Narco-Coyotaje: Study Examines the Overlap of Drug and Human Trafficking in Mexico Patrick Corcoran - InSight Crime
go to original December 22, 2016

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)

A recent study from a pair of academics specializing on border issues finds a wide degree of overlap between coyotes and drug traffickers along the US-Mexico border, with government policies helping to encourage the blurring of the lines between the two illicit activities.

The 2016 paper "On Narco-Coyotaje: Illicit Regimes and Their Impacts on the US-Mexico Border," by Howard Campbell and Jeremy Slack, probes the dynamics along the Mexican border between human traffickers, or coyotes, and their criminal cousins who traffic drugs.

Based largely on interviews with migrants in Tamaulipas, Sonora, and Baja California, the authors' basic finding is that where once coyotes and drug traffickers operated in separate spheres, today there is a great deal of collaborative overlap. According to Campbell and Slack, who teach at the University of Texas-El Paso, this evolution essentially coincides with the growth of "a criminal hierarchy prioritizing the most powerful and profitable clandestine activity... drug trafficking".

But while drug traffickers have exerted increased authority over coyotes in recent years, the circumstances of this hierarchy vary greatly from one part of the country to the other. In Tamaulipas, for instance, the coyotes essentially worked at the pleasure of the dominant local groups - either the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, depending on the city. In practice, this means the coyotes would make protection payments and would operate according to a detailed set of rules established by the drug gangs about how coyotes must operate. Migrants would often be obligated to provide occasional monitoring services for shipments of drugs. Migrants and coyotes who broke with the dictates would be punished, often beaten and kidnapped.

In other parts of the country, such as the Sonora Desert, dominant local drug gangs (typically affiliated with the Sinaloa Cartel) exercise much less immediate control. The authors describe local gangs as protecting human trafficking markets from stick-up artists targeting cash-rich migrants, occasionally using migrant groups to tote drug stashes across the border, and preventing them from walking where they don't want to draw the attention of the US Border Patrol. More recently, a local gang set up a checkpoint on the road from Altar, Sonora, to the border, in which migrants were charged a fee for passage.

Read the rest at InSight Crime

InSight Crime is a foundation dedicated to the study of the principal threat to national and citizen security in Latin America and the Caribbean: organized crime. We seek to deepen and inform the debate about organized crime in the Americas by providing the general public with regular reporting, analysis and investigation on the subject and on state efforts to combat it.

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!