People Smugglers Inc.

STEVE LISS FOR TIME
Illegal migrants try to traverse the Rio Grande into Texas

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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.