The Coyote poster: how the traffic of people between Mexico and the United States in the Valle del Río Grande works

La pistola que tiene el chico es de juguete. Está jugando con otros dos niños de Honduras en el pedestal de un águila azteca en Reynosa, una ciudad mexicana al sur del extremo de Texas. Los tres tienen puestos barbijos, como la mayoría de los migrantes centroamericanos reunidos allí, durmiendo a la intemperie en la Plaza de la República. Es el 14 de mayo de 2021 y los casos de Covid-19 son comunes entre las multitudes de deportados que son rechazados de los Estados Unidos en cantidades récord.

There were never so many undocumented migrants at the same time in the Valley of the Rio Grande.Many of Reynosa's squares became camps like this.It has between 50 and 100 tents, hosting four or five people each.Most are from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.Many also come from Mexico.The kiosk of the center of the square has been covered with so many canvases that looks like a yurt.People row to load cell phones with a source connected to a public lantern.There are long clothing lines hanging from trees.

In five days, a storm would hit this camp and transform the grass into mud.Today is a warm and humid day;The air is still, the typical climate of Reynosa, 75 kilometers towards the interior of the Gulf of Mexico.For the most part, the deportees did not choose to come to this city, which has one of the greatest homicide rates in the world.They were left here by the immigration authorities of the United States after their failed attempts to cross the border, in general in rural areas.

This square, one block from the international bridge that gives McAllen, Texas, is essentially a collection point, where migrants expect their next attempt to cross the United States.The agreements they made with the traffickers, known as coyotes or polleros, allow them several attempts.It is fair, considering that the majority paid between $ 7 and $ 15,000, according to their country of origin.It is a huge sum ($ 7,000 exceeds the average annual income in Honduras) and in general it is collected by relatives who are already in the United States, or get it selling their lands, or through other forms of payment including contract servitude.But the price promises not only to pass the Texas border, but a trip to Houston and, in most cases, includes house, food and transport.

"They grabbed us," says a man who comes down from the McAlen bridge with jeans and muddy shoes.He is with another five, all with mud to the knees, which have been rejected by the Patrol Border.But he smiles and lifts a thumb.“We are going to try again later.We are fighting for a better life. ”

The legacy of Spanish colonialism, the coups supported by the United States during the Cold War, the war on drugs and the expropriation of natural resources by multinational companies are among the factors that led to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador on the edge on the edgeof being failed states.Deforestation, deregulated fishing, pollution and, especially, soil erosion have complicated environmental conditions.People suffer from poverty and lack of opportunities.Those who can pay the traffickers' rates are considered lucky.It is a great investment and the price does not stop rising, as the border with the United States becomes increasingly difficult to penetrate.The dangers of the trip also intensified, since the main route converges with one of the toughest battlefields of the long posters wars in Mexico.

A couple of young people with camouflaged shorts turn visiting groups of migrants.The yellow vests distinguish them as coyotitos or traffickers' assistants: recaderos in the network of coyotes that operates from here to Miguel Alemán, 80 kilometers inward, a narco redoubt marked by 20 years of gang war that was the epicenter of mass migrationsof 2021.

In March, an Associated Press journalist who was in the river of the river on the American side in Rome, Texas, saw people crossing at a speed of 100 per hour.The photographers of the area captured a true fleet of inflatable boats and quarrels between coyotes and agents of the Border Patrol and the Texas Police, which in some cases tried to prick the boats with knives to prevent them from reusing them.

Soon I can talk to one of the most prolific coyotes, a 36 -year -old man who calls himself the commander and says to supervise much of humans in this region.Confirms what both sources from the United States government and university researchers already told me: that in the more than 300 kilometers of border from Miguel Alemán to the coast, the traffic of migrants is carried out under the tutelage of the Gulf poster, the Mexican mafia.

The Gulf poster, also known as CDG, the company or the hand, was founded at the time of the prohibition by the legendary alcohol trafficker Juan Nepomuceno Guerra.Case a century later, maintains a brutal monopoly of all forms of organized crime in the Valley of the Rio Grande, including humans.

"All coyotes are hand in hand," says Sylvia Cruz, a Reynosa independent journalist who showed me the place.

In March 2021, agents of the Border Patrol had 173,348 meetings with undocumented migrants on the southern border, according to Custom and Border Protection.That is a quintuplication with respect to March 2020 and more than double the amount of shocks that agents usually have in spring.Of the meetings of March, 60,839 took place in the Valley of the Rio Grande, more than three times the amount registered in the following region, of the river.The most common profile were Honduran families.The next category is a Mexican single man.Until April, an overwhelming amount of 64,496 unaccompanied minors crossed the border with the United States in 2021. Almost half did so in Valley, as the Texans tell this region of the State.

Including all sectors, from Texas to California, the Border Patrol found 687,854 migrants in the first five months of 2021. Surely some have been counted twice.A public health decree issued by the Center for the Control and Prevention of Diseases allows the Border Patrol to pour migrants without due process or penalty;In other words, there is no reason for migrants who have already traveled 1,500 kilometers or more do not make repeated attempts, which doubles clashes with agents at the border.But no one with whom I have spoken remembers another era in which there were so many people trying to enter at the same time.As estimated as the calculation is, the 514,901 meetings recorded by the Patrol Border in March, April and May indicate an influence on the scale of one million people this year.

Immigration is an eternally conflictive issue in the United States.Although never as much as during the mandate of Donald Trump, whose most draconian policies included the separation of migrant children from their families such as punishment or deterrence;the sanction of new restrictions on asylum orders;the cancellation of the "temporary protection statute" for Hondurans, Salvadorans and Nicaraguans;and the expansion of physical barriers on the border, the famous wall.

President Joe Biden disarmed some of Trump's policies and reduced the RAIDs of the Immigration and Customs Control Service, but maintained others, including an interpretation of the United States Title 42 law for the time of the COVID according to which the authorities canexpel immigrants "to avoid infection of diseases."The Democratic Party is divided between conservatives such as Henry Cuellar, from Laredo, Texas, who wants to "reinforce the laws", and reformists such as the mayor of San Antonio, Julián Castro, who wants to repeal the statute that makes the "illegal entries"A federal crime.

"This increase we are seeing began with the last administration, but it is our responsibility to deal with him in a human way," Biden said on March 24.He replied financial aid to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, and gave Vice President Kamala Harris the work of leading a diplomatic effort to divert migration.In a recent interview with Lester Holt, Harris stressed the need to treat the "deepest causes", but the only initiatives she mentioned were programs to expand access to vaccines, banking systems and technology.The message of her to the migrants was: "do not come", citing "violence and danger" on the road from Mexico.But it seems unlikely that his words are followed.It is true that no previous administration dealt successfully with the phenomenon of mass migration from Latin America at the time of climate change.If Biden has any new idea, he still did not communicate it.

In his words, Biden mentioned the coyotes and alluded to his practice of letting people die in the desert.People on both sides of migratory debate may agree that humans are bad.They are famous for cheating and deceiving their customers, especially underestimating the dangers of the trip.Women and minors under their custody are extremely vulnerable to rapes, and can be sold to be sexual slaves.Coyotes often contain, hit and do not give food to their "cargoes", and periodically cause terrible accidents in which large groups of people die, either by suffocation, drowning or other causes.

On March 2, 2021, near Mexicali, the SUV of a trafficker with 25 people was collided with a tractor, and 13 passengers died.Weeks later, eight people died after a trafficker launched himself to a persecution with Texan policemen who ended with an accident.These are only the most recent incidents in a long and tragic list.

The business of trafficking people through the border is absolutely controlled by organized crime, at least in the Rio Grande Valley."The posters are more involved than ever," says Jerry Robinette, a former special agent in charge of the South Texas Division of the National Security Department."The number of people who are crossing is an incentive for them."If a million migrants arrive in 2021, and each pay a minimum of $ 7,000 for traffic services, it is a black market of 7,000 million dollars.

The geographical and demographic changes in the migratory patterns also contributed to greater control of the poster on the coyotes.“In 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 - says Robinette - everyone crossed for Arizona,” and most were Mexican.The answer was the militarization of the border of the Sonora desert in Arizona, which began under the administration of Obama.But the migratory flows moved to the southeast, to the deepest peak of Texas, the closest point to Central America, where most migrants come from now.

This is not the desert border around El Paso and Ciudad Juarez that exists in the imagination of the north.It is the citrus region of Texas, a subtropical zone where grapes grow and always seem about to start rain.There are two main population centers: the binational city of Matamoros and Brownsville, which extends over the Delta where the river arrives at the Gulf;and the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission complex, on the other side of Reynosa.This portion of the border, with the Mexican State of Tamaulipas, is much more controlled by organized crime than any other point of the line between the United States and Mexico.

"The area is operated by the Gulf poster," says Guadalupe Correa Cabrera, a Mexican economist who works for the universities of George Mason and Texas, in Brownsville.She says it without turns: "They control the territory militarily."Robinette agrees: "On the northern border of Tamaulipas there is not much presence of the federal Mexican government."

The American State Department considers that Tamaulipas is as dangerous as Syria, Yemen or Afghanistan.Many people say "ta-ta-tamaulipas", imitating the sound of AK-47.The Internet is full of violent images recorded in Reynosa: shooting in the streets, flames, torture videos and executions, bodies hanging from bridges, pilas of cut heads.In a YouTube video seen almost seven million times, a gasping television journalist is on a bridge in the center of Reynosa in 2009, informing about a street battle between the CDG and the Mexican army;As the automatic weapon shooting intensifies, he bends down more and more until he ends up narrating the news lying in his stomach, the bullets flying near his head.In pirates of Mexican rappers dedicated to different members of the Gulf poster, the damn the damn.

More than a dozen international bridges connect both sides of the valley as if it were a scar. At every hour of every day of the year, it could be said that cocaine and heroin bricks are transported with the Dolphin logo of the CDG, hidden in secret compartments of cars and trucks. But narcotics are not the only source of income from the poster. In addition to stealing oil and gas from the Mexican government infrastructure at an industrial scale (an activity carried out Prostitution, they sell falsified luxury goods and perform piracy of all kinds, both the literal, maritime style, and related to intellectual property rights. As he likes to emphasize Correa, it is not so much a drug trafficking operation, but "an illicit business criminal oligopoly." For the Gulf poster, undocumented migrants are just another merchandise to traffic in the black market.

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But it would be too simplistic to think that the coyotes and the poster are the same.According to Correa's investigation, based on extensive interviews with migrants in asylums throughout Mexico, the human traffic market is "segmented."The first stretch of the clandestine trip is fixed by more or less independent groups."In WhatsApp and Facebook - he says - trips are advertised as if it were a tourist company."These traffickers, also known as polleros (a term of uncertain origin), do most of the preliminary work by moving customers throughout the vast Mexican territory, especially on bus, but also by train or on foot, which implies coimasto the police and the military along the way.

Upon arriving in Monterrey, the largest city in northern Mexico, the polleros fix so that customers pass the border alongside true coyotes, accompanied by a network of informants.Militarized as it is, with troops on the American side, the border is practically impossible to cross without professional help.There are numerous coyotes networks in Tamaulipas, but several sources tell me that the largest is in Miguel Alemán, the city on the other side of Rome, Texas.

"In Miguel Alemán," says Correa, "there is a huge network of humans connected to the poster.They are supposedly a poster cell. ”Noah Gea, a Reynosa journalist, agrees, and adds that there are many cells in the region, all under the command of the CDG."They work with a payment system to the poster," he says.They only traffic people. ”An investigation of Texas Tribune of 2016 also pointed out the existence of a “practically invisible network but with a lot of financing” of human traffickers connected to the poster in Miguel Alemán.

In the area of the Rio Grande near Rome there is an island covered with shrubs in the middle, surrounded by sand banks, low stones full of stones and a single deep channel.This geography transformed it into a popular crossing for smuggling from the origins of Texas.Now the Gulf poster controls it, but in the past it was in the hands of Los Zetas, a rival criminal militia based in Nuevo Laredo, a border city northwest of Reynosa.

Los Zetas, at first composed of deserters of the Mexican Special Forces - some, trained by the United States in Fort Bragg - dominated for years the Mexican under extreme violence, but their strength has been greatly reduced.They are now known as the Northwest poster, CDN, and have been displaced by the Gulf poster to Ciudad Mier, fifteen kilometers northwest of Miguel Alemán.The fight between the two was reduced in the last 10 years, but every so often rots and resurfaces, and is the main cause of homicides in Tamaulipas.As is obvious, migrants who must cross this area are usually among the victims.

On January 19, 2021, 19 people, especially Guatemalans, were found dead, their bodies burned, on a lost route near Camargo, town east of Miguel Alemán.The alleged perpetrators were 12 Mexican police who belonged to a SWAT -style unit, supported by the United States, from the State Police of Tamaulipas.They are known as Gopes: Special Operations Group.The reason for killing 19 defenseless people is unknown, but Gopes responds directly to the governor of Tamaulipas.Four of the last five men who held their position were formally accused of drug trafficking, money laundering or both.In May, an arrest warrant for corruption was issued in Mexico City against the governor, Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca, but he refused to resign.

The Tamaulipas police are famous for collaborating with organized crime.Ten years ago, the Mexican federal government simply disarmed the Municipal Police Force of Reynosa, after concluding that people would be better without it."Now we only have the protection of God," says Sylvia Cruz, the journalist who showed me the city.

I came to Reynosa with Enrique Lerma, a driver from the Azteca newspaper Valle, a Spanish news channel that transmits throughout the valley.In a short walk from the square, we visited the house of the migrant path of life, a shelter for migrants from Africa and Asia, as well as of Europe and the Caribbean.There are 200 people, especially from Ghana, Haiti, Cuba and Russia.

Although it is a humanitarian mission, without barbed wire or weapons, the shelter looks like a jail.There are high metal doors with small windows and bars, which close with a strong noise.All carry chins, which intensifies the sensation of a 21st century dystopia.There is a construction work to double the size of the property, and about twenty migrants work with hammers and shovels to build a concrete wall, with the heads covered in shirts under the sun and in the middle of the dust.When the construction is finished, the shelter can house 500 people.

"I am frustrated that there is no more help for these people," says Pastor Héctor Silva, the director of the shelter."Politicians only think of the campaign."He does not reveal where his funds come from, and says: "Many people wanted to donate their jewels."

Not far from there, in a neighborhood that used to be a red zone, under a dilapidated poster of the old Lipstick Hotel, there is a shelter called Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe migrant, controlled by the Church.A nun receives us at the door."We have guests from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua," she says, and she accompanies us to a patio."In general we have Garifunas," she adds, referring to people with Afro -Indigenous roots from Honduras."But not now".

They are the last hours of the afternoon, and around 15 people, men, women and children, are line to receive their dinner in the main hall."We have reached the maximum capacity, with one hundred people, by the pandemic," says Mother Catalina Carmona Librado, the Canosa director whose eyes look young and cheerful, but her face never see, since the blue facial mask is not taken out inNo time.All the nuns of the shelter, including her, council brought the COVID-19 at some point, she tells me.None died.

It leads us to know a 25 -year -old thin man named César who has just been released from a kidnapping.He is from the north of Honduras and fled from poverty, violence "and discrimination against people with my illness", which he does not specify, and only says: "People with my illness do not give work."The polleros helped him, along with his 10 -year -old sister, to cross Mexico."I read in an article that was dangerous, but they didn't mention anything specific," he says, and adds that he ignored the risk of kidnappings.

On May 3, on a bus between Monterrey and Miguel Alemán, the place from which they would cross, were intercepted by armed men, who took a group that included César to an abandoned house in a rural area, where they were separated byage and gender and locked them in rooms.The kidnappers were not aggressive and they behaved kindly all the time, he says, but they gave only one meal per day.After a week, they released him when a relative in Austin paid the rescue, whose figure does not specify.He arrived at this shelter two days ago.He is visibly scared, red eyes as if he were crying, and says he feels "a lot of anxiety" for his younger sister's safety, who is still kidnapped, waiting for the payment of the rescue.He still wants to cross the border."I want to make another attempt," he says."I can't go back to my country, poverty, persecution."

The first four months of 2021, almost 50,000 children crossed the border towards Texas without their parents, although in the church shelter we do not see any unaccompanied minor.Mother Carmona tells me that sometimes the shelter receives mothers who just sent her children alone."There was a woman who had sent her 16 -year -old son," she says.“Another sent a three girl.Another to three girls, two of which I know they had special needs, neurological problems. ”

In search of more children, we visit a specific shelter for unaccompanied minors funded by the Tamaulipas government in an old university building."We currently have 70 children," says the director, Ricardo Calderón Macías.He leads us to a place where between 80 and 100 people (children and women) sleep in Camastros on a basketball court.There is a very noisy fan.There are clothes drying in the stands, shoes everywhere, babies crying.But it is not as full as the square.Most of the place is empty.

"More than 400 people passed here," says Calderón, including adults.The number probably inflates, but in any case the figure is incredibly low.We visited the main shelters of Reynosa, the largest city in Tamaulipas, and counting the places full of deportees, we saw less than 1,000 people, at a time when the agents of the Border Patrol in the Valley register 2,000 meetings per day.

They are not here, I realize, because they already paid for their accommodation."The criminal element," says Mother Carmona, "well, they have their own houses" in the west rural areas, closer to Miguel Alemán.In the northern area of Tamaulipas, the Gulf poster maintains a network of abandoned ranches and houses, and controls the rural routes that lead to the border.The poster charges for safe access to this infrastructure."They do not provide the traffic service," says Correa, "but these houses operate."Mother Carmona says that a bishop tried to open a shelter for migrants in San Fernando, placing himself, without realizing, as a sign competitor."They threatened him," she says."You don't see it anymore."

It rains in the valley, in a spring that has been especially wet and cold.The urban ruin full of commercial chains of the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission complex extends between palm trees and Spanish posters that announce fast food, service stations and races in the US army.There are stores for sales and pawn houses, and a couple of Trump posters, a shockeante image in Hidalgo County, with 92 percent of Hispanics.

Everywhere there are signs that the valley has become the main corridor for illegal immigration.In a section of the border wall in Mission, we see numerous traces in the mud, between meat sales stalls.Lerma, who lived here all her life, never saw so many, or so much garbage on her floor.In the west direction in the Highway 83, next to a field of onions, we see three tractor wheels tied, a device used by coyotes to erase the footprints of large amounts of people.From the jewel, we began to see Texas state police with white and black SUVs located at the intersections, service stations and muddy parking."In general there are 15 units for the whole country," says David Kifuri, a family resident on both sides of the border who worked as a spokesman for the Prosecutor of the Starr County District."Now there are 200."

While we are going through Rio Grande City, we talk to Danny Villareal, owner of a property that gives the river in the mouth of the San Juan River in Mexico.The undocumented migration "is nothing new in this area," he says, but "the activity rose significantly."Shots from Miguel Alemán "at all times," he adds.“Most shootings are spontaneous and short.They killed someone, or sent a message.If it lasts more than 30 seconds, it is long.But I would hate exaggeration.“I don't want it to sound like the wild west.It is not.All communities have problems.Ours is not as bad as others. ”

In La Rosita, near Rome, we stopped walking along the terrain by the river.The hills are covered with Creosota and Mezquite, the ditches are full of sage, and there are lots of nopales and palmitos.It is a beautiful landscape despite the CBP control tower and garbage around.The worst rubble are diapers, old shoes and discarded clothes.There are also plastic bracelets, of which they usually give in recitals, carnivals and rodeos."You can see many more in the river," says a beard agent of the Border Patrol named Yasquez, sitting in a vehicle a few meters away.“When they cross they take them out.I don't know why, ”he says."Before they entered with them."

Together a handful of color bracelets.Most say delivery.Others say arrival.Some say Mexicans, supposedly to distinguish customers that are not from Central America.The meaning of others is more difficult to guess.They say metal, with the emblem of a red star, or gold, with the drawing of an elephant.

"The bracelets show that you paid the poster rate to cross the river, so that no one has passed," says an American thirty -y -peak citizen who works as Coyote and spoke with us on the phone.His posts on social networks show him with a black shirt and a gold watch, with dollar tickets in the skirt."‘ Delivery ’means those who are going to be delivered to the Border Patrol: the children," he explains.“‘ Arrival ’means that they go to Houston.Others may refer to the place where you cross, to danger, to which you paid. ”He cannot or does not mean what they mean "metal" or "gold."He says the matter is "delicate."

We arrived in Rome at 2 in the afternoon.This is a true Texan people, an Old Texas Hispano relic that never fully integrated into the Anglos that began to invade the territory there by 1800. They called it a passage of the mule, the original use of the passage in the river.When Texas achieved its independence in 1836, became famous as a traffic bulwark.During the ban they called them tequileros.In the 70s, Rome was central in marijuana traffic.It is also a drug sales focus;A week after our visit, the Texas State Police seized 16 firearms, including a .50 caliber rifle, and a thousand bullets.

The more you approach the international bridge, the more dilapidated Rome becomes.From an observation position of the center, Miguel Alemán is visible on the other side of the river.It seems like any other small border city, with low cement roofs between green trees and a handful of cell phone towers.But it is a true risk zone, even for the standards of northern Mexico, and recent changes at the top of the Gulf poster returned the situation even more uncertain."Now," says Lerma, "he who is in charge wants to keep under profile.There were three types, three leaders.One was the egg, another the bull and the third was a young guy from Hidalgo.The three were eliminated: one is in jail, two dead.That was in December.Since then, we don't know who the boss is. ”

Discolle elements of Los Zetas took advantage of this interregno to make incursions.The day before, at about 4 in the afternoon, Noah Gea, Reynosa's journalist, was close and saw several monsters.These vehicles, also known as "narco tanks" or "rhinos trucks", are mutant species of native mechanized megafauna of Iraq and Syria that arrived in northern Mexico.Mad Max's battle vehicles in general

They are built with tractor chassis, and equip them with ram and submachine guns.Gea saw several "caravans" of them "circulating" on the outskirts of Miguel Alemán."At six in the afternoon," he says, "the battle began."There was a series of shootings, with uncertain results, until the night."There is no group that has control," he warns us.“Los Zetas, CDN, is in Ciudad Mier.We can no longer go there.Miguel Alemán is the dividing line.Both groups have their own internal factions and disputes.There is no one in charge.After 4 or 5 in the afternoon, be careful. ”

Although it is already three, we decided to cross to the Mexican side after the editor of a small newspaper called El Tejano offers us to introduce ourselves to the chief of the Mafia Coyote from there.A condition for the interview is that we do not publish the real name of him, and we call it only the commander.Among other coyotes of the Valley, it is said that he is the mere-plotter, the head of all bosses."He was in the Federal Prison for Human Trafficking," says the editor of El Tejano, who published a video interview with him in 2019, in which he appears with a balaclava and used the same name.“Two years ago he took me by helicopter to Monterrey.He has a lot of money, ”she says.“He lived many years in the United States.He sold drugs, but migrant traffic is more lucrative.And he felt that he helped people. ”

With the idea of meeting him at the Virrey hotel, two blocks from the international bridge, we cross Miguel Alemán on foot.The bridge is concrete, double hand, and runs in parallel to an older bridge in disuse.Below the river flows on stone bases, but there are no migrants who cross it in broad daylight.Beyond a couple of national guard guards on the American side, there is no one.We put 25 cents each in a mill and enter Mexico without showing the passport to the few soldiers of the security post.

In Zapata Street we see buildings still damaged by shootings and fires of the worst narco battles of the last 10 years.We went through a point where, in 2019, the Zetas left a couple of heads beheaded in a refrigerator.There are an open businesses that sell clothes and food, and we cross two pairs of women and girls on the sidewalk.But the streets are empty.We arrived at the Municipal Square and we receive the strange image of Sun shining on empty banks on a beautiful Saturday afternoon.

Robinette told me that the US agencies working with the Federal Mexican government or try to infiltrate a town like Miguel Alemán due to the intensity of the poster surveillance apparatus, which is electronic and human."You can't put an undercover agent," she said.“No one is going to send an agent to such a environment.It is the enemy territory. ”

Of course, as soon as we cross the bridge a young man with long and dark hair with blond's stained tips, which looks like a troll doll.During the time we spend in Miguel Alemán, he will follow us 10 or 20 meters, filming with the phone in a blatant way, and without taking our eyes off the screen.We are also followed by a middle -aged man by bicycle, who stops in a corner of the square and observes us to take tourist photos in front of a colorful letters that Miguel Alemán says.He is the only person we see that he has an openly weapon.There is a third man who observes us from a car, I think.He has a shaved head and arm tattoos.

With these three types nearby, we walk the empty streets to the Virrey hotel that with five floors is the tallest building in the town.They tell us that the commander is staying on the last floor, from where he can observe the least deep part of the river.But he doesn't answer the phone when we call him.We stayed for a while, waiting for it to appear, but there is no answer.He doesn't answer the messages either.As the danger of 5 in the afternoon approaches, we decided to leave the town.

In Brownsville we received a call at 10 at night.He is the commander.At first the cell phone signal is low and we cannot understand what he says, something about Houston.He is angry with a television report he has just seen.On April 30, the Houston Police raided a refuge in Chessington Drive, where they found 100 people locked in rooms.Federal prosecutors accused five of his members for people traffic."I am angry because someone betrayed the location," he tells Lerma, and I listen to the speaker.“They say we didn't give them food or water.That is false, they lie. ”

As for its operation, "everything goes through Houston," he says."We take them from Reynosa to Valadeces, through Camargo, and to Los Angeles," he says, in reference to a small municipality east of the crossing of Rome."If there is a gate, a wall, or whatever, you have to jump it."Once on the other side, "we have contacts with migration," he says, I assume that in reference to the Border Patrol.He avoids the jewel corridor, where we saw a strong presence of DPS, and uses an alternative path that refuses to describe.

He denies that his group is part of the Gulf poster."We are independent," she says.“The poster has its business, and we ours.We only pay you to let us work, and do not get with us. ”He has to pay the poster between $ 300 and $ 400 for each migrant he crosses, he says.The price is lower than the 500 that I heard as the current rate of the poster per head, and I do not understand exactly how the between $ 7,000 and $ 15,000 that Central American migrants pay all over the trip, but from what the says theCommander and other sources, I imagine that the coyotes like him take between $ 1,000 and $ 3,000, and between 200 and 800 are for the poster."If they don't pay that price, obviously they are kidnapped," he says."And every day that passes the price goes up."

"There are laws here," he adds."The laws of those who control the city."When Lerma asks if she refers to the Gulf poster, she replies: "No comments."But she follows: “We all have a range.Everyone does their job.Each follows the rules.And if the rules are broken, you already know what can happen. ”

The war between the CDG and the Zetas "affects us a lot," he says."Because our territory goes from Monterrey to Ciudad Mier."If the Zetas intercept a load of migrants, they charge you $ 500 per head to return them, he says.“If we pay, they let them go.If not, they leave them there on the floor. ”

But neither the Zetas nor the Gulf poster have anything to do with the 19 killed by Camargo, he says.These people were theirs, traveling on his route, when the Gopes State Police stopped them, who requested a ransom of $ 20,000, which seemed excessive, refused to pay, and resulted in the massacre."The state shouldn't have done that," he says.“You don't treat innocent people like that.But that is what happens when you get into the State Police.They hit you, or worse. ”

He says that in general he prefers to move migrants in smaller groups.“The maximum I can enter is eight, seven, five.The large groups are delivered to the Patrol Border.These migrants seek asylum and do not give as many profits as those who pay to get to Houston, he says.“Many children arrive alone.Now we have a one -year -old boy to deliver to the Border Patrol, ”she says, and Lerma is speechless."He has written the location of her family [in the United States] in the diaper," she adds.The practice of giving small children to traffickers is so problematic for the chief of the coyotes as for Mother Carmona."It's horrible," she says, "sending your child only to the world of the border."

Vitupera against the Border Patrol with a true hatred."When they grab people they treat her as dogs," she says, and raises her voice."They bump them like dogs."She describes how border agents use horses to corner people and hit her for fun."Once a horse stepped on a person I had entered and died," she says.“They laughed as he died.They also use vehicles to run over people. ”The Border Patrol does the same with the boats, he says, “they don't care that people drown.I'm fed up".

It accuses the Border Patrol de Corruption."They are also involved with us," she says.“We have connections on the other side.People miss.Everyone has their price. ”

"The vast majority of CBP employees fulfill their tasks with honor," says Tom Gresbeck, regional spokesman for the United States Customs and Border Control Office."We do not tolerate corruption or abuse in our ranks."

It may be, but there are officers of the Border Patrol arrested almost every day.A recent analysis of a professor from San Diego State University named Davis Joncsics studied 156 cases and found that the majority "were activities related to organized crime", and that although the CBP agents with few stories had more tendency to linkWith drug -related misdeeds, those involved in corruption related to immigration tended to be more experienced officials.His techniques include false patent records, not controlling passports and allowing people to use counterfeit documents.In several cases the agents of the Border Patrol accompanied to traffickers of people or gave them advice by phone.In other cases, they led illegal immigrants in their own vehicles.

"I repeat you," says the commander, "everyone has their price."No infrastructure or security force can stop this operation, he says.“There is a wall or not, we will continue working.If it is not for the good ones, it is for the bad. ”The expression could also be translated by "you like it or not."

This article was originally published in Rolling Stone United States.