Remote Control: Burner Phones and Human Trafficking in the US-Mexico Borderlands Brian Anderson - Motherboard
go to original April 15, 2016

Comanche, a Sinaloa cartel boss, checks his phone at the border. (Motherboard)

One thousand, nine hundred and fifty-four miles of unforgiving terrain.

Mountains. Canyons. Desert. All blanketed in cholla, barrel cacti, other prickly flora, and increasingly reliable cell phone coverage. That’s why cheap, pay-as-you-go phones, known as burners, flood the US-Mexico borderlands, despite the inhospitality of the natural environment.

In the past, those attempting to cross the Mexican border were accompanied by a coyote, or foot guide. Coyotes would lead large groups of migrants across la línea to a pre-arranged site on the American side where migrants would be passed off to another guide. Many migrants do still cross this way, according to Comanche, a Sinaloa cartel boss who heads up a borderland smuggling cell in Nogales, Sonora.

But these days, a guide may just be a voice on the other end of the line.

More people crossing the border than ever carry burners, according to law enforcement, government officials, smugglers, and migrants on both sides of the border. Migrants aren’t as likely to carry smartphones. In most cases migrants already have their own phones on them as they attempt to cross. But it’s become common for polleros, or human traffickers, to push migrants, known as pollos (“chickens”), to purchase crossing packages that include burners explicitly to be used for communicating during the crossing and then to be ditched in the desert.

It’s unclear exactly how many migrants cross with phones. But at the very least, burners are now an assumed, even necessary part of the border-crossing industry.

Read the rest at Motherboard

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