Man gets 30 years after 9 immigrants die in drownings

November 30, 2011 5:22 PM
By JARED TAYLOR/The Monitor

McALLEN — A Mexican national will spend 30 years in prison after nine people drowned during a human smuggling operation failed in 2004.

Jurors convicted Joel Cardenas Meneses, 43, in September on counts of conspiracy to transport and harbor illegal aliens and transporting illegal aliens.

The immigrant drownings occurred Aug. 9, 2004, along Jackson Road in Hidalgo, where agents found a Ford sedan had overturned into an irrigation canal. Seven men and two women — illegal immigrants from Honduras and El Salvador — drowned inside.

Investigators determined the car's driver, a juvenile, had been traveling with the headlights off to avoid detection. A sharp turn led the sedan into the canal, where the nine people died.

Cardenas worked as a recruiter for the smuggling ring, finding Central Americans who needed transport to Reynosa, before organizing their trip across the U.S.-Mexico border to stash houses near Edinburg before hiring others to smuggle them to Houston.

Cardenas had been living in Mexico when a federal grand jury returned the 12-count indictment against him in 2006. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents found and arrested him in February in Houston.

Already convicted in the case were McAllen residents Jose Antonio Arispe Elizondo, 28, and Norberto Garza, 28. Cardenas' right-hand man in the operation, Jose Hernandez Hernandez, 40, hired young men to transport the illegal immigrants to various stash houses he controlled on the north side of Edinburg.

Arispe received a 100-month prison sentence in 2007. Garza receieved a 58-month sentence the same year.

Hernandez was sentenced to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty during his trial last year.

Two other defendants under indictment, Francisco Banda Encina and Victor Adrian Guerra Flores, remain at large.

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