Fatal trips bring heat to `coyotes'

By Hugh Dellios
The Chicago Tribune
June 5, 2003

ALTAR -- In the darkness, the federal police smashed through the glass door of Mary's Paper Store. They were hunting for records of phone calls made by the immigrants sleeping in the back.

Then they busted through three doors to get inside Lorena Trevino Cabrera's flower shop, where they arrested her 10 months after detaining her mother, Eunice, as the alleged ringleaders of an international human-smuggling gang.

The nighttime raid last week in this little desert town 60 miles south of the Arizona border was the biggest display of Mexico's renewed commitment to cracking down on gangs of "coyotes" who lead hundreds of job seekers to horrid deaths in the scorching deserts along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The number of border deaths this year rose to 120 after the discovery of three decomposing bodies in a train hopper car east of Houston on Tuesday. Other immigrants told authorities the three had climbed aboard near La Coste, Texas.

In last week's raid, 27 alleged smugglers were arrested in four towns by some 500 agents. The force included a number of intelligence agents looking for clues into larger smuggling operations, be they based in Mexico, South America or the United States.

The Mexican government has long been criticized for ignoring the smuggling gangs. And many fear their new efforts will be as fruitless as the wanderings of migrants abandoned in the desert; indeed, the vans carrying the migrants north to the border were again streaming out of town within minutes of the agents' departure from Altar.

Demonstration of good faith

The new campaign coincides with Mexico's renewed efforts to push for a broad U.S.-Mexico immigration accord and a realization that Mexico must first demonstrate that it is trying to take care of its affairs at home.

To be successful, Mexican officials say, the authorities need to be more thorough in their investigations, beef up anti-smuggling laws and find a way to prosecute smugglers despite a reluctance among victims to denounce them because many Mexicans see coyotes as heroes providing a crucial service.

"Of course, it's always difficult to prove," said Javier Moctezuma Barragan, the Mexican Interior Ministry's subsecretary for immigration. "But if you have the intelligence, then you can catch them. Otherwise, you are stuck in the justice system."

Last week's raid coincided with the announcement of a new prevention campaign to stem the number of deaths along the Sonora-Arizona desert. Almost 100 of 300 border deaths last year were due to overheating and dehydration in the desert there, and 40 of this year's deaths occurred there.

At a news conference in Tucson, Ariz., U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert Bonner announced Tuesday that three more helicopters and 150 more Border Patrol agents will be stationed along the Arizona border. Mexican officials said they, too, would be beefing up patrols and expanding public-service announcements to warn immigrants of the dangers.

U.S. officials also are talking about reinforcing the border fence, which is only four strands of barbed wire in many places.

"We're interested in saving lives," said Bonner, who applauded Mexico's raid against smugglers last week. "This is literally a corridor of death."

The challenges of cracking down on coyotes are on open display in Altar, a town of 17,000 people that has become famous as a staging area for the dangerous trips into Arizona.

Trafficking in the open

Dozens of vans sit alongside the central plaza waiting to ferry immigrants two hours to the border, and dozens of main street businesses have opened adjacent "guest houses" in back or next door with $2-a-night beds.

Milling about the streets in the nearly unbearable June heat are hundreds of lean young men in tight blue jeans and baseball caps with brims turned every which way. They have arrived from Veracruz, Oaxaca, Chiapas.

Every so often a bus pulls up to the plaza outside Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe Church, delivering dozens more immigrants.

Young men in sunglasses quickly approach the new arrivals, offering the "services" of their coyote operations for as much as $1,500.

Altar's mayor, Francisco Garcia Aten, says that as many as 1,500 immigrants pass through every day and that 85 percent of town residents make their living off them.

The town's new business began booming in 1997, the mayor said, after the U.S. Border Patrol initiated efforts to keep immigrants from crossing in more urban areas. That led many immigrants to begin crossing in the more perilous desert.

Last week's raid, and a similar one in Altar last August, stemmed from an investigation into the deaths of 14 immigrants who died after being abandoned by smugglers in the desert in May 2001, officials said.

The arrests angered local residents, who insisted that the detainees were innocent and that it should be not be viewed as a crime to merely house and serve immigrants who would arrive anyway.

"They say we are a big mafia of polleros [migrant smugglers], but look, you can see we don't live like kingpins," said Elizabeth Trevino Cabrera, Lorena's sister, tearfully offering a tour of the family's dirt courtyard and modest house. "You're not going to find [smugglers] among the local people. They are from outside."

But Nicholas Suarez Valenzuela, the federal police agency's coordinator of intelligence for the prevention of crime, said the agents had a trove of evidence against the Cabreras, including proof of their contacts with fellow smugglers in Central and South America. He said others were detained when they couldn't explain where they got $3,000 or $4,000 found in their possession.

Desperation trumps fear

But three days after the raid, a new wave of immigrants was in town. Three dozen of them were crowded into the bunkhouse of another Altar guesthouse, Lalo's Cafe, where they waited in the dark and sweltering heat, eating bologna sandwiches.

Most did not deny that they were afraid of their upcoming desert trek but said that life was too difficult in Mexico not to try it. As is common, many of them denied that they would need a smuggler to cross and showed no urgency about leaving.

"We're just waiting for an opportunity to fall," said Reynaldo Gomez, 44, a father of three from Veracruz who was deported from the U.S. a year ago.

But five minutes later, as if on cue, a van pulled up in front of Lalo's, and Gomez and 17 of his bunkmates piled into it.

Under the baking sun, the driver made a pass through the town and then headed off toward the border, the men inside laughing and waving as they went by.