Coyotes earning fortunes smuggling people into US

$6.6b business grows as hordes of Latin American youths head north

The man-in-the-know nursed a late-morning beer at a bar near the Suchiate River which separates Guatemala from Mexico. He answered a question about his human smuggling business with another question: "Do you think a coyote is going to say he's a coyote?"

Dressed as a migrant, in shorts and sandals, but speaking like an entrepreneur, he went on to describe shipments of tens of thousands of dollars in human cargo from the slums of Honduras and the highlands of Guatemala to cities across the United States.

"It's business," he said, agreeing to speak to a reporter only if guaranteed anonymity. "Sometimes business is very good."

With the dramatic increase in the number of minors apprehended in the US in recent months, the human smuggling business from Central America may actually be booming.

The vast majority of migrants who enter the US illegally do so with the help of a network of smugglers known as "coyotes", named for the four-legged scavengers that prowl the border.

It is a high-risk, often high-yield, business estimated to generate $6.6 billion a year for smugglers along Latin America's routes to the US, according to a 2010 United Nations report.

The migrants pay anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 each for the illegal journey across thousands of miles in the care of smuggling networks that, in turn, pay off the government officials, the train gangs and the drug cartels controlling the routes north.

Exact profits are hard to calculate. One expert who wasn't authorized to speak publicly put it at $3,500 to $4,000 per migrant if the journey goes as planned. Smuggling organizations may move dozens or even hundreds of migrants at a time.

"We're talking about a market where chaos reigns," said Rodolfo Casillas, a researcher at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Mexico who studies migrant trafficking.

The surge in unaccompanied minors and women with children migrating from Central America has focused new attention on decades-old smuggling organizations. More than 57,000 unaccompanied minors, the vast majority from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, were apprehended at the US border from October to June, according to the US Border Patrol. That's more than double the same period last year.

The smugglers are profiting from the rising violence in gang-ridden cities of Central America, and the yearning of families to be reunited. Parents often head north to find work, and then save money to send for their children, sometimes years later.

Many of the children and teenagers who traveled to the US recently said they did so after hearing they would be allowed to stay. The US generally releases unaccompanied children to parents, relatives or family friends while their cases take years to wend through overwhelmed immigration courts. That reality gave rise to rumors of a new law or amnesty for children.

Some say coyotes helped spread those rumors to drum up new business following a huge drop in Mexicans migrating to the US. Arrests of migrants on the southwestern US border dropped from about 1.1 million annually a decade ago to 415,000 last year.

Immigrants rights advocates in the US say they are seeing more children from Central America who are not only fleeing gang recruitment and random violence, but who have been targeted themselves.

"We deal with torture victims in the Congo, and some of these kids have similar stories," said Judy London, a lawyer with the Public Counsel's Immigrants' Rights Project in Los Angeles. "Kidnappings on the way home from school, being held for ransom, sexual violence. We hadn't seen the numbers of girls before."

Because of that, some smugglers say they are in the service business.

"The most important thing is to help these people," said another smuggler in Ixtepec, a town in the Mexican state of Oaxaca where many migrants board the northbound train known as "La Bestia", or The Beast.

A mother and daughter, who were deported from the United States, are escorted by an immigration agent upon their arrival to La Aurora International Airport in Guatemala City on Friday. They were among a group of children accompanied by their parents deported from Mesa, Arizona, to Guatemala, on a chartered flight. Moises Castillo / Associated Press

(China Daily 07/22/2014 page10)