14ymedio, Mexico City, 3 January 2024 — A coyote abandoned 25 Cubans on Thursday in the trailer of a cargo truck on a road in the Ignacio Zaragoza ejido, in the municipality of Suchiate, Chiapas, bordering Guatemala. The migrants were rescued by state police, who after a medical check-up, handed them over to the Immigrant Prosecutor’s Office to determine their status.
These Cubans, among whom are several women and minors, asked to communicate with 14ymedio, but the authorities denied it, arguing that “the investigation could be hindered.” The minors were taken to a shelter of the National System for the Integral Development of Families (DIF) in Tapachula.
From Tecún Umán, in Guatemala, to Suchiate and Tapachula, in Mexico, the authorities carry out tours to combat irregular entries. However, they have not been able to eradicate the networks of coyotes in the service of criminal groups.
Of an average of 1,200 migrants who illegally enter Mexico daily through the Guatemalan border, at least 50% are being kidnapped by “cartels in the municipality of Suchiate,” denounced priests from the San Andrés Apóstol parish and the Pastoral Coordination of Migrants in Guatemala.
Father Percy Cervera of Guatemalan Pastoral confirmed the increase of “migrants of 56 nationalities” in the last quarter of 2024 who seek to reach the United States. They have become a vulnerable group that is “prey to criminals, authorities, transporters and many people who take advantage of their situation,” he said.
For his part, the priest of the parish of San Andrés Apóstol de Ciudad Hidalgo, Heyman Vásquez Medina, warned Diario del Sur in August last year of the presence of coyotes under the control of factions of the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. They “arrive in vans wearing balaclavas and with weapons. They intercept the migrants and take them to farms, where they keep them for days until their relatives pay the sums they demand,” he said.
The Associated Press agency documented the kidnapping of migrants in Suchiate last November. Before crossing the river that separates Guatemala from Mexico, they are detained by human traffickers. Heyman Vázquez, parish priest in Ciudad Hidalgo – a town near the border – said in the same interview that the cartels dominate both sides of the border. “They are the ones who say who passes and who doesn’t.”
The migrants are grouped and taken to a farm known as “the chicken coop” or “la gallera.” There they demand 100 dollars for transit duty, and those who pay are marked and released. Those who cannot cover the fee remain in place, but the sum is increased by the food they receive. “When they can’t pay with money, they pay with their bodies, especially women, adolescents and homosexual men,” Enrique Vidal Olascoaga, general director of the Fray Matías de Córdova Human Rights Center in Tapachula, told the same agency.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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