Migrants become pawns of Mexico druglords

People-smuggling is only part of the cartels’ new efforts to diversify.

The Mexican border is providing a less reliable profit stream for drug smugglers, analysts and law enforcement officials say. The U.S. seized 20 percent more cocaine and 28 percent more marijuana along the border in the past six months, compared with the same period a year earlier. And last month, Mexican police made the world’s largest seizure of drug cash — $207 million neatly stacked inside a Mexico City mansion — allegedly for a methamphetamine factory that would have produced 3 million pills a day for the U.S. market.

The cartels now collect protection money from all manner of businesses, much like traditional U.S. mafia organizations. In many parts of Mexico, the cartels now dictate everything from who shines shoes on street corners to who is chosen as police chief.

President Felipe Calderon vowed two weeks ago to intensify his crackdown on the cartels in response to violence. Headless or tortured bodies turn up in public places nearly every day, many with notes threatening local authorities. On April 16 alone, some 20 bodies were discovered across Mexico, all believed to be victims of drug violence.

Death tied to migrant 'fees'
The border has become especially bloody, and some of the violence appears to be connected to people-smuggling. On Monday, police found the gagged and bullet-riddled bodies of two men near Sasabe. The wife of one of the victims, Enrique Sotelo Gonzalez, said he had complained of having to pay “fees” to armed men for the right to drive migrants to the border, according to state police.

Mexican officials say the violence is scaring would-be migrants.

In the 10 months since the arrival of National Guard troops, 271,195 people have been detained along the Arizona border, an 18 percent drop over the period a year ago, according to the Border Patrol.

“Now migrants are facing two sets of controls: the U.S. Border Patrol and criminals,” a Mexican immigration official said on condition of anonymity. “But the criminals are scaring them away because they return to their towns and tell people how bad things were for them.”

At the gas station in the town of Altar, drug traffickers collect their fees along the sandy, 60-mile road that migrants in vans and buses take to Sasabe before continuing north on foot, officials and migrants say.

Andrea Aguilar, a 41-year-old from southern Mexico, said she was stopped with 26 other migrants at the gas station, where the men demanded $45 from each migrant and another $45 each from their smuggler.

Her group was allowed to cross hours later, walking in the dark along sandy paths where the Border Patrol chased them down. She tried twice more by crawling under a metal fence and was sent back each time.

“After everything I lived through,” she said at a migrant shelter on the Mexican side, “I won’t risk my life again.”

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