On December 9, 2021, on a highway in the Mexican state of Chiapas, a trailer truck overturned. It was transporting about 200 people traveling towards the American dream; 56 of them died. Investigating this tragedy, a cross-border journalistic alliance uncovered the story of how organized criminals charge migrants exorbitant fares to stuff them, like merchandise, into these steel boxes leaving a long trail of corruption in their wake. The central corridor of Chiapas, with two main border crossings, is the preferred route for this brutal trafficking of people in trailer trucks. Thousands of migrants from more than twenty countries have traveled north like ghosts. And only when they have accidents or die, they become visible.
Guatemalan survivors of the accident that occurred in Chiapas, Mexico, on December 9, 2021 identified the “Chiapanecos” as the people who came to their communities to offer them transportation services to the United States. Chiapanecos also coordinated their truck trip, which made national news for its fatal toll of 56 people dead and 113 injured. Other victims testified that they heard them speaking in an indigenous language.
The witnesses, perhaps unknowingly, were pointing to the Chamula Cartel, composed mainly of Tzotzil indigenous people from the town of San Juan de Chamula in the highlands of Chiapas. This cartel controls migration along the central corridor of that state on the border with Guatemala. This was confirmed by Jorge L., a former federal officer with expertise in migration, who chose not to reveal his name. The government had only recognized Chamula as a criminal group in November 2021, shortly before the December 9 accident.
Since the 1990s, many Tzotzil people from Chamula had come to know the routes through experience, as they themselves were among the largest communities of migrants to the United States. At the time, they were the group with the most deportees from that country.
“If you managed to get to the United States as an indigenous Tzotzil Chamula, of course you returned to your community and wanted to take more family with you; then a dynamic began, as a moral, ethical thing, so to speak, of sharing the wealth,” said another expert in this region who chose not to reveal his name for safety reasons. Later, he explains, other people began to pay that person, “and this began to generate this story of the polleros (traffickers) of Chamula, but the beginning has more to do with an exchange and with strengthening the community itself.”
After President Felipe Calderon’s administration declared war on organized crime in 2006, dozens of drug traffickers took their families to quieter areas of the country where they could protect them, Chiapas among them.
Sinaloa Cartel arrived from the north and “came up against the strong sense of community and control of the Chamula territory (…) ‘Here we are the cartel’, the Chamula said, and they agreed on the conditions of passage,” explained Jorge L., adding that with support from the national cartel, the Chamula gained in infrastructure and strength.
Their client base also grew enormously. Central Americans were leaving their countries en masse after the economic devastation caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Other waves followed, driven by poverty, climate change and violence. To contain them, U.S. and Mexican policies tightened. Later, republicans – under President Donald Trump – put migration control and xenophobia at the center of their programs.
Crossing the previously symbolic border between Chiapas and Guatemala, which had come into existence in 1824 when Chiapas ceased to be part of the Capitanía General de Guatemala, became difficult, as did traversing Mexico towards the United States. And as the road grew harder, prices increased. Once a part of community life, traffickers started seeing the transportation of people as a lucrative business.
Crossing had been a gesture of solidarity among Tzotzil people helping each other navigate a flexible and porous border in cars or small trucks; now it had become a semi-industrialized trade with trailer trucks and mainly through the central corridor.
According to records sent by the National Migration Institute (INM) in response to requests for information made by this journalistic team, each trailer carries hundreds of people. One registered at the end of 2021, carried 468 migrants. With so many human beings crammed together, some standing with nowhere to grab onto, any jolt or mechanical failure can result in death. It is a deathtrap.
A recent occurrence revealed that the Chamula force now controls the smuggling of migrants in this border corridor. According to press reports, on March 2, people from Betania blocked the highway to Tuxtla Gutierrez in protest, claiming that neighboring residents had detained three men from their community. The neighbors announced they were in fact holding the men from Betania because they were armed and were using their territory as a passageway for smuggling migrants.
However, documents from the Secretary of National Defense (Sedena) leaked by Guacamaya reveal that in recent years there have been other groups disputing migrant smuggling along the border. The Jalisco Cartel – New Generation (CJNG) and even members of Salvadoran gangs have a presence in Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of Chiapas, and in San Cristobal, the state’s most touristic city. In 2023, in that state, armed disputes between the CJNG and the Sinaloa Cartel nearly quadrupled compared to 2022, as reported by the ACLED project, which tracks data on armed conflict around the world.
These are some of the findings of the cross-border investigation carried out by Noticias Telemundo, the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), Pie de Página and its allies Chiapas Paralelo in Chiapas, En un 2×3 in Tamaulipas and journalists in Veracruz, Contracorriente in Honduras, Plaza Pública in Guatemala, ICIJ for the Dominican Republic and Bellingcat.
After nearly 25 interviews with experts and authorities, multiple requests for information through transparency laws, searches in open sources and reporting with main actors and migrants in Mexico, the United States, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, this alliance established another cause for the boom in human trafficking in trailer trucks. Namely, the existence of criminal networks articulated in a sophisticated and transnational manner, and taking advantage of the voluminous transportation of merchandise that takes place between Mexico and Central America in this type of trucks. This is detailed in the main story of this investigation.
The present story focuses on the border region between Guatemala and the state of Chiapas. Through the Ciudad Hidalgo customs office in southern Chiapas alone, 128,000 cargo vehicles crossed in 2016, according to Mexico’s SAT. Upon entering Mexico on the way back, a few of these trucks are loaded with containers to carry migrants determined to make a new life for themselves in the United States.
In almost five years (between 2019 and September 2023) the INM has found 21 trailers going through Chiapas, either due to random searches or because they were left stranded or had accidents. In them, 3,356 men, women and children were being transported. They came mainly from Central America, but also from Ecuador, Haiti, Cuba, Dominican Republic, India, and Bangladesh, among other nationalities.
The INM told this journalistic team that 80 of these migrants died in Chiapas. The figure may be underreported because a database constructed by our team with public reports from the INM itself and press releases yields a lower number of migrants found but a higher number of dead. Our database records that at least 101 people died in Chiapas alone, between October 2018 and November 2023, while trying to cross Mexico in trailers.
The accident
Sitting on the terrace of her house in Cañafistol, a town of 8,000 inhabitants in the province of Peravia, in the Dominican Republic, Dulce Soto, mother of six children and grandmother of Yuniel Baez, told that she and her daughter-in-law spent those days in December glued to the TV and to their phones checking videos and WhatsApp groups, waiting for news of the accident in Chiapas. After a second day with no news from Yuniel, she and her grandson’s girlfriend saw in a video his body lying on the pavement, wearing orange striped pants. “That’s Yuniel, that’s him!”, said Dulce and the girlfriend nodded. The boy was 23 years old. They embraced in tears.
The tragedy happened at 3:23 pm on December 9, 2021, some 140 miles inside Mexico’s border with Guatemala. The trailer truck had passed three minutes earlier through the toll booth at Chiapas de Corzo, on the road that leads to Tuxtla Gutiérrez, capital of Chiapas. The driver of the trailer truck -who was driving with “flushed cheeks and dilated eyes”, as one of the survivors described him – took a curve at over 60 mph and overturned. Dozens of people who had been hiding in its box flew out. Eleven Dominicans died, almost all of them from the same part of the island as Yuniel, and 42 Guatemalans, according to the authorities of those countries.
“I raised him like a son, the only thing I had left of my own son,” Dulce told the journalist of this alliance who visited her at her home in April 2023. Yuniel’s father had died at the age of 21 on his way to Puerto Rico on a raft. He disappeared at sea. “He came and handed me his son with a little bed and even a bedsheet and said, ‘take care of him until I come back’.”
Yuniel’s body arrived in the village on December 24. They also returned the corpse of a neighbor on December 25. “Imagine, it was sad, a wake here and a wake there,” said Dulce. She consoles herself with the fact that “at least I have him (Yuniel) here and I can go see him, but my son was swallowed by the sea, I never heard from him.” Two of her other children have already left for the United States through Puerto Rico or Mexico.
Yuniel’s cousin was injured in the accident and was sent back to the Dominican Republic. He stayed there until his broken bones healed. A few months later he made his way back to the United States through Mexico and this time, he made it. They say he is in New York.
In the village of Xenimaquin, municipality of Comalapa, department of Chimaltenango, in Guatemala, lives Paulino Quirá, who lost his 19-year-old son Marcos Gabriel in the accident. He contacted him, the fourth of his eleven children, the day before. Marcos told him that he was in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas and that they would be leaving town the next day. He was in a hurry. He didn’t know when they were going to take him, and he wanted to leave. “I told him stay on it, don’t be ashamed, they (the coyotes) know the trip, they are the ones driving,” Paulino told a journalist from this alliance who visited him at his home in Xenimaquin.
“We always all have something to wish for,” said Paulino, “here you don’t really achieve anything. We have seen that those who go to the other side have always achieved something, that’s why he decided to leave, but unfortunately, he didn’t realize his dream. He wanted to build a house and buy land to farm. I am a farmer and he wanted that too.”
Paulino said that on Friday, the day after the accident, his daughter-in-law called him and told him that there had been an accident, and asked if Marcos might have been in it. He answered: “We hope to God no.” Then he continued his story: “In the afternoon I added internet credit on the phone and there I saw that many photos came out and I recognized that he was there, because of his haircut and a little of the profile of his face.”
Even today, two years after the accident, it is still unknown how many passengers were with Marcos, Yuniel, and his cousin. In an interview with the Mexican National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) that investigated the case, a copy of which we could access, one survivor said that about 300 people were on board. Another said he heard the organizer say that there were 210 travelers in the trailer.
When the relief corps arrived at the scene of the accident, they saw many of the surviving passengers leaving. INM official records -obtained using transparency law for this investigation- registered only 111 travelers, although the CNDH found a much higher number: just those affected were 169.
According to information the Guatemalana Ministry of Foreign Affairs gave to this investigation, 143 citizens of that country came in the container. The CNDH said in its report that there were 148 Guatemalans, and that among dead and injured there were 16 from the Dominican Republic, three from Ecuador, one from El Salvador and a young man from Colombia, later signalled by the prosecutor’s office as a possible member of the trafficking gang.
“We had hoped to give our families something better, that’s why we left (…) now with the accident, what are we going to return to the community with?”, 32-year-old Florentín Yatpop told Chiapas Paralelo, an ally of this investigation, hours after the rollover. He is a day laborer from Izabl, Guatemala, who lost his friend Santiago Bolom, 46, in the accident.
Yatpop was praying at a health center where he was recovering from his injuries when journalists approached him. “They (the traffickers) told us that we were going to go in some buses, not in trailers. When it took the curves we had nowhere to hold on. When it crashed, those who were standing up got hit harder, they hit their heads, I think that’s why so many people died.”
Dulce’s grandson Yuniel called her every one of the six days of travel before the accident. He told her he had flown from the Dominican Republic to another country before entering Mexico by land. The grandmother did not know which country.
Paulino traveled to Mexico to look for his son’s body. He inquired at the hospitals and the Red Cross gave him a list of the deceased, but his son was not listed. In the end, and after walking him through many offices, they did a DNA test and confirmed that his son was among the dead.
“The only ones who lent us a hand in Mexico were some journalists and other people who were also looking for their relatives, we had to walk a long way and then they told me to go back to my house.” The mayor of Xenimaquin promised to send Marcos’ body. About ten days later it arrived.
Florentín Yatpop, and another survivor – this one a minor – said that they were taken from their places of origin by public transport to the border crossing between Chiapas and Guatemala, known as La Mesilla – Ciudad Cuauhtémoc; others crossed through the Carmen Xhán community, a little further north. In all cases, they arrived at a town where, as one of them said, “there was a large embankment, there were several trailers (…) some spoke an indigenous dialect”. There, a first group was loaded onto a trailer, but there were so many migrants that they were loaded onto a second one, which crashed.
According to the testimonies of people who interviewed the survivors, the investigation led to a town called Betania, in the municipality of Teopisca, about 12 miles from the urban center of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, a town founded by indigenous people expelled from the town of San Juan Chamula, who profess a variety of evangelical Pentecostal religions. The results of the investigations have not been disclosed.
According to what the Mexican National Migration Institute told CNDH (CNDH investigation file, folder 77, folio 01335), its agents had been sent to hospitals “in order to gather information to try and obtain data about the trailer’s route. They established that the migrants “entered in an isolated manner (operation “ant”) to later concentrate in the municipality of San Cristóbal de las Casas, apparently in the town of Betania (uses and customs), from where they left at approximately 14:00 on December 9”.
A source that knows the region well says that in Betania the construction of large houses and even hotels has proliferated in recent years, reflecting a prosperity explained not by the sale of wooden handicrafts – the main legal economic activity – but more possibly by the profits from human trafficking.
Some of those who travel in these trailers have mortgaged their properties to pay for the fees. One survivor said he paid his transporters $5,000; others gave up to $13,000. Jose Luis acquired a debt equivalent to about $9,000 with his home as collateral and at 25% interest so he could pay the traffickers.
Dulce, Yuniel’s grandmother, confirmed reluctantly and without giving details that the trips cost thousands of dollars: “they get into a lot of debt to pay for those trips that when they get there they have to pay back”. Still, many men from the town of Dulce are leaving.
Paulino fared better. “The coyote returned the money and since my son had taken it out of the bank, we returned it to the bank to pay off that debt,” he said.
Others have relatives on the other side of the border who finance their trips. “I don’t have anything in Guatemala and in my uncle is in the United States and he is going to give me schooling,” a minor told the CNDH while in a hospital bed, a day after the accident.
Taking the average fare from the various testimonies and multiplying it by the 169 travelers identified with certainty by the CDNH, one gets a conservative estimate of the money involved: about $1.5 million in a single trailer. For fees like that, migrants expected a comfortable bus ride, and not to be locked up in a box, enduring heat, suffering the indignation of being treated like merchandise; and much less of risking their lives. A source that knows the business calculated that transporting 25 migrants would be earning criminals the same profit as transporting one kilo of cocaine. Studies by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) coincide in calculating the profits from human trafficking in relation to drug trafficking.
An investigation that did not advance
A video that was later published by El Universal on X, as well as in other media, shows two trucks with respirators in the box passing through the toll of Chiapas de Corzo, where migration authorities had a mobile checkpoint, but the vehicles continued on without being checked. The immigration agents testified before the Mexican Attorney General’s Office saying that when the trailer passed, there was only one agent at the post, and that another agent had left to do administrative work. They said that it was humanly impossible for them to check all suspicious vehicles.
The agent who remained at the post later explained to the National Human Rights Commission that when the trailer truck passed, he was checking a passenger vehicle and “some other private car that had the courtesy to stop. The two agents also stated that they lacked predictive signage, speed bumps, basic equipment such as shears, and above all sufficient personnel” to efficiently carry out their duties. One of them said he was an agricultural technician.
The victims told the CNDH that in addition to the coordinators of the trip they had put some women in the cab of the trailer in which they were traveling; one was in the container with the migrants, coordinating communication with the driver, and another was on a motorcycle (or a car) in front of the trailer, guiding it. They said that the trailer truck stopped for two minutes at the toll booth and continued at high speed. Nobody stopped it. Six miles later it overturned.
A federal government official confirmed that there was a Colombian national driving a flag car ahead of the trailer truck.
Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office, which took over the case because human trafficking is a federal crime, responded to a request for information from this alliance regarding the status of the process. It said that only four people had been detained: one person from Colombia (presumably the one who led them), one from Guatemala and two from Mexico. The agency refused to say how many were still in detention or sentenced in 2024. According to a lawyer involved in the case who preferred not to give his name, only one of the four detainees, apparently a Mexican, was still on trial. The rest had been released without charge.
According to the former federal official, they did not investigate Brayan, the Colombian initially captured, and “they released him soon after because he had entered the country legally, and because none of the survivors stayed in Mexico to continue with the legal proceeding.” In this way they lost the opportunity to establish whether the traffickers had a connection to Colombian trafficking organizations, the official said.
Nor did they encourage the survivors to stay and testify. The former official said that they returned the bodies of the dead migrants to their relatives, and survivors were told that they could accept a Humanitarian Visa (Tarjeta de Visitante por Razones Humanitarias) which would allow them to remain in the country to continue as witnesses in the investigations, but that if they later wanted to return to their countries, they would have to pay their own expenses.
The CNDH report on the case confirms this version. It says that, according to the testimony of several survivors, the authorities had told them that if they received the Humanitarian Visa and then wanted to return to their countries, they would have to do so “by their own means, without having the resources to do so.”
The CNDH investigation file includes a complaint from a consulate claiming that the INM was issuing visitor’s cards “without complying with the formalities and including minors”. The INM had responded that this was the regular procedure. It does not state the country of the consulate.
In folder 11 of the CNDH file it is recognized that “Interpol intervened in the investigations of the event and that the FGE-Chiapas had secured 144 backpacks belonging to people who were traveling in the trailer.” This team tried to talk to Interpol to find out what they knew, whether they had access to the backpacks and their contents, including cell phones, but this entity referred us to the Mexican police, which did not provide information.
Days after the accident, on December 13, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) of the Mexican government reported the creation of an Immediate Action Group (GAI), “to combat human smuggling networks and human trafficking, responsible for the tragedy in Chiapas”, in which representatives of the governments of the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, Dominican Republic and Mexico would participate. According to the announced plans, this group would meet periodically to follow up on the investigations to identify, apprehend and bring to justice the members and leaders of the transnational criminal organization responsible for the accident. In the response to a request for information regarding the minutes of this commission until January 2024, the SER only gave an account of a meeting on January 26, 2022.
In this meeting, which according to the information sent for this report lasted an hour, Javier Pérez Durón, head of the FGR’s Migrant Crimes Investigation Unit, said that, based on the analysis of telephone records of the trailer truck’s registered address and related networks, for which they exchanged information with the countries involved, they issued arrest warrants against three people, two Guatemalan nationals, of which one is in preventive custody and another was detained. The response of the Attorney General’s Office to the request for information for this report does not coincide with these minutes, as it informed that only one Guatemalan national was detained.
In an interview with this alliance, Héctor Amador, Consul of Honduras in Mexico who took office in 2022, assured that he had no idea of the formation of this GAI and that his predecessor had not informed him about it. “We have not heard anything and, in any case, I would have instructions from the Foreign Ministry (of Honduras) to be aware of the results of this multinational force (…) but officially I reiterate that we have absolutely nothing.”
Guatemala’s Foreign Ministry did initially acknowledge the existence of the GAI and said it had open investigations, but did not provide information about them due to the sensitivity of the case.. However, it rejected a formal interview with Plaza Pública, an ally of this investigation, claiming that the officials in charge no longer work for the entity. The same request was made to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Dominican Republic. However, no response was obtained at the time of publishing.
Twenty-seven months after the accident that caused the death of 56 people, seven of them minors, injuries to more than one hundred travelers and anguish, pain and suffering to the families of Yuniel, Marcos, Florentín, Santiago and all the rest, the crime remains unpunished. As far as this team could ascertain, official announcements of immediate transnational investigations never materialized. The CNDH’s recommendation to the National Institute of Migration of guaranteeing non-repetition for migrants by reinforcing controls were not followed either.
In May 2022, another four travelers died and 16 were injured in an accident involving a trailer truck traveling on the highway from San Juan de Chamula to Ixtapa. The following November, on a road in San Cristóbal de las Casas, another truck loaded with people overturned at four in the morning. In January 2023, ten Cuban women, one of them a girl, died and 17 were injured after an accident involving the truck transporting them on the Pijijiapan-Tonalá highway. Eight months later, the driver of a truck carrying 52 people lost control and overturned at kilometer 25 of the Malpaso-La Herradura highway, killing two people.
Why does this tragic flow of truck-pulled death traps keep going through Chiapas?
Both the sources interviewed and many of the victims agree that traffickers can roam freely because they pay a fix amount per passenger to the authorities along the route. “A ‘flag’ car or motorcycle drives in front warning each checkpoint that a trailer with x number of people is coming, and so the authorities, be it Migration, State Police or National Guard, then charge a fee for that passage, per passenger. They all get paid. We discovered immigration agents that have been receiving monthly payments of 60 and 70 thousand pesos for years,” said the former federal immigration officer.
This alliance asked the INM how many corrupt agents had been dismissed or brought to justice, and the entity answered this:
“The vulnerability of migrants largely rests on restrictive migration policies, which restrict the right to mobility and on the low institutional capacity on the part of the States to guarantee the human safety of the people passing through or residing in their territory”, says the CNDH report on the accident in Chiapas. In other words, no one seems to care much about the fate of migrants.
People are risking everything to go to a country seeking better opportunities for progress or escaping hunger or violence. According to a report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) for which it interviewed 8,000 travelers on the southern border between Guatemala and Mexico and another 2,000 on the jungle border between these two countries, near Flores, the questions most often asked by people are what is the procedure for applying for a visa, and what is a safe way to travel through Mexico. In other words, they wish to travel safely and get visas legally, but States are unable to respond to this demand.
Pushed into the lions’ den, the lions exploit them. The traffickers have established a source of income lucrative enough to buy themselves impunity by spreading millions of dollars all along the roads, and in recent years, have also become connected to cruel and criminal international trafficking networks. Social media ads and messaging services help them get customers, and make it easier for them to coordinate trafficking across borders. An IOM report last year found that “traffickers often promote and market their services on various social networks, mainly through TikTok, Facebook and WhatsApp.” A digital investigation by CLIP found this type of advertising also on other lesser-known social networks such as Kwai and even found a paid Facebook ad circulating in Guatemala, offering support to cross into the United States.
In his town, Don Paulino, the father of Marcos, the young Guatemalan man who died in the accident, tries to carry on. “There are expenses, and we are barely getting by,” he says. “It is difficult to get justice, that is why we no longer think about it, it is painful to think about all that and the truth is that we have already lost him (my son) and we cannot recover him… (…) We have learned that in the trailers they are crammed together and they run out of oxygen, they are very tight and do not move and that is the problem. Maybe they, the coyotes, live off that, but I would tell them to look for another way, another strategy that benefits all of us. That is what I want.”
A journalistic investigation coordinated by Noticias Telemundo and the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP) with the participation of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), Bellingcat, Contracorriente (Honduras), Plaza Pública (Guatemala), EnUn2x3-Tamaulipas, Chiapas Paralelo and Pie de Página (Mexico). Legal review: El Veinte