Mexico's southern border

Lawless roads

Where migrants meet criminals

Only the least of their perils

TRAFFIC is light on the bridge linking Ciudad Hidalgo in Mexico to Tecún Umán in Guatemala. Tricycle-taxi drivers and an armed guard idly stand around in the sun. All the action takes place on the river below. A small flotilla of rafts fashioned from trailer tyres and stacked with sacks of corn floats by, in sight of customs officials. Their cargo is destined for Tecún Umán’s bustling market, which overflows with crackers and bread made affordable by the recent depreciation of Mexico’s peso against the Guatemalan quetzal. “It’s illegal, but it’s a job for these people,” says Antonio Aguilar, the chief of Guatemala’s national police in Tecún Umán. That is one reason why he leaves the 5,000 or so small-time smugglers in this area alone. Another, he admits, is that when one of his predecessors cracked down on smuggling, a mob burnt down the police station.

Migration and the trafficking of drugs and guns across Mexico’s northern border with the United States capture endless headlines. (This week agents fired at three vans containing 74 illegal immigrants as they failed to stop at a border crossing near San Diego.) But many of these problems are quietly mirrored on its southern frontier. This is “a no-man’s land, a wild frontier,” says Conrado Aparicio, a naval commander at Puerto Madero. That is despite recent government attempts to exercise greater surveillance.

Today’s problems date from the 1990s, when traffickers began to move drugs through Central America in response to an American crackdown on their Caribbean routes. After Hurricane Mitch struck in 1998, a torrent of destitute migrants began to head north too. Mexico’s governments have come to accept that if they want the United States to reform its immigration laws and to speed cross-border trade, they have to exercise more control over their own territory.

Mexico’s southern border stretches for 960km (600 miles), snaking through remote highlands and thick jungle. Patrolling it is hard. So the government has sought to erect a “vertical border,” with army and police checkpoints spaced at 25km intervals along roads, as well as the railway that many migrants use after they have crossed the border. This strategy has forced migrants into the hills, where many fall victim to criminal gangs.

The main gang along the border is the Zetas, a group of deserters from a Mexican-army special-forces unit, some of whom were deployed against the Zapatista rising in Chiapas in 1994. They have recruited former Kaibiles, Guatemalan special forces who acquired notoriety during a long civil war against leftist guerrillas, as well as youth gangs.

This mob combines local knowledge, cruelty and violence. It has expanded from smuggling arms and drugs to both trafficking in, and preying upon, migrants. It kidnaps large groups brought across the border by coyotes (human traffickers), taking them to safe houses. The men are tortured, the women raped and ransoms demanded from relatives in the United States. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, a quasi-governmental body, recorded 9,758 kidnaps of migrants between September 2008 and February 2009, and calculated the ransoms paid in these cases at $25m.

The government has tried to curb this mayhem. A former state attorney general in Chiapas has been arrested on suspicion of corruption, as has a former federal prosecutor in Quintana Roo. The army boasts of regular seizures of weapons caches from the Zetas. But the mob has hit back with acts of intimidatory violence. In August the body of the director of immigrant affairs in Tapachula, the largest border city, was found in a tub of cement, months after he was kidnapped. The security forces are finding recruitment harder: the Chiapas police have 300 unfilled vacancies. And when they are pursued, the Zetas sometimes skip over the border to Guatemala.

The government has set up squads of orange-clad, unarmed officials called Beta Groups to rescue missing migrants and advise them of the risks, just as it has long done on the northern border. It has also speeded up the issue of visas for temporary workers and residents of the Guatemalan side of the border. But few Central Americans qualify and many enter illegally. Recession and tighter security on the northern border may have reduced the flow of migrants entering the United States. But sadly they have also made it easier for the gangs to recruit.