Watts Case Shows Difficulty of Halting Human Smuggling

Two of the three people charged by federal prosecutors in April with operating a human smuggling ring out of a Watts “safe house” were actually immigrants paying for passage into the United States, according to authorities.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have dropped charges against the two men as well as a woman they suspect may have had some connection to the smugglers. Moreover, investigators said they had few clues about who was actually running the smuggling operation.

The Watts raids highlight the trouble federal officials have apprehending both “coyotes,” who guide illegal immigrants into this country, and the masterminds who oversee the rings. It’s also another setback in a raid first believed to have been a victory in the battle against smuggling of people.

Agents compare Latin American human-smuggling operations to the drug-trafficking cartels that dominated cross-border crime during the 1980s and ‘90s. But unlike the circumstances of the long-running drug war, in which cartels were often identified by name, the U.S. government is just beginning to identify the largest targets in the booming human smuggling trade, officials said.

“I’m not sure the public is aware of how complex and deep-seated these organizations are,” said Scott Weber, head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Human Smuggling and Trafficking Unit. “These organizations have a huge profit motive.”

The Watts house alone operated as long as two years, officials say, funneling up to 400 people a week at a fee of $3,000 to $10,000 per head into the United States.

Authorities discovered the house in April, crammed with more than 100 Latin American migrants -- some held against their will. At the time, officials thought they had captured at least a few of the actual smugglers who were keeping the immigrants until their families secured final payments. But during interviews with migrants from the safe house, that contention crumbled.

Marvyn Raul Soto-Chavez was one of the three initially arrested on suspicion of smuggling. But in a jailhouse interview, he insisted that he was one of those being smuggled.

When he could not pay the last $3,000 of his bill to the smugglers, he said, his captors agreed to let him work off the debt through a variety of chores, including cooking meals and cleaning the single, broken toilet in the house. He said he also had called relatives of other migrants to demand ransom.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice said officials were now inclined to believe Soto-Chavez’s story. She described him and the other two whose charges were dropped as “little fish” in what is though to be a large, sophisticated human smuggling organization.

Kice said Soto-Chavez had refused to cooperate with federal agents, perhaps fearing retaliation by the smugglers. He will probably be deported this month.

In an interview, he offered a lengthy description of his journey from San Salvador to Watts that speaks to the size, sophistication and reach of the smuggling rings. The following account is based on the interview and court records:

Soto-Chavez had no problem finding a smuggler in San Salvador to organize his passage to the United States, he said, adding that within a week of contacting one, he found himself on a bus headed north.

The guide from San Salvador left him at El Salvador’s border, where Soto-Chavez was joined by two other coyotes, rugged woodsmen who led him and other Salvadoran migrants who accompanied him to a truck loading dock across the Guatemala line. Then began an 18-hour journey to Mexico City.

The group boarded a bus there, driven by another smuggling operative, for a 10-hour trek to Guadalajara. They met their first serious obstacle -- a military checkpoint -- in that city.

“The soldiers told all seven of us to get off the bus and line up,” Soto-Chavez said. “A 16-year-old boy was with us. He cried too and tried to run away. The soldiers grabbed him by the hair and made him tell them where we were from.”

At that point, the bus driver led the soldiers away for a private discussion. Soto-Chavez suspects that the driver bribed the soldiers, “because when they came back, the soldiers were smiling and joking.”

The soldiers smiled and waved at them as the bus pulled away.

Finally, the group arrived at Hermosillo in the state of Sonora, which borders Arizona. There they were joined by 19 other migrants and were told to wash and put on their best clothes -- they were to cross the U.S. line the next day. Two fresh guides led them on foot for three days through the desert near Nogales as the group grew to about 60 migrants.

Soto-Chavez said that once they were in the United States, their guides grew increasingly belligerent, threatening the slowest of the group and occasionally hitting the migrants.

For the first time during the trip, both guides carried guns, he said.

Eventually, the group rendezvoused with several vans, which drove them through the night to Los Angeles.

Before arriving in Watts, Soto-Chavez said, his group was turned away from another drop house, an apartment in an unfamiliar part of the city.

“One of the coyotes was arguing with someone in the apartment,” he recalled, adding that they warned the coyote not to mess around. “ ‘We’ve got too many already. I don’t want to put another load in here.’ ”

The van headed to the Watts house, pulled into the backyard and unloaded its cargo. Inside the house were three new coyotes, men whom Soto-Chavez assumed managed the site. There were also dozens of immigrants.

“It was horrible,” Soto-Chavez said. “Just imagine: One bedroom had 40 people on the floor, practically on top of each other. The heat was unbearable. There was only one toilet, and it was partly detached from the floor, so the bathroom was always a stinking mess.”

Soto-Chavez knew the coyotes only by their nicknames: El Barbaro, El Costino and El Cholo. He said that he saw El Cholo punch a Mexican Indian who struggled to speak Spanish but that El Barbaro -- “the barbarian” -- was the worst.

“He asked the cook to make him a cup of soup,” Soto-Chavez said. “When the cook didn’t give it to him fast enough, he started to hit him.” The cook is the other man whose smuggling charges were dropped.

Soto-Chavez said he had worked in the house for two weeks before the raid. He said he saw El Barbaro escape through a fence amid the confusion.

“Barbaro ran right past them, and they didn’t stop him,” he said. “They caught 80 people, and they didn’t arrest the worst guy right in front of their nose.”

For immigration officials, the outcome of the raid is far from rare.

As in the drug trade, leaders of the smuggling rings are well insulated by cadres of uninformed underlings and the threat of violent reprisals against informants. Most of the illegal immigrants rounded up at the Watts safe house have refused to cooperate with authorities, fearing retribution from the ring.

Weber and other immigration officials said that the establishment last year of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security -- which eliminated the U.S. Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service and reorganized their responsibilities -- has given the government important new tools to use against human smuggling.

Officials in Washington cite one case in which the combined assets of Customs and of Immigration Enforcement led to the dismantling of a major smuggling operation. Last summer, the government indicted a Guatemalan woman, Karla Patricia Chavez Joya, who authorities said had employed a driver to ferry a tractor-trailer full of 74 illegal immigrants across the Texas border. Nineteen of the immigrants died from heat and suffocation when the driver abandoned the rig, its passengers locked inside.

Investigators worked with surviving immigrants and the trucker to identify 13 far-flung suspects, including Chavez, a Honduran citizen and legal U.S. resident. She was arrested last year in Guatemala by authorities there, she pleaded guilty last week in federal court in Texas and she faces a possible life sentence.

Officials hope the case will be a model for future smuggling investigations.