When Crossing the Border with a Backpack Full of Drugs Is Your Only Option to a Better Life Stephanie Leutert - Foreign Policy
go to original July 18, 2017

How a Coyote Smuggles Hundreds of Immigrants: Ramón is Mexican and he has worked over the last six years crossing immigrants across the U.S.-Mexico border. Here he shares how he does it, how he has to pay the cartels for each person he smuggles in and what the dangers of the journey are. (Univision Noticias)

On the Mexican side of the border, organized criminal groups control all the northbound smuggling (of humans and goods), charging a tax on every illicit movement into their territory. To pass through, migrants need to hire a smuggler, who then pays the required tax to that city’s dominant criminal group. There are no exceptions. Migrants looking to cross alone or smugglers trying to sneak someone across without paying the required dues are considered to be committing a serious underworld crime, punishable by death.

The brutally enforced business scheme is nothing new in the world of illicit migration, but steadily increasing U.S. border enforcement has directly influenced how it looks today. On the U.S. side, strategically placed walls, fences, surveillance technologies, and border patrol agents shut off the areas that are easiest to cross and push migrants into more desolate and dangerous zones. The results have been high body counts despite falling apprehensions — with over 80 bodies recovered from Arizona’s desert this year — and higher smuggling fees.

These pricier smuggling services reveal a lot about the economics of migrant smuggling markets. For decades, as border enforcement efforts have intensified, the crossing price has shifted upward from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Today, along the western part of the border, the smuggling price hovers around $4,000, with half demanded upfront and half upon arrival. For most people, scraping together this money on short notice would be tough, but for the poorest and least-connected migrants who lack U.S.-based family or friends, it’s downright impossible.

These migrants have only one way across the border: with a backpack.

This option — described as “backpacking” or “burro-ing,” — is well known among the most marginalized migrants. All they need to do is show up in specific border towns and say they want to cross with a backpack. At that point, they are assigned to a group, loaded down with a 50-pound backpack of marijuana, along with four gallons of water and food, and sent off on a guided eight- to 10-day trek into the desert. When they reach the predetermined place on the U.S. side, they drop the backpack, hopefully collect the promised $1,500 for their services, and head off into the United States.

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