A VIP trip from the Cuba to the Mexican state of Chiapas can cost between $5,000 and $7,000 per person.
14ymedio, Mexico City, 31 October 2024 — A VIP trip from Cuba to the Mexican state of Chiapas, on the border with Guatemala, can cost Cubans leaving the Island between 5,000 and 7,000 dollars per person. The coyotes claim that traffic is “safe” and that they know the tricks to mislead or convince the authorities. “There are no robberies, much less threats with firearms,” a coyote who calls himself ‘AK-47’ told Diario del Sur in an article published on Tuesday.
The search for customers begins on social networks, where traffickers present themselves as travel agents, the same source tells the Mexican newspaper. “We use the TikTok platform, which is the one that is fashionable. It helps us to publicize testimonies that people arrived well at their destination,” he explains. The flight to Nicaragua costs $3,600, and if you want a more thorough service, an extra $1,200 guarantees the arrival to Tapachula without problems. For that price, security is a fact: “We have bought the police. We use code words and above all ’official’ stamps, each one from his own company, and we avoid confrontations,” he says.
According to AK-47, the “center of operations” is Cuba, from where flights depart to Nicaragua, Russia, Peru and Guyana. There they have their “travel agency” installed and promote plane tickets to those destinations. If the client requires it, they provide ground transportation to get closer to the final goal: the United States.
Diario del Sur managed to interview a Cuban woman who hired — for herself, her husband and their two children — the agency’s services to fly to Bogotá (Colombia) and make a second stop in Nicaragua. In this way, Yadiris, 45, found it cheaper to cross than if she flew directly to Managua. From there, the coyotes took care of moving them to Mexico, where the family ran out of money.
The trip wasn’t easy either. According to Yadiris, the driver who took them to Tapachula drove as if the vehicle were a racing car. Once in Mexico, they had to look for work to support themselves, but the Cuban woman says that she is still in contact with the coyote.
Karla, another Cuban interviewed by the Mexican media, tells a similar story. After reaching Tapachula, she was also stranded without money. Now she works as a waitress, because “it’s easy money,” and she hopes in a few months to have saved enough to request a CBP One appointment with US Customs and Border Protection.
Recently interviewed by 14ymedio, another Cuban migrant, experienced in the tricks of migration, Alexander Mori, told this newspaper that he has been approached by coyotes to offer him “facilities” to reach the border. “To get to Tijuana they charge you 2,000 dollars in a van, and 1,500 if you make the trip by bus. The traffickers give you a bracelet, which they say is to prevent Migration officials from arresting you,” said the Cuban, who hopes that in Chiapas, he will get a CBP One appointment.
According to figures from the Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid, up to September of this year, a total of 39,754 migrants had gone to their offices in Palenque and Tapachula seeking asylum. At the beginning of October, the director of the Human Dignity Center, Luis García Villagrán, said that more than 45,000 illegal foreigners were stranded in that state, of which some 1,000 were Cubans, due to the delay in the procedures through the US application.
Last week the mayor of Tapachula, Yamil Melgar Bravo, told EFE that the municipality has received 60% of the migrants in Mexico. Irregular migration rose by 193% year-on-year in the first half of the year to more than 712,000 people nationwide, according to the Government’s Migration Policy Unit.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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