People Smugglers Inc.

By Tim Padgett/Minatitlan

When detectives came calling this summer at the 25-acre ranch of Lucio Avianeda, outside Minatitlan in southern Mexico, their mission was to arrest Avianeda and his alleged partner in crime, Constantino (Coty) Andrade. But before the lawmen got to the ranch house, they heard voices coming from the stables. Inside they found a dozen undocumented Central American migrants who had been locked up for three days with no food or water. Some lay unconscious in the stifling heat while horses munched hay a few feet away. The cops were not completely shocked: Avianeda and Andrade are reputed people smugglers. Police say the two recently gained trafficking control over a large swath of Mexico's southern isthmus--an unavoidable corridor in the perilous odyssey from Central America to the U.S. that hundreds of thousands of desperately poor migrants make each year.

But as the detectives headed to the house to make arrests, something frighteningly unusual happened. Instead of scattering like the desert animals that migrant smugglers are named for--coyotes--henchmen working for Avianeda and Andrade fired at the cops with automatic weapons. "We've never faced that kind of resistance from coyotes," says the Minatitlan detective commander, Simitrio Rodriguez. "They're usually not even armed." None of the police were hurt. When the gunfight was over, Avianeda, 39, and four others were under arrest. Andrade, 28, had fled, and is still at large.

U.S. and Mexican authorities fear that incidents like the shootout at Minatitlan may also signal the start of a new wave of violence along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border. The U.S. believes organized smuggling rings are responsible for a dramatic increase in illegal traffic along the border--and in the unprecedented numbers of migrants dying in their attempts to get in. This year more than 250 migrants have perished along both sides of the border, including at least 100 this summer, when crossings are the most dangerous because of the desert heat. (In Arizona, 50 migrants died in July alone.) Immigration experts expect 2003's migrant death toll to surpass last year's total of 490, making this the deadliest 12 months for border crossings on record.

A group of Republican Representatives are pushing the Bush Administration to take action. In response to the rising death rate and the growing power of the coyote Mafias, Arizona Senator John McCain and a host of legislators from border states like Texas last month introduced bills that could grant permanent residency to some workers already in the U.S. and allow millions of other Mexican and perhaps Central American migrants legal but temporary "guest worker" entry into the U.S. By granting more migrants safe passage, advocates say, the reforms would reduce demand for the coyote Mafias, help stanch the tide of migrant deaths and allow U.S. authorities to spend more time securing the border against potential terrorists. The bill's backers are using Congress's August recess to lobby the White House hard to sign on to the proposed legislation. "If we create a legal mechanism for people who just want to come work and then go home," says Arizona Representative Jeff Flake, "we can focus our border interdiction on people who do want to do us real harm."

In the past, migrant-smuggling rings tended to be obscure, amateurish mom-and-pop organizations. But today they are assuming "all the indicia of more corporate, organized crime," says Michael Shelby, the U.S. attorney in Houston who is prosecuting 14 alleged coyotes in the case of 19 illegal immigrants found dead in a tractor trailer in May in Victoria, Texas. Aspiring coyote kingpins like Avianeda and Andrade employ a vast network of organized smuggling cells that Rodriguez fears "may be headed to where [Mexico's] drug cartels are today." U.S. authorities also believe that some kingpins may be forging links with potential Middle East terrorists attempting to slip into the U.S. from Mexico. "It's not unusual anymore to find a wandering Egyptian in Marfa, Texas," says Jim Chaparro, former head of the U.S. federal anti-smuggling task force and a special agent for the Homeland Security Department's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In one recent case, U.S. law-enforcement authorities busted a Mexican of Lebanese descent for smuggling migrants from the Middle East into the U.S. through his Tijuana base. Chaparro says the smuggler was "working with well-established [coyote] organizations."

Such groups profit from restrictive immigration laws. In recent years, especially after 9/11, the U.S. has tried to tighten its border with Mexico, even as economic conditions have worsened for workers in Latin America, who usually earn in a day what they could make in half an hour in the U.S. The twin pressures have created a booming business for human-smuggling professionals in Mexico and the U.S. Their industry grosses more than $5 billion a year, compared with about $20 billion for Mexico's drug cartels, according to immigration experts like University of Pennsylvania sociologist Douglas Massey. In many instances, smugglers can command more than $1,500 a head, three times the rate of a decade ago.

The new migrant-moving outfits operate with drug-cartel savvy. U.S. officials say one ring recently duped border guards by dressing up campesino migrants as border factory executives and having them drive over in Mercedes-Benz cars. The smugglers rely on a complex network that includes chains of housing and transport that extend from Guatemala through Mexico and well into the U.S.; sophisticated radio communications; payoffs for corrupt cops, both U.S. and Mexican; and as Rodriguez's detectives discovered, raw armed violence. Narco-trafficking veterans are getting into the act, often making migrants carry drugs.

With their emphasis on volume (the Avianeda-Andrade ring, say police, can smuggle as many as 500 migrants on a good day), the smuggling lords have helped increase the number of indocumentados entering the U.S. More than 3.5 million made it last year, compared with about 2.5 million a year for most of the '90s, according to Massey's estimates. The larger numbers mean that when things go wrong, more migrants are left to die on Texas highways and in Arizona deserts. Gonzalo, 19, a Guatemalan, barely escaped that destiny. "Last year I paid a coyote organization $2,000, and that's what finally got me into Arizona," he says as he sits in a detention pen near Minatitlan, facing deportation back to his country. "But then they just left me in the desert. I had to be saved by U.S. immigration officials, who deported me." What's more, violence between rival smuggling cells is on the rise: three coyotes were killed in an Arizona parking lot in a recent clash.

Coty Andrade exemplifies the new coyote ambition. Raised in a farming family near Minatitlan, he tried drug trafficking as a teen, according to Mexican investigators. He crossed into the U.S. as an undocumented migrant in the '90s, then worked for minimum wage in Chicago restaurants and North Carolina poultry-processing plants. In 2000, investigators say, he returned home to join his father and brother as a smuggler. But he had bigger plans than his kin. He had learned in his brief narco days how to intimidate competition, says Rodriguez, who adds that Andrade has an "impulsive, psychotic and violent profile." Avianeda and Andrade are charged with the murders of three rivals. Avianeda has pleaded not guilty to the smuggling and homicide charges.

With a more open field, says Rodriguez, Avianeda and Andrade were able to build what local police call the Uxpanapa organization, named for an isthmus mountain valley in Mexico. The outfit specializes in ushering illegal Central American migrants through Mexico. In a few short years, say investigators, the pair earned enough to fund not only a gun arsenal but also kingpin lifestyles that included Avianeda's ranch and the slick cowboy clothes and motorcycles Andrade loves. Andrade, say police, likes to remind associates that because the poor Central Americans he smuggles are nacos, or hillbillies, he has to flaunt his kingpin trappings to "show them I'm the Man."

Many Central American migrants seek out groups like the Uxpanapa to get a measure of protection inside what they call "the corridor of death," the forbidding territory just north of the Mexico-Guatemala border. There, a vicious army of Central American gangbangers called the Mara Salvatrucha are known for assaulting, robbing and raping passing migrants. From there, Uxpanapa clients are often loaded onto freight trains for a two-day journey to Veracruz, Mexico. Hundreds of migrants can be pressed into empty cargo cars, especially when railroad security are paid to look the other way. Nearer the U.S. border, they are usually handed off to partner cells that promise to get them deep into America, beyond U.S. immigration authorities, who now have checkpoints well north of the border.

Rodriguez says he is certain that some of the migrants who died in the Victoria case, the worst smuggling tragedy in U.S. history, were ferried to the border by the Avianeda-Andrade ring. Federal prosecutors have charged Karla Chavez, 25, a Honduran, with being the "general" responsible for cramming more than 70 illegal migrants into the trailer. She pleaded not guilty.

Arrests of U.S.-Mexico border smugglers are up some 40% this year, but prosecutors concede they are still looking for the big bosses. With this in mind, U.S. and Mexican officials have begun applying anti-racketeering laws to coyotes, and the Mexican Congress is expected to pass more draconian laws this year against people smuggling. In a sign that the courts may be getting tougher, a U.S. federal judge recently sentenced convicted coyote kingpin Ruben Patrick Valdes to an unprecedented 27 years in prison.

U.S. legislators like McCain and Flake hope to see their guest-worker bills pass Congress and, this fall, win President Bush's approval. But the grim reality of the smuggling business is that some migrants won't survive that long. Summer, the deadliest season for border crossings, isn't over yet. --With reporting by Hilary Hylton/Austin and Dolly Mascarenas/Mexico City

With reporting by Hilary Hylton/Austin and Dolly Mascarenas/Mexico City