"El Chuy" has been plying his trade as a migrant trafficker for 10 years now along the U.S.Mexico border near Mexicali. Tall, thin, young and cheerful, he says he greatly enjoys his work and his clients. And when "the heat" from authorities gets too heavy, or during slow periods when he can find few clients, he turns to his backup career: car theft.
"We do what we do to survive," he says.
As contemptible as some may find human smugglers, colloquially known as polleros or coyotes, others see them as a necessary evil in a country so dependant on remittances from migrants working in the United States. Miguel Moctezuma, researcher at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas, says, "The economic, social and political life of the country would turn to gloom and chaos without remittances."
There has been a long history of Mexican laborers crossing the northern border to work and send money to their families back home. During the 1940s and 1950s, Mexicans were invited to migrate legally to the United States, first as temporary help to fill the labor shortages caused by World War II, and then as braceros, or seasonal farm workers. When the bracero program was cancelled in 1965, it marked the beginning of large-scale illegal migration.
Starting in the 1960s, labor contractors working for employers in the United Status would travel through the poorest areas of central Mexico recruiting peasants to work in the fields of Texas and California. They transported their recruits to the border packed into poultry trucks like chickens. Thus the migrants became known as pollos, or chickens, and the agents, polleros.
El Chuy gets his pollos mostly from the states of Jalisco, San Luis Potosi and Zacatecas, though he doesn't need a poultry truck to haul recruits now they come to him at the border.
It is a common pattern for a pollero to service customers from specific states or regions, says Claudio Méndez, coordinator of the Office of Migrant Affairs in the state of Michoacan. "Migrants have established connections with polleros that they trust, those who have crossed different members of the same family on various occasions."
This, he says, serves to reduce risks and unfortunate incidents, since the polleros are often family friends or acquaintances.
Still, there have been numerous cases of smugglers abandoning their charges in the desert to die of exposure and dehydration or sending them on deadly river crossings in makeshift rafts. Perhaps the most notorious of these was in May of 2001 when smugglers abandoned 28 migrants in the desert near Yuma, Arizona, without food or water. Unable to withstand the scorching desert heat, 14 died.
Other polleros rob their clients once in the desert, and there are numerous accounts of rapes perpetrated against women migrants by the smugglers. Polleros have also been known to knowingly abandon their charges at the mercy of asaltapollos, the bandits and rapists who lurk in the no-man'sland of the desert border area.
While he claims he has never lost a client or acted irresponsibly during his decade of work, El Chuy has still had brushes with the law. On several occasions, he was picked up by the U.S. Border Patrol, but each time he managed to wriggle away without being revealed as a smuggler.
"I always succeed in escaping by telling them that I myself am a migrant and that polleros deceived me along with the rest," he explains. "The people that I bring never report me to the authorities, either. That's because I treat them well and they know that as soon as we get back to Mexicali, we're going to cross again."
There is also another factor that keeps migrants from incriminating their polleros: fear. Because the polleros are so wellconnected to the migrants' home states or towns, many fear reprisals against themselves or family members. For that reason, authorities find it very difficult to locate citizens willing to help them prosecute. According to authorities from the federal Attorney General's Office, bands of polleros operate with relative impunity in rural areas since people are only willing to give them up in cases where they have harmed migrants or abandoned them in dangerous circumstances.
BIG MONEY ENTERPRISE
Remittances are now the second-largest source of foreign income for Mexico, trailing only the money earned from petroleum exports. Over US13 billion was sent back to Mexico from the United States in 2003 and this year's total is expected to top that figure by a wide margin.
Remittances are especially important to Mexico's poorer states, like Zacatecas, a state with a resident population of 1.5 million people and another 807,000 in the United States. In 2003, Zacatecans sent US480 million home to their families and the more than 400 Zacatecas clubs in the United States regularly contribute to public works projects in the state.
Michoacan is the leading state in terms of remittances, with almost US1.7 billion sent home in 2003. In Guanajuato, a state that received US390 million just in the first four months of 2004, there are 18 known bands of polleros in operation to help maintain the flow of migrants and dollars.
For their vital role in this bigmoney enterprise, the polleros are demanding a larger and larger fee for their services. El Chuy charges migrants US2,000 for a crossing and says that his monthly income ranges from US10 to 20,000 per month after he covers costs and pays off his assistants and corrupt police associates who turn a blind eye in exchange for a piece of the pie.
Pollero rates are higher for the Central American migrants who also gather at the Mexico-U.S. border due to the risks involved with these clients. For one, they are illegal in Mexico as well as the United States so the pollero must take pains to keep them hidden from authorities during the time they are waiting to cross. Secondly, if a pollero is caught by the Border Patrol guiding a group of Guatemalans or Hondurans across, they can quickly determine which member of the group is the smuggler. And while captured migrants are simply deported home when caught by U.S. immigration, smugglers are arrested and sent to federal prison.
ALTAR: POLLERO HUB
El Chuy meets his clients at the Mexicali airport or bus terminal, and from there he brings them to a safe house, where they wait two or three days until he has put together a large enough group to make a crossing usually a minimum of 10.
These waiting periods are another way in which illegal migrant trafficking brings economic benefit to poor areas of Mexico. This can be seen in the city of Altar, Sonora, 97 kilometers south of the U.S. border.
"When the U.S. government decided to seal the borders at Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez [in the mid-1990s], the bands of human traffickers came here, due to the poor coverage that the Border Patrol has in this desert," says Altar's ex-mayor, Francisco García.
That has meant a boom in business for the local guesthouses, restaurants and grocery stores that the migrants patronize while waiting to cross.
According to estimates by the National Migration Institute, more than a thousand Mexican and Central American migrants arrive in Altar each day. Many of them stay at safe houses, disguised as common homes, for 100-300 pesos (US8.75-26) per night.
In Mexicali, El Chuy has connections to a handful of safe houses where he sends his clients. "In these houses, I give them lodging, food, water and a place where they can relax, so that when it's time to cross, they are ready," he says.
His services also include acquiring false visa documentation for the migrants and fake passports "with photos of people who look like them." And he says that he promises to deliver his pollos to whatever city they indicate.
"This is a family business," he explains, for not only does he transport whole families across the border, his own wife and children are his associates.
He had a business partner for a while, a man called "El Pecoso," or "Freckles," but Freckles is currently serving time for stealing cars.