U.S., Mexico Investigating Child-Smuggling Operation

U.S. and Mexican authorities said Thursday that they were investigating what one official here called a huge smuggling ring that transports children to the United States.

The ring, operating for several years, had delivered more than 100 children--at least 20 of them from El Salvador--to the U.S., according to federal law enforcement officials in Mexico. The countries of origin of the other children were not immediately clear.

Three of those children, authorities said, were found early Tuesday in the Inland Empire city of Fontana after Mexican officials provided information to the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

According to U.S. law enforcement officials, two toddlers and a 6-month-old--all cousins--were smuggled across the border to be reunited with family members who are U.S. citizens.

“At this point, it is a migrant- smuggling case,” INS spokeswoman Virginia Kice said.

But federal officials in Mexico wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the international ring goes far beyond smuggling and could involve minors destined for child prostitution or even death as organ donors.

Regardless of whether such crimes are linked to the ring, authorities in both countries said, the apparent number of children involved--and the inherent dangers in smuggling them--represents a significant law enforcement challenge.

The case, said Julio Cardenas, a spokesman for the Federal Investigative Agency, Mexico’s version of the FBI, is “huge.”

Three Mexican citizens were in custody and being questioned by the attorney general’s office in connection with child trafficking, authorities in Mexico City said.

Two of the three--Estela Barajas Gonzalez, 26, and her aunt Virginia Barajas Perez, 43--were arrested at Tijuana International Airport on Monday in the company of six Salvadoran children. They were taken to Mexico City for questioning.

Late Thursday, Mexico’s Ministry of Public Security alleged that the two women were making two or three trips a week to Tijuana, taking three to six children each time.

The pair aroused the suspicion of airport authorities this week when they bought return tickets for themselves but not the children.

Virginia Barajas has a prior arrest in connection with a 1998 child theft, and her niece is a suspect in another kidnapping, Mexican officials said.

On Tuesday, Abel Bartolo Alaniz, Estela Barajas’ husband, was arrested at a house in Naucalpan, a Mexico City suburb, where five Salvadoran children were being housed in what Mexican officials described as “deplorable conditions.” At least two of the five children are related, a spokeswoman for the Mexican attorney general’s office said.

According to Mexican authorities, the children said they agreed to go with the three adults on the promise of being reunited with family.

The attorney general’s spokeswoman said the three suspects were still being interrogated and that no motive had been determined.

The attorney general’s office alleged that the ring’s modus operandi was for Alaniz to take delivery of the youths from a Guatemalan woman known as the “traveler,” who had brought them from Central America. He would then house them until the two women could arrange to take them to Tijuana, authorities said, where the children would be handed off to another person who would smuggle them across the border.

No ages were given for the five children taken into protective custody in Naucalpan. The six children seized in Tijuana were between 9 and 11 years old. Government officials said they were trying to contact family members in El Salvador to whom they could return the minors.

In the United States, authorities said they had no evidence that the smuggling ring had a dark purpose, but they weren’t ruling out the possibility.

“There are just too many serious allegations being made for us to discount anything,” one senior law enforcement official said.

Authorities said the smuggling of children across the border is a highly dangerous proposition.

Citing Tuesday’s discovery of the three youngsters in Fontana, FBI spokesman Matthew McLaughlin said, “Although this case seems to have turned out OK, there are many cases where kids have turned up injured or killed as a result of smuggling activity.”

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Kraul reported from Mexico City and Krikorian from Los Angeles.