Smugglers of Immigrants Fill Growing Demand

Public enemy No. 1 in the eyes of the Border Patrol. Crafty, nocturnal, predatory, a lifeline to the desperate, a smuggler of illegal immigrants. Coyote.

Two bloody incidents in the span of a week--the videotaped beating of two suspected illegal immigrants Monday in South El Monte and the deaths of seven suspected illegal immigrants Saturday morning near Temecula--have thrust the illicit but thriving business of immigrant smuggling into the public spotlight.

In each case the smuggler was willing to risk his life and that of his clients to evade capture. And in neither case has the smuggler been identified.

The videotape that caught Riverside County sheriff’s deputies beating two immigrants shows the driver--the presumed smuggler--fleeing on foot and escaping.

Officials Fight Back

In Saturday’s grisly scene, where a stolen truck crammed with illegal immigrants flipped into a wooded gully, investigators have yet to determine whether the smuggler was one of the seven dead or the 18 who survived. A code of silence among immigrants may make it impossible to determine who was the coyote.

“Smugglers are public enemy No. 1,” Johnny Williams, chief of the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector, said after the accident.

In the world of immigrant smuggling, Tijuana is the premier staging area, and it is here that the smugglers, the coyotes, often begin their perilous and sometimes deadly journey northward.

As with most facts of life on the border, the world of the coyote is ambiguous and elusive, a complex network of working-class grifters and high-living organized crime members that no single, villainous image can adequately reflect.

“There’s a whole subculture that orchestrates illegal entry into this country,” said Scott Marvin, a U.S. Border Patrol agent who guided a reporter last week through the craggy canyons and fetid gulches that have served as smuggling routes for more than a century. “It’s much like a full-service travel agency, all depending on how much you’re willing to spend.”

U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno has likened the smugglers of illegal immigrants to the slave traders of old, heartless profiteers trafficking in human misery. Alan Bersin, U.S. attorney for San Diego and Imperial counties, has dramatically stepped up the numbers of smugglers being prosecuted, using new prosecutorial methods and invoking new laws calling for longer prison sentences.

“I’m confident that we will be able to send a message to the smugglers,” Bersin said. “Just as they permit no free rides to the migrants, we are no longer going to permit free rides for them in terms of prosecuting their unlawful trades. The prices have gone up for the migrants, and they’re about to go up for smugglers.”

The spectrum of coyotes is immense, from lowly talones who fish for customers as they arrive from cross-country odysseys at the Tijuana bus terminal to sophisticated rings that specialize in non-Mexican immigrants.

The coyote may be a teenage boy charging $5 for the right to crawl through a hole he has burrowed under the steel-plate fence that forms the U.S.-Mexico border. He may be a mountain guide who accompanies his clients on a treacherous, nighttime hike through the wilderness of eastern San Diego County. He may be a wildcat taxi driver, waiting to pick up immigrants who have managed to make it on their own to the fast-food restaurants that line San Ysidro Boulevard. Or he may be a streetwise peddler with ties to them all, using his connections to hawk a menu of illicit services--$50 to jump the fence, $300 to rent false documents, up to $1,000 for guaranteed delivery in Los Angeles.

“Coyotes do provide a service, sometimes a very dangerous one, but it’s a business that flourishes because there’s a need,” said Julio Madrigal, chairman of the Psychology and Sociology Department at Texas A&M; International University in Laredo. “As long as there’s a demand, the coyote will be there to fill it.”

In the fleabag hotels and honky-tonk luncheonettes of Tijuana’s Avenida Coahuila, where smugglers feed and house their human cargo before making the trek north, the question is not whether coyotes will continue their work, but how safely they can operate.

Guadalupe Colon, a swashbuckling hustler with a penchant for tropical-themed shirts, was quick to denounce the Riverside Sheriff’s deputies after viewing the video of the beating, calling them “sons of bitches” for hitting a woman. But the 31-year-old Colon, who described himself as a retired smuggler, was just as critical of the driver, whose high-speed maneuvers apparently provoked the officers’ wrath.

Endangering the client, as Colon sees it, is simply bad for business.

“We’re here to provide a service, to protect our countrymen, not to abuse them,” said Colon, who said he still refers would-be customers to others within the flourishing trans-border trade. “As in all businesses, of course, there’s good ones and bad ones. In this case, I think they should punish the cops--and the coyote.”

Smuggling Methods

It is difficult to gauge how many coyotes perform their function conscientiously, at least to the extent that one believes honor exists within the context of an illegal enterprise. Victor Clark Alfaro, a Tijuana anthropologist and prominent human rights activist, contends that a sizable majority take pride in their work, whether by virtue of fraternal spirit or capitalist acumen.

“I’m not defending what they do--because it is illegal--but I also think we should look at the reality,” said Clark, who regularly interviews coyotes. “Thanks to them, many Mexicans have crossed safely into the United States. Some are really quite famous for providing a secure passage.”

But even Clark concedes, as U.S. border authorities argue, that many coyotes are scurrilous thugs and rip-off artists. There is no shortage of horror stories about beatings and sexual assaults, robberies and kidnappings, many of which end tragically for the immigrants, who have little choice but to follow blindly.

“A lot of these guys try to rationalize their smuggling, saying things like, ‘I’m just doing it for my people,’ ” said Bill O’Brien, a U.S. Border Patrol investigator in San Ysidro. “But if they really felt that way, they wouldn’t treat them the way they do.”

Coyotes have crammed their clients--referred to as pollos, or chickens--in car trunks and engine compartments, under piles of dirt and inside portable toilets. They have left them to die in sealed boxcars in Texas, on the desert floor in Arizona and in the rugged mountains of Southern California.

They have held them for ransom, packed by the dozens, in squalid “safe houses.” On Thursday, 87 suspected illegal immigrants were found inside a tiny house in east San Diego, the doors and windows boarded and nailed to prevent their escape before they paid their coyotes. Smugglers have sold debtors into prostitution and rented them to sweat shops.

Despite the well-documented brutality and treachery of some smugglers, illegal immigrants have become more dependent on them and more vulnerable in recent years as the Immigration & Naturalization Service and Border Patrol have strengthened efforts to seal the border and federal prosecutors have increased prosecutions.

With a beefed-up and better-equipped Border Patrol, additional fencing and stadium-style lighting in some areas near the San Ysidro border crossing, many immigrants are forced to resort to nighttime treks through the mountainous stretches of eastern San Diego before being picked up by vans. Or they use the winding roads around the Interstate 15 checkpoint, as the truck Saturday morning was doing when spotted by the Border Patrol.

Officials say the days are gone when immigrants need only wait for nightfall to sprint across the border within a few miles of Interstate 5. Now guides are needed, which increases both the cost and the danger of sneaking into the United States.

To Bersin, who is Reno’s representative on all border matters, the war on smugglers is part of an overall strategy of tougher prosecutions of illegal immigrants who commit felonies and of illegal immigrants with criminal records who try to reenter the U.S.

In 1995, 74 smugglers were convicted in San Diego, the busiest federal court in the country when it comes to smuggling cases. In 1996, Bersin hopes, the figure will be more like 400. Smugglers’ property is being seized, and those who have resident alien status are deported after serving their sentences.

For years, it had been the policy of the U.S. attorney’s office to allow smugglers the same deal offered to most illegal immigrants when apprehended: the chance to voluntarily return to Mexico.

Now smugglers are hit with felony prosecutions. But prosecutions are often hampered by lack of evidence and a code of silence by immigrants not to identify their smuggler if apprehended, a code often enforced by fear of retribution from the smuggler.

To get around this code of silence, the government has begun a new record-keeping system, backed up by a new fingerprinting method. A list is kept of immigrants who are suspected of being smugglers and are targeted for prosecution.

Once they are apprehended a certain number of times attempting to cross at the same spot or using the same methods, the suspects are not offered the chance to return voluntarily to Mexico.

Instead, the immigrants are deported, a criminal proceeding. Thus if they are caught again, they can be charged with a felony, which can lead to a maximum two-year prison sentence.

New Federal Weapon

There is also another tool prosecutors are beginning to use: a 1994 federal law that allows smugglers to receive additional prison time in cases where immigrants have been killed, injured or put in danger. In extreme cases, the law calls for the death penalty.

Since danger--such as trekking through rugged terrain at night or being stuffed into vans--is an integral part of the smuggling process, the 1994 law is thought by prosecutors to be an excellent tool to put smugglers out of business.

Because of its newness, however, it has not been tested in the federal appeals process, so its durability is unclear.

On the other side of the political spectrum from the Border Patrol, marchers protesting at the Civic Center on Saturday blamed last week’s two high profile incidents not on coyotes, but on an anti-immigrant attitude in America.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) said that as long as California’s economy is built on farm labor, people will “leave their homelands and risk their lives to work for little pay.”

Although the common image of the smuggler is that of the lone operator, officials say that smuggler rings are often expansive and complex and that drug smuggling and immigrant smuggling are often done by the same groups.

An anti-smuggling task force assembled by the INS is targeting large-scale rings. Last month, a ring was broken that allegedly took illegal immigrants from Mexico City to points in Texas, including Houston and McAllen.

“Let’s be real,” said K.C. McAlpin, deputy director of the Washington-based Federation for American Immigration Reform. “These smugglers are criminals. They’re the bad guys in all this.”

From the immigrants’ perspective, however, there is great ambivalence about the role of the coyote, a person whom they both fear and trust.

Last summer, when Border Patrol agents in South Texas made a series of railroad raids, pulling dozens of dehydrated migrants from the sweltering heat of a sealed boxcar, none of the smuggled passengers seemed relieved. “To be honest, none of them even thanked us,” said Ismael Herrera, a Border Patrol supervisor in Harlingen. “I had to tell them, ‘Hey, you could have died.’ ”

Jim Pilkington, Border Patrol agent in San Diego, said it is a rare Border Patrol agent who has not discovered immigrants near death from carbon monoxide after being stuffed inside a car trunk or from hypothermia after being abandoned in the mountains for being too slow to catch up.

Human rights activists see those kind of tales as proof not of the coyotes’ ruthlessness but of the immigrants’ fortitude. “I think it speaks to their great courage and heroism,” said Roberto Lovato, executive director of the Central American Resource Center in Los Angeles. “People don’t risk their lives like that to come here and be on welfare.”

But it also speaks to the market forces that drive the coyote trade, filling Avenida Coahuila with smugglers in search of a niche in the illicit economy that the would-be immigrants have spawned. Although some coyotes have exploited the situation, says Guadalupe Colon, he wonders what price the migrants would pay if left on their own.

“Without us,” he asked, “how many more of them would die?”

Times researcher Lianne Hart and staff writers Jodi Wilgoren and Eric Slater contributed to this story.