Migrants become pawns of Mexico druglords

updated 8:39 p.m. ET April 30, 2007

SASABE, Mexico - Mexican druglords are taking over the business of smuggling migrants into the United States, using them as human decoys to divert authorities from billions of dollars in cocaine shipments across the same border.

U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials told The Associated Press that drug traffickers, in response to a U.S. border crackdown, have seized control of the routes they once shared with human smugglers and in the process are transforming themselves into more diversified crime syndicates.

The drug gangs get protection money from the migrants and then effectively use them to clear the trail for the flow of drugs.

Undocumented aliens are used “to maneuver where they want us or don’t want us to be,” said Alonzo Pena, chief of investigations for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Arizona.

Gustavo Soto, a spokesman for the U.S. Border Patrol in Tucson, Ariz., said smugglers are carrying drugs along paths once used primarily by migrants. New fences and National Guard troops have helped seal the usual drug routes, and vehicle barriers are forcing traffickers to send more drugs north on the backs of cartel foot soldiers, he said.

“We have been able to seal many of the drug routes by adding technology and more agents,” Soto said. “We’re seeing a tremendous amount of drugs being seized.”

The advent of drug-trafficking extortionists along the border may also be responsible for much of the drop in illegal immigration that U.S. officials have attributed more directly to better enforcement, Mexican officials and analysts say.

Turf enforcement
The new order became clear in December when heavily armed men stopped 12 vans packed with 200 migrants on a desolate desert road just south of the border. Local officials say they ordered everyone out, doused the vehicles with gasoline and set them ablaze.

Eduardo Verdugo / AP file Migrants wait to give their names to a member of Mexico's government-sponsored migrant assistance group in El Tortugo near the border with Arizona on April 11.

Nobody was hurt, but the charred carcasses of the vehicles remain an unmistakable message to the thousands of migrants traveling north on the border’s top people-smuggling route.

Since then, members of the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel have consolidated control of most of the main routes into Arizona, using teams of gunmen to set up the haggard border-crossers as decoys for U.S. security, U.S. and Mexican officials said.

Just south of the Arizona border, near the key people-smuggling waystation of Sasabe, armed men at a gas station stop vans full of migrants heading north, charging them $90 each and dictating when and where they can cross, migrants and local officials told the AP.

At times, the migrants are pooled and sent across in large numbers at one time of the day, clearing the route for a drug shipment a short time later. Smugglers also direct migrants away from successful drug routes in hopes of minimizing the manpower U.S. authorities assign to the area.

“The drug traffickers won’t allow migrants to enter because the area will ‘heat up’ and the U.S. Border Patrol will be on alert,” one local Mexican official said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “They want control so they can ‘cool off’ the area and go in with their cargo.”

While the Sinaloa cartel controls the Arizona border, its main rival, the Gulf cartel, has become involved in the people-smuggling business along the Texas border, according to Noe Ramirez, a Mexican deputy attorney general. Ramirez described the development recently as he announced the detention of five people who allegedly moved drugs and migrants into the U.S. for the Gulf cartel.

Federal police have seen the same trend.

“Drug smugglers are shifting toward people- and arms-smuggling,” said Patricio Patino, a top Mexican security official.

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