Human Smuggling Rings Drive Mexico Violence

Joseph Kirschke | Bio | 30 Mar 2009
World Politics Review

WASHINGTON -- Last week, the Obama administration announced a new interagency initiative involving the government of Mexican President Felipe Calderon, designed to put a stop to the drug-fueled violence that has swept the northern parts of Mexico in recent months. Among the initiatives, Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice officials -- with their Mexican counterparts -- will confront the criminal enterprises that traffic drugs, arms and cash across the border.

Many in Washington welcomed the invigorated strategy, and rightly so: Increased and effective cooperation between the U.S. and its southern neighbor is long overdue. Bush administration policies combining highly punitive domestic immigration enforcement with heavy-handed border controls have done little to stem the tide of illegal immigrants, much less repair the hopelessly broken immigration system itself.

Meanwhile, many are optimistic that the new approach will also address a far less publicized issue: the criminalized human-trafficking network that has systematically emerged along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border.

The $700 million program, which falls under the auspices of the Merida Initiative, is aimed at strengthening Mexican law enforcement and judicial capacity in a number of key ways. Its immediate goal is to assist Mexican officials in stemming the flow of drugs, guns and people across the border -- by training officials in the rule of law and human rights; enhanced technology and hardware, as well as Department of Defense training of Mexican counternarcotics forces.

From the U.S. side of the border, each of the main federal law enforcement agencies will also coordinate to provide support.

These include the DHS, which will increase the number of its intelligence analysts and work more closely with Mexican border officials; the Drug Enforcement Agency, which will be increasing its staff; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms which is also bolstering its presence, along with the FBI which is creating an intelligence task force and increasing its focus on kidnappings and corruption in areas near the Southwest border.

The Justice Dept.'s Organized Drug Enforcement Task Forces Program, meanwhile, is adding personnel to its strike force along the Southwest border.

The fact that organized gangs have all but taken over illegal immigrant smuggling corridors to the U.S. is nothing new. However, their role in the current violence in Mexico is far less acknowledged.

The addition of border patrol agents coupled with other obstacles has pushed immigration routes further inland in recent years, deep into the desert areas of New Mexico, Arizona and Texas. Consequently, the journey has grown more treacherous for the immigrants themselves, and more difficult to navigate for the traditional "mom and pop" coyotes that in the past have accompanied and often exploited them.

Into the breach have quickly appeared well-organized criminal gangs with greater resources and more ruthless methods to move their human cargo over the more dangerous route.

"With thousands of additional border guards, it has been more difficult to cross the border," said Jennifer Johnson, a senior associate at the Latin American Working Group. "And now that the traffic has moved to some of the remote stretches, it's become more lucrative," attracting criminal gangs.

The very number of crossings made over the U.S.-Mexico border -- 250 million annually, by some estimates -- makes such unintended consequences more likely in the event of a major law enforcement action on either side of the border, such as the increased deployment of U.S. border guards.

"When you crack down on a crime," noted Peter Hakim, director of the Inter-American Dialogue, "clearly you very often have a whole new kind of crime."

Officials on both sides of the border are well aware of this. Unfortunately, just as U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials are increasing their cooperation, "a growing nexus" is forming between Mexican drug cartels, illegal-alien smuggling rings and U.S.-based gangs, according to interviews conducted by staff of the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary's immigration subcommittee with federal law enforcement in McAllen, Texas.

In fact, the subcommittee staff reported in 2006 that the human smuggling networks that operate along the southwest border are forced to pay a fee before moving anyone through regions controlled by the drug syndicates.

The money to be made is considerable. In all, the average fee paid to smugglers by a Mexican national to cross the border is believed to be between $1,200 and $2,500. Non-Mexicans, meanwhile, pay far more -- anywhere from $45,000 to $60,000 per person. Not surprisingly, this financial windfall has empowered Mexican crime syndicates with untold billions of dollars with which to battle Mexican security officials and police.

The smuggling of illegal immigrants can even be more lucrative than the trafficking of narcotics, with fewer risks. For one thing, drugs can't hide themselves. People, on the other hand, can.

Beyond that, smugglers of illegal immigrants are rarely prosecuted or jailed. Often, they are not even identified by the immigrants with whom they are caught. Captured drug traffickers, on the other hand, face a far harsher fate at the hands of the U.S. criminal justice system.

But criminality associated with the human traffickers certainly does not stop at the border. Johnson said that many of the heightened number of cross-border kidnappings now appear to involve Mexican drug gangs holding immigrants hostage, in order to extort money from family members already in the U.S.

But if there is room for hope, strengthening Mexico's judicial and law enforcement sectors are as good a start as any. Johnson, for one, lauded the Obama administration's goal of reduced entry levels, as well as the emphasis on "investigation and prosecution, instead of more border controls."

Joseph Kirschke is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who covers current affairs and international politics.

Photo: Border Patrol Agents watch for illegal entry from Mexico into the U.S. (Customs and Border Patrol photo).

Editor's Note: This story was updated to add details of the recently announced border initiative.

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