WUNRN
Cecilia’s mother, on one of three beds in the home of
Cecilia’s aunt in
EL PARAÍSO, Guatemala — The smugglers advertised
on the radio as spring bloomed into summer: “Do you want to live better? Come
with me.”
Cecilia, a restless wisp of a girl, heard the pitch and ached to go. Her
stepfather had been murdered, forcing her, her mother and four younger siblings
into her aunt’s tiny home, with just three beds for 10 people. It was all they
had — and all a smuggler needed. He offered them a loan of
$7,000 for Cecilia’s journey, with the property as a guarantee. “I gave him the
original deed,” said Jacinta, her aunt, noting that the smuggler gave them a
year to repay the loan, with interest. “I did it out of love.”
The trip lasted nearly a month, devolving from a journey of want and fear
into an outright abduction by smugglers in the United States. Freedom came only
after an extra $1,000 payment, made at a gas station in Fort Myers, Fla., as
her kidnappers flashed a gun.
Now in Miami, Cecilia, 16, is one of more than 50,000 unaccompanied minors who
have come to the United States illegally from Central America in less than a
year. Though the number of new arrivals has been declining, the Obama
administration says it is determined to “confront the smugglers of these
unaccompanied children,” and the “cartels who tax or exploit them in their
passage.
But breaking up these networks will be difficult.
Behind the surge of young migrants showing up for a shot at the American dream
is a system of cruel and unregulated capitalism with a proven ability to adapt.
The human export industry in the region is now worth billions of dollars,
experts say, and it has become more ruthless and sophisticated than ever,
employing a growing array of opportunists who trap, rape and rob from the point
of departure to the end of the road.
Thousands of migrants are believed to be kidnapped and abused every year
while going through Mexico. Others, like Cecilia, are held for ransom in the
United States, and officials across the region lament that the ugly business of
human smuggling keeps getting uglier. Especially here in Guatemala, smugglers,
or “coyotes,” have grown increasingly adept at marketing themselves to poor
families, drumming up hopes with false depictions of American immigration
policy, then squeezing their prey with death threats, demanding payment through
bank loans or property titles.
The result, visible throughout mountain villages like this one, is a
relentless cycle with departures that ebb and flow but never seem to end. In
this self-perpetuating system, the seeds of future migration have already been
sown in the debts of the past and present. Cecilia’s inability to send money
home right away led her pregnant mother to try to make the journey herself a
few weeks later in a desperate bid to save the house, only to fail. Now she
owes a coyote, too.
Other family members will follow, her relatives say, repeating the pattern
of debt, extortion and additional risk. One relative’s failure to cross the
border or earn enough money up north prompts another departure, then another.
“It’s a pyramid scheme,” said David Stoll, a
sociologist at Middlebury College who has studied migration in Guatemala. Once
coyotes and families realize they are about to lose money or a house, he added,
“the only way they can recoup their losses is by passing the game on to those
below them.”
A Marketplace for Leaving
Nebaj, the municipality that includes El Paraíso, sits in a small green
valley deep in the Guatemala highlands, an eight-hour drive from the capital on
rough roads that zigzag through lush canyons. This is the land of the Ixil,
indigenous Mayans famous for weaving bright red skirts — and for being the
victims of a scorched-earth military campaign that killed thousands in the
1980s during Guatemala’s civil war.
The region has been sending people north for years, often with loans. In
the hillside villages all over Nebaj, stories of land lost to coyotes and banks
are common. Many families spend years struggling, with debts passed on like
poisoned inheritances.
Local lenders often lay out the initial payments. But if they are not paid
back right away, they often threaten violence, forcing many families to borrow
from Banrural, the main bank in rural Guatemala, or from cooperatives and
credit unions, all of which happily advertise credit on billboards above the
rural area’s muddy roads.
Many families have come away with nothing more than regrets.
“Sometimes I think my father just wasn’t thinking through the consequences
of leaving,” Magdalena Raymundo, 25, said in a dirt-floored shack she shares
with her husband in Acul, a village outside Nebaj. She and her mother still owe
nearly $13,000 for a trip her father and brother took in 2006.
Threatening to evict the family, “bank collectors come by every few weeks
asking for money,” she said.
Everyone here seems to know that going to the United States is a gamble
with dangerous odds. But many go anyway because some win, and they tend to show
it — like the owner of a new concrete house with an enormous American flag
painted on the front, just a short walk down a muddy path from Ms. Raymundo’s
home.
The banking system encourages the risky behavior. Jorge Gúzman, the manager
at one of two Banrural banks in Nebaj, said loans are more likely to be
approved if the family applying has a relative up north sending back money. The
loans are supposed to be for construction or farming improvements, but Mr.
Gúzman said “most people are not honest about why they are borrowing.”
He acknowledged that a lot of the money had been used to pay for additional
journeys north. During the recession a few years ago, that led to more losses
for the bank. But in the past year or two, he said, the bank’s portfolio had
stabilized, allowing for more lending.
And with more money in play, coyotes have come calling. Their ranks have
multiplied, many here say, because it’s the best job around. One trip often
pays more than a teacher’s annual salary.
“This migration was prompted by a growing business, of the coyotes,” said
Luis Fernando Carrera Castro, Guatemala’s foreign minister. “They saw a
business opportunity, and they convinced people in Central America that somehow
the laws of the United States were going to allow them to stay.”
Their advertising in Nebaj could be heard openly
on the radio. It could be seen in the market, where women in jeans handed out
business cards with phone numbers for coyotes who came to town once or twice a
week.
Cecilia, who did not want her full name or the
full names of her relatives used — to avoid trouble with American authorities
and the people her family owes in Guatemala, knew the journey was risky. Her
cousin, Ana, 21, who lives in the same house, had already tried and been
deported, twice.
But Cecilia and her family believed the smuggler’s proposal. “I thought
when I got to the United States they would give me papers — the coyote said
that,” she said.
So early one morning in May, Cecilia put five pairs of pants and five
shirts in a backpack and set off, walking up the dirt trail leading away from
the home that paid her way. The coyote or one of his lackeys — they were all
strangers, reachable only on cellphones that were shut off after two weeks —
picked up Cecilia later that day, along with a half-dozen others.
What followed, Cecilia said, was a five-leg, three-week journey with a
rotating cast of opportunistic guides. First, she rode a bus to the Mexican
border. Then another set of coyotes took them through Mexico, again by bus,
often failing to give them any food — a common tool to maximize profit — until
they reached the town of Reynosa, just across the border from McAllen, Tex.
There, for about a week, she said, she was kept in a warehouse with as many
as 100 people until they crossed the Rio Grande in a small boat and eventually
landed at a house in or near McAllen. About 85 people, most of them men,
squeezed into three bedrooms. The shades were drawn, and the new guides were
gruff, rummaging through the migrants’ belongings while they slept.
“They took all our money from us,” Cecilia said. She handed over her last
500 Mexican pesos (about $38).
After about a week, another coyote took a small group to begin the
treacherous walk through the desert in Brooks County to avoid the Border Patrol
checkpoints on the roads. The thorns stuck to her legs. The dry air sapped her
strength.
“I saw two dead people in the desert,” she recalled. “There was hardly any
food or water. The coyote had food for himself, but not for us.”
At one point a car came and picked them up. They squeezed in, seven of
them, and drove for an hour, following signs to Houston. The new coyote started
calling her biological father, Jacinto, who had only recently reappeared in her
life.
“Where’s the money?” the coyote asked. Jacinto was confused. He had gone to
the United States as a young man, working as a gardener in Miami, but had been
back in Guatemala with a second family for more than a decade.
“The man said if they don’t pay they are not going to let us out,” Cecilia
said.
Migrants as Commodities
It is a common scheme. Even as thousands of children have presented
themselves to American border officials in recent months, many smugglers are
holding onto others for extortion. In July, a 16-year-old Guatemalan boy was
rescued from a Central Florida motel after a smuggler decided he wanted more
money from his uncle and took off with the children in a van. The smuggler was
later arrested.
In March, 115 migrants were rescued from a stash
house in Houston after a woman said she had paid a smuggler $15,000 to bring
her daughter and two grandchildren to Chicago, but that they were being held
against their will until an additional $13,000 was paid, according to a federal indictment.
Local lenders often lay out the initial payments. But if they are not paid
back right away, they often threaten violence, forcing many families to borrow
from Banrural, the main bank in rural Guatemala, or from cooperatives and
credit unions, all of which happily advertise credit on billboards above the
rural area’s muddy roads.
Many families have come away with nothing more than regrets.
“Sometimes I think my father just wasn’t thinking through the consequences
of leaving,” Magdalena Raymundo, 25, said in a dirt-floored shack she shares
with her husband in Acul, a village outside Nebaj. She and her mother still owe
nearly $13,000 for a trip her father and brother took in 2006.
Threatening to evict the family, “bank collectors come by every few weeks
asking for money,” she said.
Everyone here seems to know that going to the United States is a gamble
with dangerous odds. But many go anyway because some win, and they tend to show
it — like the owner of a new concrete house with an enormous American flag
painted on the front, just a short walk down a muddy path from Ms. Raymundo’s
home.
The banking system encourages the risky behavior. Jorge Gúzman, the manager
at one of two Banrural banks in Nebaj, said loans are more likely to be
approved if the family applying has a relative up north sending back money. The
loans are supposed to be for construction or farming improvements, but Mr.
Gúzman said “most people are not honest about why they are borrowing.”
He acknowledged that a lot of the money had been used to pay for additional
journeys north. During the recession a few years ago, that led to more losses
for the bank. But in the past year or two, he said, the bank’s portfolio had
stabilized, allowing for more lending.
And with more money in play, coyotes have come calling. Their ranks have
multiplied, many here say, because it’s the best job around. One trip often
pays more than a teacher’s annual salary.
“This migration was prompted by a growing business, of the coyotes,” said
Luis Fernando Carrera Castro, Guatemala’s foreign minister. “They saw a
business opportunity, and they convinced people in Central America that somehow
the laws of the United States were going to allow them to stay.”
Their advertising in Nebaj could be heard openly
on the radio. It could be seen in the market, where women in jeans handed out
business cards with phone numbers for coyotes who came to town once or twice a
week.
Cecilia, who did not want her full name or the
full names of her relatives used — to avoid trouble with American authorities
and the people her family owes in Guatemala, knew the journey was risky. Her
cousin, Ana, 21, who lives in the same house, had already tried and been
deported, twice.
But Cecilia and her family believed the smuggler’s proposal. “I thought
when I got to the United States they would give me papers — the coyote said
that,” she said.
So early one morning in May, Cecilia put five pairs of pants and five
shirts in a backpack and set off, walking up the dirt trail leading away from
the home that paid her way. The coyote or one of his lackeys — they were all
strangers, reachable only on cellphones that were shut off after two weeks —
picked up Cecilia later that day, along with a half-dozen others.
What followed, Cecilia said, was a five-leg, three-week journey with a
rotating cast of opportunistic guides. First, she rode a bus to the Mexican
border. Then another set of coyotes took them through Mexico, again by bus,
often failing to give them any food — a common tool to maximize profit — until
they reached the town of Reynosa, just across the border from McAllen, Tex.
There, for about a week, she said, she was kept in a warehouse with as many
as 100 people until they crossed the Rio Grande in a small boat and eventually
landed at a house in or near McAllen. About 85 people, most of them men,
squeezed into three bedrooms. The shades were drawn, and the new guides were
gruff, rummaging through the migrants’ belongings while they slept.
“They took all our money from us,” Cecilia said. She handed over her last
500 Mexican pesos (about $38).
After about a week, another coyote took a small group to begin the
treacherous walk through the desert in Brooks County to avoid the Border Patrol
checkpoints on the roads. The thorns stuck to her legs. The dry air sapped her
strength.
“I saw two dead people in the desert,” she recalled. “There was hardly any
food or water. The coyote had food for himself, but not for us.”
At one point a car came and picked them up. They squeezed in, seven of
them, and drove for an hour, following signs to Houston. The new coyote started
calling her biological father, Jacinto, who had only recently reappeared in her
life.
“Where’s the money?” the coyote asked. Jacinto was confused. He had gone to
the United States as a young man, working as a gardener in Miami, but had been
back in Guatemala with a second family for more than a decade.
“The man said if they don’t pay they are not going to let us out,” Cecilia
said.
Migrants as Commodities
It is a common scheme. Even as thousands of children have presented
themselves to American border officials in recent months, many smugglers are
holding onto others for extortion. In July, a 16-year-old Guatemalan boy was
rescued from a Central Florida motel after a smuggler decided he wanted more
money from his uncle and took off with the children in a van. The smuggler was
later arrested.
In March, 115 migrants were rescued from a stash
house in Houston after a woman said she had paid a smuggler $15,000 to bring
her daughter and two grandchildren to Chicago, but that they were being held
against their will until an additional $13,000 was paid, according to a federal indictment.
Local lenders often lay out the initial payments. But if they are not paid
back right away, they often threaten violence, forcing many families to borrow
from Banrural, the main bank in rural Guatemala, or from cooperatives and
credit unions, all of which happily advertise credit on billboards above the
rural area’s muddy roads.
Many families have come away with nothing more than regrets.
“Sometimes I think my father just wasn’t thinking through the consequences
of leaving,” Magdalena Raymundo, 25, said in a dirt-floored shack she shares
with her husband in Acul, a village outside Nebaj. She and her mother still owe
nearly $13,000 for a trip her father and brother took in 2006.
Threatening to evict the family, “bank collectors come by every few weeks
asking for money,” she said.
Everyone here seems to know that going to the United States is a gamble
with dangerous odds. But many go anyway because some win, and they tend to show
it — like the owner of a new concrete house with an enormous American flag
painted on the front, just a short walk down a muddy path from Ms. Raymundo’s
home.
The banking system encourages the risky behavior. Jorge Gúzman, the manager
at one of two Banrural banks in Nebaj, said loans are more likely to be
approved if the family applying has a relative up north sending back money. The
loans are supposed to be for construction or farming improvements, but Mr.
Gúzman said “most people are not honest about why they are borrowing.”
He acknowledged that a lot of the money had been used to pay for additional
journeys north. During the recession a few years ago, that led to more losses
for the bank. But in the past year or two, he said, the bank’s portfolio had
stabilized, allowing for more lending.
And with more money in play, coyotes have come calling. Their ranks have
multiplied, many here say, because it’s the best job around. One trip often
pays more than a teacher’s annual salary.
“This migration was prompted by a growing business, of the coyotes,” said
Luis Fernando Carrera Castro, Guatemala’s foreign minister. “They saw a
business opportunity, and they convinced people in Central America that somehow
the laws of the United States were going to allow them to stay.”
Their advertising in Nebaj could be heard openly
on the radio. It could be seen in the market, where women in jeans handed out
business cards with phone numbers for coyotes who came to town once or twice a
week.
Cecilia, who did not want her full name or the
full names of her relatives used — to avoid trouble with American authorities
and the people her family owes in Guatemala, knew the journey was risky. Her
cousin, Ana, 21, who lives in the same house, had already tried and been
deported, twice.
But Cecilia and her family believed the smuggler’s proposal. “I thought
when I got to the United States they would give me papers — the coyote said
that,” she said.
So early one morning in May, Cecilia put five pairs of pants and five
shirts in a backpack and set off, walking up the dirt trail leading away from
the home that paid her way. The coyote or one of his lackeys — they were all
strangers, reachable only on cellphones that were shut off after two weeks —
picked up Cecilia later that day, along with a half-dozen others.
What followed, Cecilia said, was a five-leg, three-week journey with a
rotating cast of opportunistic guides. First, she rode a bus to the Mexican
border. Then another set of coyotes took them through Mexico, again by bus,
often failing to give them any food — a common tool to maximize profit — until
they reached the town of Reynosa, just across the border from McAllen, Tex.
There, for about a week, she said, she was kept in a warehouse with as many
as 100 people until they crossed the Rio Grande in a small boat and eventually
landed at a house in or near McAllen. About 85 people, most of them men,
squeezed into three bedrooms. The shades were drawn, and the new guides were
gruff, rummaging through the migrants’ belongings while they slept.
“They took all our money from us,” Cecilia said. She handed over her last
500 Mexican pesos (about $38).
After about a week, another coyote took a small group to begin the
treacherous walk through the desert in Brooks County to avoid the Border Patrol
checkpoints on the roads. The thorns stuck to her legs. The dry air sapped her
strength.
“I saw two dead people in the desert,” she recalled. “There was hardly any
food or water. The coyote had food for himself, but not for us.”
At one point a car came and picked them up. They squeezed in, seven of
them, and drove for an hour, following signs to Houston. The new coyote started
calling her biological father, Jacinto, who had only recently reappeared in her
life.
“Where’s the money?” the coyote asked. Jacinto was confused. He had gone to
the United States as a young man, working as a gardener in Miami, but had been
back in Guatemala with a second family for more than a decade.
“The man said if they don’t pay they are not going to let us out,” Cecilia
said.
Migrants as Commodities
It is a common scheme. Even as thousands of children have presented
themselves to American border officials in recent months, many smugglers are
holding onto others for extortion. In July, a 16-year-old Guatemalan boy was
rescued from a Central Florida motel after a smuggler decided he wanted more
money from his uncle and took off with the children in a van. The smuggler was
later arrested.
In March, 115 migrants were rescued from a stash
house in Houston after a woman said she had paid a smuggler $15,000 to bring her
daughter and two grandchildren to Chicago, but that they were being held
against their will until an additional $13,000 was paid, according to a federal indictment.
American law enforcement officials note that the culprits in these cases
and others probably had nothing to do with the original smuggler the migrants
signed up with. While a generation ago coyotes were typically local figures
with trusted employees, smuggling is more decentralized now, making it easier
to expand and harder to stop.
“If this was hierarchal, you could take out the top, target the leadership,
and it would be simple to take out the organization,” said Brian Moskowitz, the
special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Houston.
“Because it’s loose affiliations of cells and networks which form, break up and
change alliances, it’s very difficult.”
Kidnapping has become systemic. A 2011 report from Mexico’s National Commission of Human Rights cited
10,000 abductions in six months, leading many advocates to estimate that 20,000
people a year are abducted in Mexico on their way to the United States.
In some cases, women are used as currency to pay for passage through areas
controlled by drug cartels. The cartels generally require each coyote to sell
at least one woman into prostitution every two months in lieu of his monthly
fee, according to Óscar Martínez, a Salvadoran journalist who investigated
smuggling rings for his book “The Beast.”
And in the United States, the exploitation continues. Smugglers sometimes
buy migrants for $100 or $200 each, then extort relatives to make the money
back.
“They rent a house, gut it, throw down a few
mattresses, and then when aliens get there, take their shoes, clothes and put
them in a room,” said Sean McElroy, assistant special agent in charge of
Homeland Security Investigations in Houston. “And usually, you will walk into a
bedroom and see 20 people sitting on hands and knees, sometimes tied up with
zip ties and with burlap sacks over their heads.”
In June, Homeland Security began Operation Coyote,
leading to 540 smuggling-related arrests and the seizure of more than $950,000
in suspected smuggling payments from 504 bank accounts, as well as 56 vehicles.
Experts welcomed the effort, but said that it had touched only a tiny piece of
the trafficking industry. In most cases, especially in Central America and
Mexico, smugglers still operate with impunity.
$1,000 for Her Freedom
Few migrants or their families ever call the police. In Cecilia’s case, her
mother, frantic after not hearing from her daughter for weeks, took cash from a
lender, hoping to make it to the United States to find her daughter and repay
the original loan. But she lost everything at the Mexican border when a coyote
robbed her and refused to bring her north because she was pregnant.
Jacinto was now considered responsible for the debts, but he said he had no
way to pay. Cecilia said her captor became more aggressive, prompting her to
play her final card: a telephone number in her pocket.
Before she had left, her father had given her the
home number of a Miami human rights activist whose lawn he had occasionally cut
as a teenager in the United States. He had not seen the family — the Maríns —
in years.
“I get this call, and it’s a girl saying, ‘It’s Cecilia. Can you help me?
They won’t let me out unless we pay money,’ ” said Ms. Marín, who did not
want her full name published because of security concerns. “I said, ‘Who is
Cecilia?’ ”
The coyote got on the phone and made the terms clear: He wanted $500
immediately, and someone had to come to Houston to retrieve the girl.
Flabbergasted, Ms. Marín explained to the coyote that she did not know her.
A series of calls later, Ms. Marín realized that Cecilia was her former
employee’s daughter.
She eventually agreed to pay the $500, and the man agreed to drive east.
But every time he crossed another state line, he called and demanded more,
raising the price for Cecilia’s release to $1,700 by the time he reached
northern Florida.
“It was clear that if we did not comply, she would wind up in a brothel,”
said Ana Reyes, Ms. Marín’s family friend who fielded most of the phone calls.
The more Ms. Marín thought about the proposition, the angrier she became.
“It’s vile blackmail,” she said. But she agreed to meet in Naples, about two
hours’ drive from Miami. Ms. Reyes, her toddler, Ms. Marín and Ms. Marín’s
sister and niece all piled into a car to rendezvous with the smuggler.
On the ride to Naples, the women rehearsed what they would tell the police
if they were arrested. “I had no choice,” Ms. Marín thought. “They would
prostitute her. What was I supposed to do? Leave her?”
Along the way, they exchanged several phone calls with the man, who needed
directions. He could not spell the names of the street signs and kept calling
an unknown conspirator seeking authorization for price changes.
The trip ended off Interstate 75, near a Circle K convenience store, where
Ms. Marín and her entourage encountered a red Jeep Cherokee with temporary
license plates. There were two men in the car. The driver was middle-aged and
wore glasses. He lifted his shirt to show the firearm tucked in his waistband.
He wanted $1,500, but Ms. Marín had brought only $900. Her sister scraped
together another $100 from her purse.
“When he showed the gun, I was so mad,” Ms. Marín said. “I said, ‘Look,
sir, I don’t know her. I did not hire you. Take her!’ When he saw my rage, he
said, ‘You don’t know her?’ ”
“ ‘No, I don’t,’ ” she answered.
“ ‘I am going to lose money on this, but O.K.,’ ” he said. He
took the $1,000 and let Cecilia out of the car. She carried nothing. Her bag,
her clothes were gone. All she had was lipstick, in her front pocket.
Over the next
few weeks, Cecilia’s father would be threatened by the lender; her mother would
give birth, adding another child to the crowded house that might soon be
seized; and Cecilia would learn that her dreams of sending home $1,000 a month
were unrealistic.
But by the smuggler’s accounting, there on the side of the road, Cecilia
had been well served.
“You have to be thankful,” he said. “We treated her well.”
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