes northward.

"If you want to arrive safely at your house in the United States, you have to pay these coyotes between $7,000 and $10,000," said Patricia Villamil Perdomo, who was the Honduran consul in Tapachula, a Mexican city near the Guatemalan border, until mid-June, when she quit after receiving written threats signed by "Z," or Los Zetas.

Villamil said coyotes told her that they now must pay a "fee" to the Zetas if they work independently and pass migrants through turf controlled by the gang.

"Everything is passing through their hands," she said of Los Zetas.

Zetas operatives are known to be strong in the southern border state of Tabasco, in Veracruz along the Gulf Coast and in Tamaulipas, which abuts Texas. But they're also in Oaxaca and Chiapas.

In Arriaga, the southernmost rail yard in Mexico, residents said they often saw pickups with tinted windows and license plates from Tamaulipas, the home state of Los Zetas.

Read more: http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/08/11 ... z1UpQIKhna

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