By Ronny Rojas, Albinson Linares (Noticias Telemundo) and Àngela Cantador (CLIP)
An increasing number of migrants seeking to cross the US border are now transported inside cargo trucks, a burgeoning illegal industry that, between 2018 and 2023, has left at least a hundred dead and dozens wounded. This surge is being driven, in part, by restrictive immigration policies enacted by Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, partly responding to pressure from American authorities. Telemundo News and the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), together with other partners, corroborated through official records the journey of some 19,000 people who attempted to reach the US border inside cargo trucks through Mexican roadways, including some 3,000 children.
The heat inside the cargo truck was suffocating. The women were squatting against the walls holding the children on their legs; the men sat in rows, one behind the other, at the center. About 170 people were traveling in the container, in the dark and in forced silence.
Two weeks earlier, on January 4, 2019, Yanira Chávez had closed the reddish wooden door of her house in Armenia, a small town in northern Honduras. She had paid $5,000—an amount she would have never been able to save with her salary at a banana packing house—to a local coyote who promised to take her to the United States along with her children, Samir, who was 9 years old, and Emely, 5. Her husband, Erling Rosales, had paid for the trip and was waiting for them in New Orleans, where he had been living for two years now.
Chávez was carrying two huge black suitcases “with little wheels” that she bought for 1,200 lempiras (about $48) in a nearby town because the coyote assured her that they were going to cross Mexico by plane and “they couldn’t look like immigrants” at the airports. Upon arriving in the United States, the family would have to pay the smugglers another $5,000.
From San Pedro Sula they traveled by bus to the Guatemalan border with Mexico, which they crossed through a river by boat. “I’m now a little closer to you,” she wrote in a text message to her husband. “We didn’t know, it didn’t cross our minds, everything we still had to go through,” Chávez recalled last October in an interview with Telemundo News. She spoke from Long Island, New York, where her family lives in uncertainty, after their asylum request was denied.
In Mexico, she said, they were taken to Villahermosa, a city in the state of Tabasco, where they expected to finally catch a plane. But there they had their phones taken and were forced to throw away their suitcases and board a trailer truck.
“We said: ‘We’re not going,’” Chávez recalled, “but by then it doesn’t matter if you want to get in or not: you have to go, because if you don’t, they threaten to turn you over the cartel.”
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
They hadn’t gone two miles when the truck stopped at a checkpoint and a child, around 2-years-old, began to cry. “Either you shut him up or I do,” a coyote demanded of the mother, while outside the vehicle was being inspected, according to Chávez. The smuggler, who was armed, snatched the boy from her, held him dangling by his head, and put one hand on the back of his neck and another on his face, covering his mouth: “The mother just started crying. Then the boy fell fast asleep,” she recalled.
They had barely any food or water. There were plastic buckets at each end of the trailer for those who couldn’t hold in their bodily needs: “People were fainting. A young woman told me not to let the children fall asleep,” Chávez said.
They crossed 900 miles (almost 1,500 kilometers) from Villahermosa to Reynosa, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. In four days they got off the trailer only twice. At one of the stops, already near the border, they walked for several hours up a mountain until nightfall to go around a police checkpoint. “It was so cold it was horrible,” Chávez said, “we felt so weak, I couldn’t walk as fast since I had my daughter. We hadn’t had water in two days.”
The 36-year-old woman claims that when she arrived in Reynosa, the coyotes who greeted them kidnapped her along with her children and her sister-in-law, who was traveling with two children, and held them in a hotel for two weeks with almost no food while they extorted her husband in New Orleans. Rosales paid $14,000 to have them released, she said. Finally, on February 3rd, after traveling for almost a month, Chávez and her children crossed the Rio Grande and surrendered to the Border Patrol in McAllen, Texas.
“I think about the people who die in those containers. It’s horrible to have to beg them, because they could maybe open the door, but they don’t care. They want the money and to deliver the package, because they don’t look at you as a person. They look at us as if we were cattle or animals,” Chávez concluded from Long Island, New York, where her family lives in uncertainty, after their asylum request was denied.
Chávez and her children survived the harrowing journey, but many others have not.
For seven months, Telemundo News and the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP, in Spanish), together with Pie de Página and its allies Chiapas Paralelo, En un 2×3 Tamaulipas, and reporters in Veracruz, Plaza Pública in Guatemala, Contracorriente in Honduras, ICIJ in Dominican Republic and Bellingcat, investigated the flourishing business of smuggling migrants in tractor-trailers across Mexican highways. We interviewed survivors, researchers and former officials, and reviewed thousands of pages of documents. Based on statements from federal institutions and press reports, we created a database with more than 170 cases of trucks that were involved in traffic accidents or were detained or abandoned between 2018 and 2023, which offer important clues about how smugglers operate.
About 19,000 migrants have traveled in these cargo trucks, including more than 3,200 minors. At least 111 migrants who were traveling in tractor-trailers in Mexico have died in the last six years, suffocated to death by the heat and lack of oxygen, or in traffic accidents, among them the trailer that overturned in December 2021 in the state of Chiapas, when 56 people died.
Due to the inconsistent quality of the data, and because Mexican authorities only began tracking cases since 2022, following the Chiapas accident, the data reveals only a small portion of this form of human trafficking.
Justice for victims of this cruel business or for their relatives can be a long time coming, if it ever comes at all: in Mexican district courts there are records for only 35 convictions for human trafficking between 2016 and 2023. Veracruz, Chiapas and Nuevo León, for example, are the states where the most tractor-trailers are detected every year and where the most deaths are recorded, according to our analysis. In Veracruz, during that same period, the Attorney General’s Office opened only three investigations into human trafficking that used this type of vehicle, while in Chiapas and Nuevo León there are no records of any investigations into this at all, according to data provided by that entity.
Trafficking undocumented immigrants is a federal crime in Mexico, though it can be investigated jointly by federal and state prosecutors, as Mexican lawyers and experts explained to Telemundo News. This crime can fall under a “very broad” scope depending on whether it involves organized crime groups or foreign individuals, explained Tonatiuh Guillén, former National Migration Institute (INM) commissioner under the López Obrador administration. However, Guillén described the scarce number of investigations registered at the Prosecutor’s Office as “undeniably insufficient” and said it shows a degree of “inefficacy that is astounding.”
While the flow of migrants passing through Mexico continues to grow (77% more between 2022 and 2023 alone), the restrictive policies of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador to stop the arrival of migrants, partly due to pressure from US authorities, have contributed to many people resorting to dangerous clandestine means, like tractor-trailers, to cross the country on their way the US border, according to documents analyzed and multiple testimonies.
Officials and experts also warn that drug cartels have been taking over the business, which had been traditionally controlled by groups of local coyotes, encouraged by a lack of resources, personnel and technology needed to inspect thousands of trailers; and by the alleged acquiescence of some police forces, who allow free passage to containers as they move migrants along Mexican roads. In the United States, authorities estimate that migrant smuggling generates billions of dollars for cartels, which appear to operate with impunity in Mexico.
A deadly and increasingly common ride
“In these trailers you know you’re either going to live or die,” Reyna Jacinto said, a 43-year-old Guatemalan immigrant who crossed Mexico in a cargo truck on three separate occasions in 2005. Jacinto said she was desperate to reunite with her three children in Maryland and was deported by US authorities four times that year.
Almost two decades later, she is still haunted by images of her first trip from Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the largest city in the Mexican state of Chiapas and about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the Guatemalan border. She claims she was never told she would travel inside a container until she was standing before one. About 130 people were ultimately crammed inside. They traveled for two days and the heat nearly killed them.
“You don’t bring water with you because you can’t pee, you can’t relieve yourself,” Jacinto said in October during an interview from Joliet, Illinois, where she lives and works thanks to an employment permit obtained through a humanitarian parole she obtained in 2019.
“It was sealed shut, it’s like being inside a pressure cooker. The heat suffocates you, I took off my shirt… You could hear screams, people banging on the car to make it stop– no one is going to open the door so you can get out,” Jacinto said, who is originally from Ipala, a town in southeast Guatemala. “I thought I’d never leave and I wouldn’t be able to see my children,” she lamented.
The number of migrants who have been intercepted at the United States southern border has increased significantly over the years. However, in the last three years, under Joe Biden’s Democratic administration, record numbers have been registered: almost 2.48 million during fiscal year 2023.
This record number of arrivals has risen in tandem with the number of trailers that have been intercepted carrying migrants. “They [smugglers] have always used them, but not as much as now,” Timothy J. Tubbs, former special agent at the Department of Homeland Security, told Telemundo News, in June 2023. In Mexico, reports of people located in cargo trucks in the last three years have also been increasing, according to an analysis by Telemundo News and CLIP.
In the state of Chiapas, which borders Guatemala, data provided by the National Migration Institute (INM in Spanish) shows 3,300 people were found inside tractor-trailers in the last five years, 83% of them in 2021 and 2022. The number of rescue operations on record, as the Mexican Government calls them, fell considerably in 2023, but the INM did not explain why the change took place.
The recent increase in migrants fleeing countries such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela may have contributed to the rise in human smuggling in trailers or cargo trucks through Mexico, according to Tonatiuh Guillén López, former commissioner of the National Immigration Institute in the López Obrador Government. He held the position for six months between 2018 and 2019, until he resigned, he said, due to a disagreement he had with the president over an immigration agreement made with the United States.
“Human trafficking is not a new issue,” he said, “what is new is the scale, and in the last two, three years, the scale has become overwhelming, like it never had before.”
The ‘death trailers’ routes
There is no single route to cross Mexico clandestinely, but reports of accidents and intercepted trailers trace the outline of the road network tractor-trailers use to carry migrants. Starting from towns on the Guatemalan border, they move mainly through the Atlantic coast states: Chiapas, Tabasco, Veracruz, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas and Coahuila. Federal highways 180 (which leaves Yucatán and goes north, silhouetting the Gulf of Mexico), 145 and 150 (which run through Veracruz), and 190 (which heads towards the states of Oaxaca and Puebla) are the roads where the most trailers were intercepted during the period analyzed each year. It is also common for them to go up the toll road 145D, which leaves Tuxtla Gutiérrez and crosses the state of Veracruz, where on more than one occasion federal agents have found containers full of dehydrated people.
A Mexican truck driver, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, claimed to have been transporting migrants from Michoacán to Tamaulipas since 2022. His story closely mirrors anecdotes that immigrants and other truckers have shared over the years: he explained to a reporter from this alliance that sometimes migrants arrive in Mexico City “however they can” and are contacted at the Mexican capital’s bus stations by the coyotes. “They tell them, ‘we have safe transportation to the border,’” he said, and for about 13,500 Mexican pesos ($818) they take them to Michoacán. There the tractor-trailers travel on federal highway 57 through Guanajuato and San Luís Potosí up to Reynosa.
The driver explained that a trip from Michoacán to Matamoros, to the US border, lasts about 15 hours, and that they transport people of all ages: “Children, infants, babies, women, entire families.” He estimated that between 50 and 100 people travel in each container, and said that drivers are prohibited from stopping along the way to check the conditions migrants are traveling in: “There is no request that ‘you have to make sure they’re comfortable or well-fed.’ The only thing that matters is that they reach their destination.”
The truck driver said that for each trip (or “package” delivered, as they call it) drivers are offered between 80,000 and 100,000 Mexican pesos (between $4,800 and $6,000), but it is not unusual for them to end up receiving less than half that amount. “You have to take it. It’s non-negotiable,” he said. Drivers do not necessarily work for these criminal groups, he explained, but are recruited randomly at freight stations. Refusing can mean a death sentence, he said.
“You’re in bad luck if you have to go to where they have a trip set up,” he said, “they come and tell you, ‘I need you to do this trip for me. Everything is already arranged’ (…) it’s a nicer way of forcing you to do it.”
Cartels now control human trafficking
Former Commissioner Guillén claimed that human smuggling on tractor-trailers within Mexico is now under the control of drug trafficking cartels, a claim supported by US experts and authorities. “They own drug trafficking, and, of course, they own human trafficking as well,” Guillén said. “They are heavily involved there and they own the communities,” he added.
In January, during a summit on combating human smuggling networks organized by The Cipher Brief magazine, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, David Fitzgerald, stated that the cartels have taken over this business because “they can profit with very low risk.”
Traditionally, coyotes paid cartels a fee to move migrants through their territories and operate in border towns that were under their control. But that dynamic changed in 2019, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting director, Patrick J. Lechleitner, said during a congressional hearing. “Some have taken a more active approach to human trafficking: they are increasing and diversifying their sources of income through an activity they consider low risk. The cartels have adapted,” he explained.
The penalties for human trafficking in Mexico range between 8 and 16 years in prison, and are more severe than in the United States (where a person who transports undocumented immigrants faces a maximum of five years in prison). But most cases are not investigated because they are not reported, and when investigations are carried out they progress very slowly or come to a dead end, explained Mónica Oehler, an expert migration researcher at the Amnesty International Mexico City office.
Fitzgerald pointed to the Gulf cartel, in Tamaulipas and border territories; to the Zetas, in Nuevo León and Veracruz; and the Sinaloa cartel as “a big problem” for human trafficking in Mexico: “Two years ago these guys only controlled the border. They realized, ‘My God, you can really make money here.’ And what are the risks?: a couple of arrested coyotes who spend a couple of months in jail,” he said during the panel in which other former US officials participated.
“In recent years, the Mexican cartels have basically gone from operating on or near the border to controlling the entire immigration system from Guatemala to the US border,” explained Fitzgerald, who worked for 37 years at the CIA and has been an intelligence advisor to the Central Command at the Department of Defense.
The fragmentation of drug cartels, beginning in the 2000s, also led to the emergence of regional criminal groups that lack the capacity for large-scale international drug trafficking, but have pursued other illegal businesses such as extortion, kidnapping and human trafficking, according to an October 2021 study from the University of San Diego. This happened for example, In Chiapas, where human trafficking was originally controlled by the Chamula cartel. A former immigration officer familiar with the region, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, explained the group made an agreement with the Sinaloa cartel to operate the business together.
The truck driver who claims to transport migrants from Michoacán to Tamaulipas explained that in the past year his workload has increased, and, based on the traffic he has seen on the border, he estimated that in Tamaulipas alone about 3,000 people are trafficked every month. “The same is done throughout the Mexican border,” he said, “of course, it’s different cartels, but they do the same thing.”
He said he has taken migrants in trucks that usually transport cucumbers or watermelons. And he claimed to have transported drugs on other occasions: for every 10 trips, he estimated, “you could do two with migrants and one with drugs.”
He also said that both drivers and the people they transport are at the mercy of rivalries between cartels. In Tamaulipas, he said, the safe houses he has seen are jealously guarded by the Gulf cartel so that rival groups “don’t steal their migrants.”
The safety of drivers also hangs from a thread: “If an opposing [criminal] group catches a load, or identifies you, or manages to catch you, then you could probably lose your life,” he said.
Telemundo News has not been able to independently verify the truck driver’s claims.
A rise in cases, and in deaths
The five trailers carrying the most migrants between 2022 and 2023 were caught in the last two years. In one of these cases, in July 2022, reported by the Reuters agency, around 400 people almost suffocated to death after the driver abandoned the trailer shortly before a checkpoint in Acayucan, Veracruz. The migrants broke the container’s roof in desperation and jumped out; some broke their ankles and knees during the escape.
Accidents, deaths and injuries have also increased: 72% of the 111 deaths recorded on board cargo trucks in the past six years occurred between 2021 and 2023, our investigation revealed. One of the victims, 20-year-old Clorinda Alarcón, from Nicaragua, died in Coahuila on March 6th, 2023, when the trailer she was traveling in with another 160 people was left on the side of the road in Monclova, Coahuila. They were abandoned, without water or ventilation, to suffocate in temperatures that reached 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40 Celsius). Alarcón was traveling with her husband and she was pregnant.
Because of this case, the Coahuila Attorney General’s Office opened a file for attempted homicide and aggravated migrant trafficking, according to a CNDH file to which Noticias Telemundo and its partners had access to. The prosecutor’s office was asked about the progress of the investigation but it did not respond.
Last year was the deadliest for migrants traveling on Mexican roads: 151 people died in all manners of accidents on roads and railways, according to the International Organization for Migration. In the past three years, more than half of all deaths that usually take place in a decade have been recorded. Guatemalan and Honduran are the nationalities that appear most frequently in this list.
The worst tragedy occurred on December 9th, 2021, in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, when 56 people, mostly from the Dominican Republic and Guatemala, died when the trailer they were traveling in with another 100 migrants overturned. The Mexican Government then created a working commission made up of six countries, including the United States, to investigate and dismantle the criminal network held responsible. It promised results “soon.” But the group only met twice, the last in January 2022, according to a record provided by the Mexican Foreign Ministry. They never saw each other again. The report with the results promised by then Mexican Foreign Minister, Marcelo Ebrard, was never presented.
As to judicial investigations, although arrests were made in Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Guatemala, there is no evidence that these cases led to any convictions. In Chiapas, the case remains open and only one of the four detained suspects remains in preventive detention, according to a federal official who requested his identity be protected.
The Mexican Foreign Ministry did not answer a list of questions sent by Telemundo News and CLIP about the results it promised in 2021 when it announced the creation of the working group.
That accident may have been a watershed moment for Mexican authorities, who up to then appeared to be blind to the sheer magnitude of the numbers of people who are smuggled in cargo trucks. In a response sent to Noticias Telemundo and CLIP, the National Migration Institute acknowledged that it only has data on cases and migrants rescued from trailers as of January 2022, when the IMN state offices began issuing daily incident reports.
The criminal case on these 56 deaths also illustrates the impunity with which criminal groups operate. This is due in part to how slowly the Mexican justice system conducts its investigations: it solves only 10 out of every 100 crimes reported, according to a recent report by the public policy analysis center, Mexico Evalua. It considered the authorities, “as a general rule, very inefficient.”
Furthermore, migrants who board tractor-trailers deceived by smugglers, or who were victims of abuse, kidnapping or who were involved in accidents, do not have effective means for legalizing their immigration status and be able to remain in Mexico to then report these incidents and participate in the judicial process.
This is the situation that some victims of the Chiapas accident found themselves in. They explained to the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) that they refused to receive the Visitor Card for Humanitarian Reasons offered to them by the National Migration Institute because officials from that same institution warned them that, if they accepted it, they would have to return to their home country on their own.
Whether it is out of fear from the coyotes, fear of being deported if they reach out to Mexican authorities, “it had never even entered their heads when you asked them ‘And did you report any of this?,’” Mónica Oehler, from Amnesty International, explained. “It’s a perfect circle of impunity,” she said.
It also didn’t help that when a migrant became a witness in a judicial investigation, the authorities held them in immigration stations, in some cases for months, awaiting to be called to testify before a judge, Oehler explained. “We must look for mechanisms for access to justice where people can give their testimonies and continue their lives, but in dignified conditions.”
In March 2023, Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional to detain people in immigration stations for more than 36 hours.
Corruption and collusion
How is it possible for tractor-trailers loaded with migrants to travel thousands of miles along federal highways, avoiding inspection points, without being detected?
“For a trailer carrying 100 migrants to go through a territory where the National Migration Institute, the National Guard, the Army, the Navy are present… it is impossible for no one to be aware this trailer is carrying migrants,” said Yesenia Valdez, lawyer and coordinator of comprehensive legal defense at the Foundation for Justice and State, which offers legal counseling to migrants and victims of human rights violations in Mexico.
“It’s not just one corrupt official who got caught. We are talking about entire institutions that are part of this criminal network,” she added.
María Alejandra Mángano, from the Ibero-American Network of Prosecutors Specialized in Human Trafficking and Illicit Smuggling of Migrants, pointed out (without referring to any country specifically) that “there is no organized crime that can develop and be profitable if it hasn’t in some way permeated the authorities.”
In 2019, this network of prosecutors detected 28 different nationalities among those detained, and last year that number rose to 49. This rise in migrants who journey to the United States through Latin America and how increasingly diverse their backgrounds are suggests that human smuggling “is mutating towards a more organized business” and is evidence for the need to investigate possible corruption cases that facilitate this growth, Mángano explained.
“In most cases, if not all, possible corruption of public officials, possible collusion, negligence or inefficiency is required (…) Without discussing any country in particular, the truth is that if crime grows, it is because the levels of public corruption are growing as well in some way,” the prosecutor said.
Testimonies from migrants, operators and experts point to the existence of a network of complicity within Mexico that has allowed this business to flourish.
The truck driver who transports migrants from Michoacán to Tamaulipas said that smugglers pay soldiers 500 Mexican pesos per migrant (about $30) to let them continue on their way to the city of Matamoros. “[They pay] each time they stop you… it can be three, four or five times,” he said.
Telemundo News and CLIP have not been able to independently confirm this allegation. The National Ministry of Defense avoided referring to the trucker’s claims, arguing that it has no jurisdiction on immigration matters. The National Guard did not respond to questions sent by this alliance.
The truck driver claimed they usually travel at dawn to avoid National Immigration Institute checkpoints. “Normally (the smugglers) tell you to go through the Buenos Aires (checkpoint), at the Y on the road, between 2 and 3 in the morning, because that’s when immigration isn’t there,” he said, referring to where the roads that lead to Matamoros and Reynosa meet.
If immigration agents stop them, the truck driver said, smugglers pay them 1,000 Mexican pesos (about $60) per person inside the tractor-trailer. The payment, he said, is made by someone who is far off location. “If that payment is not authorized, if they haven’t confirmed they received the payment, they won’t let you through,” he concluded.
Telemundo News and CLIP have not been able to independently confirm these allegations. The National Migration Institute did not respond to the questions sent.
However, testimonies from migrants support the truck driver’s experiences. David Exzequiel Portobanco, a 38-year-old Nicaraguan who traveled in a tractor-trailer in November 2021, told Noticias Telemundo that on the way between Mexico City and Monterrey, agents in “black uniforms” stopped the truck for an hour and a half while they allegedly negotiated with the coyotes.
“It was about 10 at night. The police stopped us (…) they opened the truck and shone a flashlight inside. And then they took a while there, negotiating, I imagine. Then they closed it again. Behind, in the truck where we were going, were two people, I imagine they were in charge of the coyotes (…) They stayed talking and returned to the truck,” Portobanco narrated from his home in Moyogalpa, where he returned last December after living two years in the United States.
Reyna Jacinto, the Guatemalan migrant who traveled on three separate occasions aboard a trailer in 2005, claimed that on one of those trips, during a stop, she heard how the coyotes were negotiating payments with a group of soldiers: “They [the coyotes] call them guachos. They were talking about amounts of money. But yeah, those were soldiers.”
José Luis Reyes Farías, the director at a migrant shelter in Acayucán, Veracruz, said that he has received migrants that have told him they’ve passed up to three security checkpoints where they asked for money to let them go through. At this shelter, in the last six years, according to our data analysis, at least 8 cargo trucks have been detected carrying more than 1,400 people.
“There’s probably groups dedicated to human trafficking that have special treatment, an agreement with immigration authorities. I don’t doubt that. I can’t find an explanation for actions that go unpunished like this, people traveling en masse, in all these different ways, without the complicity of immigration authorities,” Farías said.
Corruption problems within the National Migration Institute are well known. In August 2020, the INM fired more than 1,000 officials for alleged corrupt acts, including a dozen heads of the Mexico City delegation. Months earlier, President López Obrador had announced the dismissal of 500 agents for the same reasons, saying that the Institute was one of several public entities that “was completely ruined.” It is not known if any of the cases are directly connected to the trailers business.
“There is a long history of complaints of corruption in our institutions,” former commissioner Tonatiuh Guillén admitted. “At the National Migration Institute it happened to me often: complaints from local, state and municipal police, who were also part of extortion activities, often of migrants.”
Another problem that plagues Mexico is the lack of controls over cargo truck fleets out on the roads, which in 2021 comprised more than 600,000 units. A 2017 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) warned that “Mexican police forces do not have sufficient resources” to supervise that heavy vehicles comply with current safety standards, and reveals the country lacks specialized inspectors. The Ministry of Communications and Transportation (SCT) currently employs around 400 officers, a number that should be between 750 and 3,000 in proportion to the country’s population, according to the OECD.
The report, which does not address human smuggling, warns that the supervision of transportation on highways is a dangerous activity for police officers in Mexico due to high levels of cargo theft and drug trafficking, and proposes creating a special unit that only supervises compliance with safety standards, including the weight and mechanical condition of the vehicles.
A hard journey for children
Children also travel in these trailers, under inhuman conditions, sometimes alone or while they’re ill. On May 7th, 2019, the Federal Police located 289 people, mostly from Honduras and Guatemala, in two trucks at the checkpoint known as La Coma.
Among the migrants were minors sick with chickenpox, smallpox and measles. In June 2021, coyotes abandoned Wilder Ladino, a two-year-old boy who was traveling alone in a cargo truck with 100 other people, on a highway in Veracruz. A 25-year-old man had died in that container. That day no one could tell the rescuers who the child belonged to, but a reporter from this alliance managed to speak with his family in Honduras and clarify his story.
On June 25th, 2021, his father, Isidro Ladino García, who was nicknamed Chilo, said goodbye to his family in San José de Miramar, Honduras, and left on his way north with little Wilder. Three days later, the child’s mother, Lorena García, received a call from a Honduran consulate in Mexico informing her that her son had been located alone next to an abandoned trailer truck.
The family explained to Contracorriente in July 2021 that Chilo was separated by the authorities in Tuxtla Gutiérrez from the group he was traveling with, but no one and nothing prevented his son from continuing the journey in a cargo truck that traveled thousands of miles north, before being abandoned by the side of the road near the US border.
Immigration authorities returned the boy to his family days later. Telemundo News and its partners have not been able to confirm the reasons that led to the separation of Chilo from his son during the trip.
It is also not unusual for authorities to find infants barely a few months old in these rolling ovens, as happened in October 2022, when a cargo truck with 110 people was intercepted in Tuxtla Gutiérrez. Inside was a 5-month-old baby from Ecuador and six other children between 2 and 11 years old, according to the IMN report.
Yanira Chávez, who is also from Honduras, laments from her Long Island home the four “horrible” days her children spent inside a trailer with barely any water and on the verge of suffocating. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,” she added. She does not forget the smell of excrement, the heat, feeling like she could not breathe, the people fainting, the cries and the prayers, the dust that seeped through a hole in the container, the four days she spent without bathing, cramped with bent knees, her legs numb.
“I never tire of telling my children, ‘Forgive me for everything I unknowingly put you through.’ I know I risked their lives, but I felt like I couldn’t leave them in my home country because it was going to be much worse,” she said through tears.
Yanira said her children have been strong and have left behind the traumatic memories of the trip: leaving their country, the parching thirst and the abuse from the coyotes, but she acknowledged her daughter still has nightmares. “It is very difficult to forget.”
Multiple studies have shown that the difficult conditions of irregular migration –fear, hunger, lack of medical care and facilities– impact children’s mental health, who can suffer from anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Why do migrants end up in cargo trucks?
Reynaldo Campos, who is 40 years old and hails from Honduras, undertook the trip to the United States together with three cousins in April 2020, from Ocotepeque, a municipality on the border with Guatemala and El Salvador. He said that they did not have enough money to pay a coyote, so they traveled on their own and managed to get to the city of Querétaro by bus. There, together with other migrants, they paid to get into a refrigerated cargo trailer where they spent an entire night, almost freezing to death.
“It’s hard, when the children start crying,” he explained, “they cover [their mouths] so they don’t scream.”
They traveled more than 430 miles (700 kilometers) to Monterrey, where they were dropped off. Without money, they continued on foot; about three hours later they were intercepted by immigration agents. Campos was detained for three weeks until he was deported and sent on a bus to Guatemala. Since he still had no money, he returned to Honduras on foot and hitchhiking. “It was very hard for us… crossing all of Guatemala on foot is miserable,” Campos said, who currently works in construction in Ocotepeque.
Data from 2018, the most recently published by Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a Mexican research center, show that migrants from Honduras, like Reynaldo, are the ones who make the most trips in tractor-trailers to cross Mexico.
But it’s not just Central Americans who travel in cargo trucks: in the lists of survivors frequently published by the INM are Dominicans, Ecuadorians, Venezuelans, Nepalese, Bangladeshi families, one or two Uzbeks, Indians, Africans, and Haitians, to name a few nationalities.
What pushes migrants to take these risks? “In Mexico, there’s currently no regulation of any mechanism that allows the free transit” of migrants, explained Axel González, lawyer at the Legal Clinic for Refugees of the Universidad Iberoamericana at Mexico City.
There are no legal routes for undocumented migrants to cross the country safely. López Obrador became president in December 2018, inheriting from his predecessor an aggressive immigration policy that was already pushing migrants to cross Mexico clandestinely, including in cargo trucks. When he came to power, AMLO promised a “welcoming country” and promised foreigners could “transit safely” or even stay in Mexico. He announced friendly immigration policies and a work visa program for people from Central America. However, just six months later, he agreed to reinforce the border with Guatemala and increase deportations under pressure from former Republican President Donald Trump, who threatened to impose tariffs on Mexican products.
He also assigned 6,000 National Guard agents to “rescue” and “register” migrants. Since then, that figure is five times larger. López Obrador has also attempted to transfer the National Guard (a body that he himself created) to the Secretariat of National Defense, which would militarize these immigration controls.
Between June 2019 and February 2020, the Government detained more than 130,000 migrants, an almost 30% increase compared to the same period the previous year, when Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration was ending.
López Obrador’s government also ordered bus companies to require documents from passengers — including Mexicans — before selling them a ticket. The president said at a press conference that he had been threatened by the Trump administration with “tariffs.” “There is evidence that, in a passenger truck, a considerable percentage are traveling from out of the country, without registration, we are going to impose order on that,” he promised.
At that same conference, however, he recognized the danger migrants face when traveling inside a cargo trailer. Three days before, four vans carrying around 800 people had been located in Veracruz. “We are talking about families, about children in an overcrowded setting, at risk of suffocation. This is all up to us to avoid and that is what we’re doing by combating illegality,” he said.
Months later, the Mexican Government threatened bus companies with sanctions if they did not check passengers’ documents, according to an official letter signed by the director of the National Migration Institute, Francisco Garduño Yáñez, to which Telemundo News and its partners had access to. The measure was declared unconstitutional by a court in Mexico City in October last year, and ruled it discriminates against migrants, violates their freedom of movement, and puts “life and dignity at risk […]. by fostering the black market for trafficking undocumented immigrants.”
“They turned these companies into immigration agents,” explained Gretchen Kuhner, director at the Institute for Women in Migration, who filed the judicial appeal against the measure. Kuhner, an American who has lived in Mexico for 26 years, together with a notary agent, attempted to purchase a bus ticket without immigration documents at the Central de Autobuses del Norte, in Mexico City. They tried five different stalls and all refused to sell her a ticket, she said.
Her priority now is to monitor that the bus companies comply with the Court order and stop asking migrants for documents. The National Migration Institute declined to answer Telemundo News and its partners if it had canceled the measure.
Both Kuhner and Mónica Oehler, from Amnesty International, also criticized immigration controls that seek to prevent migrants from traveling in safe vehicles and that turn Mexico’s interior into a “vertical border.” “[Authorities] go on the roads and stop people arbitrarily,” Kuhner said, “they stop cars and trucks [buses] and search them; it happens all the way from Chiapas to the northern border.”
“When someone offers them to cross Mexico in just two days under horrible conditions, it seems quite attractive compared to everything they would have to go through if they made the trip on their own,” Oehler explained.
The National Human Rights Commission in Mexico noted in 2022, in its report on the trailer accident in Chiapas, that due to the fear of being deported by Mexico, migrants are forced to “hire the transfer service offered by traffickers who have little to no interest in their life or well-being.”
The crisis at the US-Mexican border is once again the pivotal point of November’s US presidential election, and is also crucial in Mexico’s presidential election on June 2nd, when López Obrador’s successor will be elected.
In the United States, President Biden has already made his intentions clear in further tightening rules for requesting asylum and quickly deporting those who do not qualify. In Mexico, the candidate from the ruling party, Claudia Sheinbaum, supports López Obrador’s immigration measures, while Xóchitl Gálvez, from the opposition, accuses him of handing over Mexico as a safe third country to the US without obtaining anything in return, leaving migrants unprotected.
For now, it seems the only option for undocumented migrants to move safely through Mexican territory is to apply for refugee status, but the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance has practically collapsed and this process can be delayed from three to six months. “Since the López Obrador Administration began, there has been no interest in strengthening the State’s protection initiatives. And when there is, the budget of the Refugee Assistance Commission is minuscule,” denounces former commissioner Tonatiuh Guillén.
A human smuggler’s fee
“They asked 125,000 quetzales (about $16,233) per head from us because it was a special trip,” said Sandra Coc Mohulds De Yat from her home in Río Dulce, in the department of Izabal, Guatemala.
In December 2021, her brother, Andrés, her husband, Florentin, and her brother-in-law, Santiago Bolom Coy, contacted a local coyote to take them to the US. The trafficker promised them a safe journey. “He was saying they weren’t going to suffer, they weren’t going to walk through the desert and they were going to go through by car. But unfortunately, they put them in a van,” she explained.
On December 9, the three men boarded a tractor-trailer in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. They had already handed over part of the money and felt that they no longer had any other choice: “In the end my brother-in-law said, ‘Let’s go because there’s no other way, we’re going to make it to our destination,’” Coc Mohulds explained. Their trailer was the one that overturned because it was going over the speed limit and in which 56 people died — among them Santiago, Sandra’s brother-in-law — near Tuxtla Gutiérrez, about 30 miles (52 kilometers) from where they had left, in a place now known as Migrant’s Curve.
The rate coyotes charge migrants to journey in tractor-trailers depends on factors as varied as the place where they board the trailer, their nationality and their support networks in the United States. “It’s a thoroughly analyzed business,” explained Brenda Ochoa, director at the Fray Matías Center in Tapachula, Chiapas. Migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and the Dominican Republic interviewed by Telemundo News and its partners claim to have paid between $10,000 and $19,000 per person for coyotes to help them cross Mexico, including the journey inside a cargo truck.
Reynaldo Campos said he paid 10,000 Mexican pesos (currently $511) for the 11-hour trip from Querétaro to Monterrey. In 2005, Reyna Jacinto paid 40,000 quetzales for the trip from Guatemala, almost $8,000 at the current exchange rate. Enzo Eras, who traveled that same year from Ecuador crossing a sizable chunk of Mexico by trailer, paid $14,000 for the trip, which started in his home country, not knowing it would take him to the inside of a container, according to the account he gave Telemundo News.
The services coyotes offer have become increasingly expensive, especially in the last decade. This change first became apparent during the first years of the Peña Nieto administration, when migrants began to hire smugglers to cross Mexico more frequently, forced by that government’s immigration policies, according to a 2020 study by the Strauss Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
“This is no longer just a group of informal coyotes smuggling five, 10, 15 people,” John Cohen, former acting undersecretary for Intelligence and Counterterrorism at the Department of Homeland Security, said in January. Cohen also served on the human trafficking panel. “It’s a multimillion-dollar business,” he added.
It is estimated that annual profits of criminal groups that smuggle migrants through the US border, including drug cartels, could amount to $13 billion, a report by The New York Times found, citing data federal.
Social media can help coyotes connect with migrants in some cases, but for many Central Americans, word-of-mouth remains one of the fundamental ways to contact smugglers in their towns, migrants said. Local coyotes, reached through friends or acquaintances in their neighborhoods, or family members who have already left or tried to leave, seem to be the first links in the long odyssey towards the American dream.
On the other side of the border
The US Government knows that drug cartels have been taking over human smuggling on both sides of the border, including transporting people in trailers through US and Mexico highways, the head of the Border Patrol, Jason Owens, acknowledged to Telemundo News.
“The same groups that are in charge of drug trafficking are also transporting people. They’re making money on both sides with this,” Owens said during a video call in February.
For drug cartels, part of the appeal of smuggling migrants is the possibility of making money in an illegal activity that authorities do not devote the same attention to as drug trafficking, Arístides Jiménez, a former Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agent, told Telemundo News last year. “There are fewer people investigating a very profitable crime (…) moving and transporting drugs comes with a lot of scrutiny: SEDENA in Mexico, federal organizations: the DEA, the FBI, the HSI, everyone is looking at drugs,” he said.
In recent years, as the US government increases its pressure on Mexico to stop migrants from passing through its territory, it has also deployed resources to investigate smugglers in migrants’ own countries.
In 2021, after the number of migrants arriving at the border doubled in the first months of the Biden administration, the United States announced two programs to combat migrant smuggling organizations outside its borders, targeting criminal groups in particular that operate in Mexico and in the countries known as the Northern Triangle, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
Through one of these initiatives, the Department of Justice was able to extradite several smugglers from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, including four Guatemalans who last November received sentences of between 10 and 40 years in prison. They were accused of smuggling Guatemalan migrants through Mexico on their way to the US border. Among them was a young woman who died in Odessa, Texas, in April 2021, and whose body was left on the side of a country road. Her relatives had paid smugglers $10,000 for the trip; after her death, they tried to bribe them and buy their silence, according to the federal indictment.
The Border Patrol also investigates these criminal networks in coordination with Mexican authorities, Jason Owens explained, without offering further detail. “We have specific investigations on this trailer tactic. People are dying every year on both sides of the border,” he said.
Mónica Oehler, from Amnesty International, however, said she believes the problem “will never end if immigration is not approached differently,” and migrants are seen “not as a threat” but as people “in a crisis situation in need of protection.”
Former commissioner Tonatiuh Guillén said he thinks the issue is larger than a border and attributes part of the responsibility to political calculations within the United States. Immigration is at the epicenter of the conflict between Joe Biden and Donald Trump and the ideological differences between Republicans and Democrats have prevented for decades any progress on immigration reform, in a country in dire need of workers and where the migrant population has been key to covering that shortage: last year immigrants were responsible for 60% of the workforce’s growth.
“A good part of the regional solution begins and ends with the political dispute in the United States. What we see as a migration crisis is actually first and foremost a political crisis,” Guillén said.
Meanwhile, as presidential election campaigns are in full swing on both sides of the border, and thousands of investigation files become stranded in Mexican courts, the flow of trucks loaded with migrants on their way north continues. Thousands of people continue to pay what to them is a small fortune to risk their lives and fight for a different future in the United States, as Yanira Chávez and her children did. In their journey they are deceived, persecuted, extorted and threatened, while clinging to their lives inside a container with barely any oxygen, through rivers or under the scorching desert sun.
“When we finally crossed that river on a raft, my son, a 9-year-old boy, said to me: ‘Don’t worry, mommy, we’re finally getting out of this hell,’” Chávez said through tears. “‘It’s going to end soon and in God’s name we will be OK.’”
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
