Desperate Parents Keep Child Smuggling Alive

After breaking what they described as the largest child-smuggling ring investigators had ever encountered, federal authorities face two challenges.

One is that the ring, which reportedly smuggled hundreds--perhaps thousands--of children into the United States from Central America, was only one of many regularly used by immigrants.

The second challenge is that many desperate immigrants, legal and otherwise, have grown dependent on these networks to reunite their families, paying an average of $5,000 per child.

“It’s as easy as going to a travel agent,” said Tony Cisneros, 25, of El Salvador. “Within five days, you can get a trip for your child if you have the money.”

As they announced Monday the end of the decade-old ring, Immigration and Naturalization Service officials tried to emphasize the danger that parents face in employing smugglers.

“We understand this is an emotional situation, and that parents will do anything to be reunited with their children,” said Hipolito Acosta, who directed “Operation White Fields” as head of the INS’ field office in Mexico City. “But they need to understand ... they are literally turning over the lives of their children to smugglers who don’t really care about anything but the money.”

Federal authorities said the INS, in cooperation with authorities in Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala, had arrested a dozen people on suspicion of operating a child-smuggling ring they said had started as early as 1990.

The smugglers moved as many as 100 children a month on perilous journeys from villages in El Salvador to suburban neighborhoods in Southern California. Careful to avoid detection, they would take as long as a month on trips that could be made by bus or car in as little as three days. They led children as young as 18 months from bus stations to dingy hotels and through desert and mountain terrains.

Though U.S. authorities have not substantiated allegations that some children were sexually assaulted, they said there was no doubting the peril.

One child who was transported by the ring, 11-year-old Sandy Lilibeth Chavez, described Tuesday how she slept on floors in different houses and was given only crackers and juice to eat. Her four-day journey from El Salvador to Los Angeles ended prematurely in January when Mexican authorities stopped her and five other smuggled children in Tijuana.

Sandy said she had secretly saved the $300 her father in L.A. had sent her each month, organizing her trip north without telling him. “I was dreaming of going to school with my brother and seeing my father,” said Sandy, whose mother disappeared nine years ago. “It didn’t bother me how I was treated on the trip. I just wanted to be in the United States.”

Sandy’s father, a cake decorator and nighttime janitor, said he is ashamed of his daughter’s treatment. “She said she was treated very badly,” said Juan Chavez, who said his work permit does not allow him to leave and re-enter the United States. The girl was returned to El Salvador.

Monday’s announcement that 12 alleged leaders of the smuggling ring had been arrested made front-page news throughout Central America, where immigration to the United States has long been a burning issue.

Jesus Aguilar, the director of Carecen, an El Salvadoran nonprofit organization devoted to immigration issues, said the arrests would do little to stem the flow of children rejoining their parents in the United States.

“It’s logical, human and normal for parents to want their children to be at their side,” Aguilar said. “In criminal terms,” breaking the ring was “an important blow to the process of identifying child traffickers. But in terms of combating the roots of the problems, it’s severely lacking. It’s not going to stop the problem. It’s only going to make it more hidden and more expensive.”

Aguilar said his group has been pushing the Salvadoran government to negotiate special U.S. immigration agreements for children separated from families that are in the United States and attempting to legalize their status here.

Immigration officials from the United States and other nations insisted that despite the presence of other smuggling rings, Monday’s announcement represented a breakthrough.

“This one has been the biggest [case] so far,” said Miguel Peralta of the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles. “We hope it will lead to other investigations to eradicate this problem.”

The lucrative nature of smuggling was underscored earlier this year when authorities uncovered the huge ring: One of the traffickers allegedly threatened not only the family of one smuggled child if they cooperated with authorities, but the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador as well, according to documents and interviews.

Allegedly heading the smuggling ring was Berta Rosa Parada Campos, identified by authorities as a permanent U.S. resident who had been deported in 1995 and in 1998 for smuggling.

Among the other 11 people arrested--seven of them in El Salvador--were Campos’ two sons and a former daughter-in-law, Blanca Rivas. (The English translation of Rivas’ first name and Campos’ last led authorities to dub their probe “Operation White Fields.”)

The first hint of the smuggling ring came in October when INS agents in San Salvador interviewed four children who were about to be smuggled into Guatemala.

Three months later, on Jan. 29, six Salvadoran children were detained, this time at Tijuana International Airport. Accompanied by three adults, the children were found to have been smuggled from El Salvador on their way to the United States.

That same day, INS officials were dispatched to a so-called drop house in San Bernardino where they found three children who were about to be smuggled.

And when Mexico’s federal police pressed their investigation, they found seven more children in Mexico City waiting to be smuggled into the United States. “That is when we were able to get the bigger picture,” said Acosta.

Working with Guatemala’s immigration office and national police, authorities on April 5 intercepted seven buses in Guatemala City carrying a dozen adults and 49 children, from toddlers to teens.

The investigation found that children were smuggled in small groups of three to six. They would leave from the San Cristobal border, crossing in El Salvador on Fridays, when the site was transformed into an open-air market.

Once inside Guatemala, according to authorities, the smugglers would move the children by buses to Guatemala City and then to the border city of Tecun Uman. There, the children would be handed over to Mexican smugglers who would take them from Mexico City to Tijuana.

Finally, another group of smugglers would transport the children into the United States, where they allegedly would be kept at the San Bernardino home of Campos’ daughter until the parents made the final payment.

Immigrant parents often turn to smugglers because they have used them in years past to come here.

Sonia Villas, 35, a Los Angeles factory worker, had used a smuggler, also known as a coyote, to enter the United States in 1993 from El Salvador. She said she had been abandoned by her husband and left with two small children. She wound up a shoeless beggar in L.A., she said.

After nearly eight years, she paid a man she only knew as Carlo, a coyote, to bring her daughters here. She would pay him $1,700 to take her 14-year-old daughter, Raquel, from El Salvador to Mexico, and then she would send an additional $1,500 to cross from Mexico into the United States.

Raquel arrived in Mexico after several nights in which she and about five other teenagers slept outside. They had little to eat. One day, Raquel ate nothing.

When the group arrived in Oaxaca--the southern tip of Mexico--the deal turned sour.

Carlo said he would not take Raquel farther if Villas did not pay him an additional $900. She sent the money. When the group arrived in Mexico City, he asked for $800 more.

“I was heartbroken, but I said ‘Leave her there.’ I have no more money to give you,” said Villas, who earns $225 a week in the factory. “I told my daughter [on the phone to] go to a church. I can’t help you more,”

For days, she heard nothing. She cried to relatives and friends. Her daughter eventually telephoned her and, with the aid of another coyote, was able to journey to Los Angeles, but the emotional scar was deep for the mother.

She said she doesn’t dare try to bring her other daughter here.

“If you have not lived through the anguish of missing your children, you can’t understand why I did what I did,” Villas said.

Ismael Rodriguez, executive director of the San Salvador-based Institute to Protect Children, on Tuesday applauded the crackdown for sending a message that child trafficking is unacceptable, no matter how understandable.

Krikorian and Mena reported from Los Angeles, Miller from Bogota, Colombia. Also contributing to this report were Times staff writers Michelle Munn in Washington, D.C., Lianne Hart in Houston, David Rosenzweig in Los Angeles and Times special correspondent Alex Renderos in San Salvador.