Mexico Under Siege

CARTELS SNATCH COYOTE TRADE

As They Expand Their Enterprise From Drugs to Human Smuggling, a
Bleak Situation Is Worsening, Experts Say.

Mexican drug cartels and their vast network of associates have
branched out from their traditional business of narcotics trafficking
and are now playing a central role in the multibillion-dollar-a-year
business of illegal immigrant smuggling, U.S. law enforcement
officials and other experts say.

The business of smuggling humans across the Mexican border has always
been brisk, with many thousands coming across every year.

But smugglers affiliated with the drug cartels have taken the
enterprise to a new level -- and made it more violent -- by
commandeering much of the operation from independent coyotes,
according to these officials and recent congressional testimonies.

U.S. efforts to stop the cartels have been stymied by a shortage of
funds and the failure of federal law enforcement agencies to
collaborate effectively with one another, their local and state
counterparts and the Mexican government, officials say.

U.S. authorities have long focused their efforts on the cartels'
trafficking of cocaine, marijuana, heroin and methamphetamines, which
has left a trail of violence and corruption.

Many of those officials now say that the toll from smuggling illegal
immigrants is often far worse.

The cartels often further exploit the illegal immigrants by forcing
them into economic bondage or prostitution, U.S. officials say. In
recent years, illegal immigrants have been forced to pay even more
exorbitant fees for being smuggled into the U.S. by the cartel's
well-coordinated networks of transportation, communications,
logistics and financial operatives, according to officials.

Many more illegal immigrants are raped, killed or physically and
emotionally scarred along the way, authorities say. Organized
smuggling groups are stealing entire safe houses from rivals and
trucks full of "chickens" -- their term for their human cargo -- to
resell them or exploit them further, according to these officials and
documents.

Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) said greed and opportunity had
prompted the cartels to move into illegal immigrant smuggling.

"Drugs are only sold once," Sanchez, the chairwoman of the House
Homeland Security border subcommittee, said in an interview. "But
people can be sold over and over. And they use these people over and
over until they are too broken to be used anymore."

The cartels began moving into human smuggling in the late 1990s,
initially by taxing the coyotes as they led bands of a few dozen
people across cartel-controlled turf near the border.

After U.S. officials stepped up border enforcement after the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks, the price of passage increased and the cartels got
more directly involved, using the routes they have long used for
smuggling drugs north and cash and weapons south, authorities said.

Sometimes they loaded up their human cargo with backpacks full of
marijuana. In many cases, they smuggled illegal immigrants between
the two marijuana-growing seasons, authorities said.

Kumar Kibble, deputy director of the Department of Homeland
Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement's office of
operations, said the cartels made money by taxing coyotes and
engaging in the business themselves.

"Diversification has served them well," Kibble said.

Unlike the drug-trafficking problem, the cartels' involvement in
human smuggling has received scant attention in Washington.

That is the case even as the Obama administration and Congress
increasingly focus their attention on Mexico, fearing that its
government is losing ground in a battle against the cartels that has
resulted in the deaths of more than 7,000 people since the beginning of 2008.

At one of many congressional hearings on the subject last week, Sen.
Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) unveiled a chart that he said described
the cartels' profit centers: drugs, weapons and money laundering.

"I would add one thing, senator," said Arizona Atty. Gen. Terry
Goddard, who then described to Durbin his concerns about the cartels'
movement into illegal immigrant smuggling. "It is really a four-part
trade, and it has caused crime throughout the United States."

Arizona has become the gateway not only for drugs, but also illegal
immigrants. Fights over the valuable commodity have triggered a spate
of shootings, kidnappings and killings, Goddard and one of his chief
deputies said in interviews.

In Arizona, the cartels grossed an estimated $2 billion last year on
smuggling humans, Goddard said.

Senior officials from various federal law enforcement agencies
confirmed that they were extremely concerned about the cartels' human
smuggling network.

In recent years, the U.S. government has taken significant steps to
go after illegal immigrant smugglers on a global scale, setting up
task forces, launching public awareness campaigns and creating a
Human Smuggling and Trafficking Center to fuse intelligence from
various agencies.

But at the southern border, the effort has stumbled, in part because
Homeland Security and various Justice Department agencies have
overlapping responsibilities and are engaging in turf battles to keep
them, Goddard and numerous other federal and state officials said.

The vast majority of ICE agents cannot make drug arrests, for
instance, even though the same smugglers are often moving illegal immigrants.

The reason: The Drug Enforcement Administration has not authorized
the required "cross-designation" authority for them, according to
Kibble and others. A top DEA official said that was partly to prevent
ICE agents from unwittingly compromising ongoing DEA drug
investigations and informants working the cartels.

Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
focus almost exclusively on cartel efforts to smuggle large
quantities of American-made weapons into Mexico.

"The only way we're going to be successful is to truly mount a
comprehensive attack upon the cartels. They're doing a comprehensive
attack on us through all four of these different criminal
activities," Goddard told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee.

"I'm afraid in this country we tend to segregate by specialty the
various areas that we are going to prosecute. And our experience on
the border is we can't do that. We've got to cross the jurisdictional
lines or we're going to fail."

Kibble agreed, saying that the cartels' diversification will require
federal agencies to work together. "It means we need more teamwork so
things don't slip through the cracks."

He added: "We are very focused on it and applying law enforcement
pressure to all aspects of the cartels' activities."

Asked for comment, Justice Department officials referred calls to
Homeland Security.

But authorities are also hampered by budget shortcomings and other obstacles.

Even though ICE has primary responsibility over illegal immigrant
smuggling, it has only 100 agents dedicated to the task, Kibble said.

There is no line item in ICE's budget for human smuggling, so no one
knows how much money is being spent on it, he told Sanchez's border
subcommittee, before acknowledging that the agency needs more
resources to fight the problem.

There are also not enough resources for providing medical treatment
and protection for those illegal immigrants who are caught, so many
of them are not available to testify, said Anastasia Brown, the
director of refugee programs for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

As a result, there have been relatively few prosecutions and convictions.

In fiscal 2008, ICE initiated 432 human smuggling investigations,
including 262 cases of alleged sexual exploitation and 170 cases of
suspected labor exploitation.

Those efforts resulted in 189 arrests, 126 indictments and 126
convictions related to human smuggling, according to Homeland
Security documents provided to Congress.

Cameron H. Holmes, an assistant Arizona attorney general at the front
lines of the fight against cross-border human smuggling, agreed that
federal authorities were trying to collaborate better.

"Are they working together enough? Absolutely not. Are they being
successful? Look around," Holmes said, before describing details of
illegal immigrant smuggling cases in which people were killed or
enslaved for years.

"We have a multibillion criminal industry that has grown up in the
last 10 years and it all involves violations of federal law. I would
not call that a success."