Coffins containing the remains of 72 immigrants massacred in Tamaulipas. (AP)
“Immigrants are a business worth $3 billion dollars per year, which is divided up amongst the criminal cartels and corrupt police forces, both in the US and in Mexico. To cross to the other side they pay between $4,000 and $15,000 dollars.
Often, it is only the principle of martyrdom that drives the “American dream,” which has already been achieved by (in addition to tens of millions of Mexicans) a million Hondurans, two million Salvadorans, and three million Guatemalans who send about $10 billion dollars in cash remittances to their families in their countries of origin every year.
Every year, according to official statistics, at least 20,000 immigrants are kidnapped by criminal cartels and forced to pay, in addition to the cost of their passage across the border, ransoms of between $1,000 and $5,000 dollars each. They become trade items between the cartels, as if they were packages, or they are murdered has hostages in order to convince others to pay.
In 2009, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) published a volume entitled “Welcome to the Kidnappers’ Hell,” in which it denounced the mistreatment of Central American immigrants and collected numerous testimonies regarding the involvement of Mexican authorities in the kidnappings.
The report describes kidnapping’s characteristics. The immigrant is usually detained by the police and sold to criminal organizations, who sent him to isolated places like the San Fernando ranch where the Tamaulipas massacre occurred.
There, the beatings, the harassment, the rapes, and the torture begin. The goal is to obtain family members’ telephone numbers so that [the criminals] can obtain exorbitant ransoms from the immigrants, almost all of them very poor.
In general, those who cannot pay are murdered.”