Mass grave near border shows drug-gang control over border crossers

An Ecuadorean migrant with a bullet in his neck wandered out of a mass grave of 72 corpses in a ranch 100 miles south of Brownsville, Texas, on Monday and walked 13 miles before finally locating Mexican authorities.

Luis Freddy Lala Pomavilla told them he had escaped armed members of the Zetas gang, a drug cartel so powerful that it controls parts of Guatemala in addition to its turf in Mexico. The Associated Press describes the grisly scene at the ranch:

The Mexican newspaper El Universal reports the Zetas intercepted the truck carrying the 58 men and 14 women on their way to the United States and demanded they become assassins for the organization. When the people in the truck refused, the gang members shot them all, perhaps intending to send a message to anyone who wants to pass through the area without paying their dues.

Professor Edgardo Buscaglia, an expert on organized crime at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, tells The Upshot that drug cartels have recently gained an iron grip on the human smuggling business, and now usher an estimated 176,000 immigrants per year into the United States.

People seeking to enter America illegally used to turn to an unorganized network of thousands of "coyotes" who would guide would-be immigrants over the border in exchange for a fee. Drug cartels have since killed off many coyotes who did not want to share profits, and now the Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel have a near monopoly on the human smuggling business, Buscaglia says.

"These organized-crime groups are basically controlling the trafficking of migrants," he said. "That means that there's a much higher risk of being kidnapped, of being squeezed, because the criminal business is much more structured. There's a much higher chance of being killed."

Of the 72 dead found on the ranch, at least four were originally from as far away as Brazil.

The relationship between migrants and the gang members is complicated. Sometimes the gangs kidnap migrants and demand money from relatives living in the United States. Other times they agree upon a fee but then extort more money later, or force them to smuggle drugs or work for the gang. Sometimes they murder the migrants.

The Rev. Alejandro Solalinde told the AP that Zeta gang members infiltrate his migrant shelter in Oaxaca with informants. The undercover gang members find out which migrants have connections in the U.S. that they can extort.

At least two other mass graves have been discovered in the past few months, though Mexican authorities think they contained the bodies of rival drug members, not migrants. Since Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug cartels in 2006, 28,000 people have died in the violence.

Meanwhile, those who try to cross the border on their own are increasingly using riskier and riskier routes to avoid the heightened U.S. Border Patrol presence. Hundreds of migrants die while attempting the crossing on their own each year.

Law enforcement officials on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border report that the volume of overall border-crossing is down this year, suggesting fewer people are trying to cross illegally than in previous years.

(Photo: The ranch where the 72 bodies were found in Tamaulipas, Mexico/AP)