Thread: Triple homicide exposes violent toll of human trafficking

Published: 02.09.2007

Triple homicide exposes violent toll of human trafficking
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
The detailed picture that emerged Friday about events that led to bandits shooting and killing three Central American illegal entrants in northwest Tucson provides a glimpse into the violent underbelly of human trafficking in Arizona where people are viewed as commodities.

Here's how events unfolded early Thursday morning northwest of Tucson near the Silver Bell Mine Road area that took the lives of two men and one woman.

Authorities have not yet released the nationally, age or names of the victims.

Between 4:30-5 a.m., a Dodge pickup stolen out of Phoenix was driving north across the Tohono O'dham Reservation with a group of 15-20 Central American illegal entrants, said a press release from the Pima County Sheriff's Office.

A group of bandits tried to stop the vehicle and opened fire when the truck refused to stop. Authorities estimated the gunfire came from four bandits shooting high powered rifles. Bullets entered the front and side of the truck, the release states.

The gunfire likely came from assault weapons or AK-47s, judging by the casings found said Lauren Mack, spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is also investigating the shooting.

After the shooting began, the truck continued traveling at high speed along Silver Bell Mine Road before it lost control and ran off the the dirt roadway into the desert. The occupants got out of the vehicle and ran into the desert.

There were at least seven people in the vehicle that the Pima County Sheriff's Office has accounted for but there could have been at least 10 more people involved, based on interviews with the four survivors.

The four people that fled the scene left behind a dead female in the center front seat and a dead man in the bed of the truck, said Pima County Sheriff's Department Bureau Chief Richard Kastigar.

They made it back to the roadway, apparently dragging a man who had been shot in the head. A 21-year-old Mexican man who was shot in the hand and lost some of his fingers left the group and went in another direction.

Authorities learned Friday that that individual, Pedro Luis Beltran-Camargo, 21, of Chapalita, Sonora, Mexico was the guide, or coyote, in the truck and arrested him.

The other four were picked up on the Silverbell Mine Road by another truck carrying illegal entrants. The truck drove about eight to 10 miles northwest until the driver realized the seriousness of the injuries his passengers, Kastigar said.

They ordered the three illegal entrants still alive out of the vehicle, dumped the body of the man who had been shot in the head and kept driving, the report says. The man died on the side of the road, the report said.

A local rancher found the three survivors and called 911. He found:

- A Guatemalan woman who had been wounded in the chest and neck, Sevastiana Quextan-Gomez, from Mareos, Guatemala.

- Olinda Arelina Mateo-Gomez, a 15-year-old girl from Mareos, Guatemala, who was not injured.

- Selvin Eristo Boj-Chavajay, an uninjured adult male from Sucahitepeques, Guatemala.

http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/printDS/168462

Gunmen in fatal Ariz. attack likely rival smugglers
By Arthur H. Rotstein
Associated Press
Feb. 9, 2007 04:20 PM

TUCSON - Gunmen who opened fire on a truck carrying illegal immigrants and their smugglers, killing three people and wounding two, were probably rival smugglers, an investigator said Friday.

The gunmen chased down the truck Thursday northwest of Tucson and opened fire but were never able to stop it and eventually abandoned the chase, said Pima County sheriff's Lt. Michael O'Connor, commander of the violent crimes unit.

"It really appears to us it was a situation where it was a rival smuggling operation trying to take these people," O'Connor said. advertisement

Investigators are still trying to determine the motive. But feuding among smuggling organizations is not uncommon, sometimes involving smugglers taking customers from rival groups to be held for ransom.

Smuggling violence in Arizona has increased over the last six months, said Lauren Mack, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who was not speaking specifically about Thursday's shootings.

She attributed the rising violence to smugglers who are frustrated by the increasing difficulty they have in sneaking immigrants across the Arizona border, which remains the busiest illegal entry point on the U.S.-Mexico frontier.

With a concentration of Border Patrol agents and National Guard members making it harder to cross the border in Arizona, smugglers are resorting to stealing the customers and employees of their rivals, Mack said.

"Why bother going through all the work to getting a group on the other side of the border when it's equally as lucrative to snatch or steal loads of illegal immigrants from other smugglers?" Mack said.

Once family members or sponsors are contacted and pay the ransom, the immigrants are released and head toward jobs elsewhere in the country, Mack said.

The smugglers are driven by the singular motive of making money, Mack said.

"They are ugly with greed," she said. "It's about money."

O'Connor and Rick Kastigar, the Pima County sheriff's criminal investigations chief, said local law enforcement resources are being drained all along the border by smuggling-related incidents. And many assaults on immigrants go unreported, they said.

"The encounters, the violence around them is getting more intense," O'Connor said. "Maybe people are resisting more aggressively; maybe there's more money involved in it."

Authorities said one of those wounded in Thursday's shooting is a smuggler.

Pedro Luis Beltran-Camargo of Chapalita, Mexico, who was hospitalized for a gunshot wound that cost him several fingers, was the driver of the truck, and Mack said he will be charged with immigrant smuggling.

O'Connor said Beltran-Camargo had threatened to harm family members of the Guatemalan and Honduran migrants he was transporting if they identified him as a smuggler. But some of the customers did so anyway, authorities said.

Authorities were still searching for the gunmen.

Authorities on Friday also released more details on the incident.

O'Connor said investigators now believe there could have been 20 or more immigrants in the truck.

After the shootings, the truck continued down a dirt road and at some point veered out of control into the desert. The wounded and uninjured occupants wildly got out and more than a dozen people ran or got rides out of the area - either from other smugglers or from passers-by, O'Connor said.

Only seven of those were accounted for: the three who were killed, including a 15-year-old girl, the two who were wounded, and two others who were found unharmed.

O'Connor said Pima County investigators are also working with the sheriff's department in neighboring Pinal County to compare notes on a violent confrontation Jan. 27 about 40 miles north at Eloy, also possibly between human smugglers.

In that incident, a suspected smuggler who was driving a vehicle was killed and a young man was wounded when four men wearing camouflage uniforms and berets and armed with at least one assault weapon stopped the vehicle in a farm field.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/ ... 09-ON.html

First if illegals were not in this country they would not be kidnapped. The gangs are crossing the border as fast as the drugs and illegals are. We need to secure the border as fast as possible before they start kidnapping more and more Americans.