Coyote Inc.

Jaime Cordoba, smooth-faced and barely 18, sits crossed-legged in a corner of Agua Prieta's central plaza, sketching a map in the dirt. His audience is a family of five that has just gotten off the bus in this dusty Mexican border town with hopes of getting to Phoenix, Ariz. Cordoba makes his pitch: "You'll cross in one day. And you only pay if you make it." The price is $650 a person. From a nearby pay phone, the father calls relatives in Colorado, telling them to be ready to wire the money to Phoenix in a few days. Then Cordoba hands him a slip of paper with the address of a hotel a few blocks away. His instructions are simple: "Wait there until tomorrow."

From here other men will take over. And taken over they have. In the last year, Agua Prieta, with a permanent population of 120,000, has become the people-smuggling capital of Mexico, and Douglas, Ariz., the town of 15,000 across the border, the latest battleground in the U.S. war on illegal immigration. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of illegals a day evade the U.S. Border Patrol, prompting some American ranchers to round up illegals themselves. The coyotes, as smugglers have been known since the days when their trade was a series of mom-and-pop operations, have evolved into a highly organized, multimillion-dollar network, widely believed to have overtaken drug trafficking as Agua Prieta's leading industry. Its success is driving an economic boom. "I think there is more money in smuggling aliens than there is in drugs," says an agent in the Border Patrol's smuggling-investigation unit. "One reason why we are seeing the organizations getting more sophisticated is that the narcotics smugglers are switching over to aliens."

Some simple math shows why. In March, the peak of the migrant-worker season, the more than 1,200 Border Patrol agents covering the 281-mile stretch of Arizona border known as the Tucson sector caught 60,537 migrants, almost half of them in the 30-mile section around Douglas. The total for the sector this year is expected to top 450,000, or about 51 an hour. By the most conservative estimates, at least twice that many are getting through, often only after several rounds of being caught and returned to Mexico. At $800 a head, the average price this year, that adds up to $900 million--nearly as much as the Border Patrol spent last year nationwide trying to stop them.

The business is as old as illegal immigration itself. But just a decade ago, the trip to Phoenix cost $200--if migrants bothered to use a guide at all--and the money was paid in advance. Now, few illegals attempt the journey alone, and the smugglers offer a guarantee: you don't pay until Phoenix. The coyote is still the boss of the operation, but he employs several subcontractors (graphic). A street-level recruiter works in Agua Prieta and throughout Mexico and is the only person in the chain who gets his money even if the migrants are turned back. A guide uses a mobile phone--and in some cases even night-vision goggles--to deliver migrants across the border, either to a waiting car on the highway or a safe house in Douglas. A safe-house operator keeps migrants overnight until they are picked up. A driver delivers the migrants to a house in Phoenix, where they stay until the money is wired from a relative in the United States. From there, they fan out across America by land or air, with the arrangements made by the smuggler. In the last four months, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents have arrested and deported more than 3,000 illegals in various sting operations at Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport, but the traffickers are caught far less often.

None of this would be possible without the U.S. Border Patrol. In 1994, authorities began a crackdown at the border's busiest crossing spots, dramatically reducing the number of illegals coming through Texas and California. But instead of stopping the flow of illegals, the clampdown only diverted it--turning Agua Prieta into the headquarters of Coyote Inc.

Agua Prieta bulges against the U.S. border. At times, the population has swelled to 200,000, with thousands arriving each day. The flow of migrants starts at the airport in Hermosillo, the nearest major city, five hours south. (More people arrive there on one-way plane tickets than to anywhere else in Mexico.) Buses leave for Agua Prieta nearly every hour. The bus station where passengers get off is one-stop shopping for the journey north. Inside, bottled water sells for twice the standard price. Next door there is a shoe store and a pharmacy.

Smugglers with mobile phones dangling from their belts wander through the terminal. Fernando, who makes $50 for every migrant he recruits, hears the growl of an incoming bus and rushes to position himself at the door. "Phoenix? Phoenix?" he asks passengers as they descend the steps. A competitor is trying to beat him by knocking on the bus windows to make deals even before the passengers disembark. Fernando gets no takers immediately; some passengers have already made arrangements from their hometowns. But across the street at a taco stand, he signs up a group of nine young men who have just arrived from Chihuahua and are trying to get to Los Angeles. They agree to pay $1,200 each. They will head out that day at 4:30 p.m. Fernando gives them his mobile-phone number so they can reach him to receive further instructions.

Fernando is well aware that his business is illegal. Many smugglers have been prosecuted and jailed in Mexico--but U.S. investigators say the surest way to get caught is by not giving the local officials a share of the profits. When a policeman pulls up, Fernando walks over, chats for a minute and hands the cop $50--the daily price of doing business and just one of many bribes he says he has to pay to various officials. With his own earnings over the last several years, he has built a $30,000 house. This year he hopes to graduate to bigger money as a coyote. "If you make contact with a group of 20 from Mexico City and move them to Phoenix, that's $12,000 profit," he says. "Double if you get them to California."

Like some Mexican drug lords, the people smugglers enjoy a quiet respect in Agua Prieta for making it a boom town. Three years ago there were nine hotels. Today there are 16, along with dozens of new "guest houses"--private residences converted into dormitories. Often more than a dozen migrants cram into one room. Even three doctors have made their offices into boarding space. "There is a market for it," says 28-year-old Jose Ramon Prieta, who recently opened one boardinghouse, where rooms with two bunk beds cost $30 a night, and is expanding another. "A lot of people were sleeping in the parks, in empty lots." He laments that the coyotes have gained so much power and says he has turned down their offers to rent his properties. But, he adds, "without them, I wouldn't exist." Outside his hotel, migrants crowd around a pay phone that advertises collect calls to the United States, and taxis are starting to fill the streets. Every afternoon they begin their trips to the pull-offs on the highway outside town, where migrants dash past the signs warning of poisonous snakes, over the barbed wire and into the scrubland that leads to the border.

In Arizona, the border patrol is no longer the only obstacle. Now there is Roger Barnett, a 56-year-old rancher and former deputy sheriff who has discovered a new sport. Every Sunday he heads out onto his land with an assault rifle, a 9-mm handgun, high-powered binoculars, a two-way radio and his dog Mikey to capture immigrants crossing his 22,000-acre property, which sits between the border and the highway. He says he is tired of the plastic water bottles and bags illegals scatter over his land. Migrants trying to quench their thirst have also broken the hoses on his water-storage tanks, draining thousands of gallons meant for his cows. In the last year, Barnett estimates, he has captured more than 1,000 illegals--once 86 in a single day--and turned them over to the Border Patrol. (He has also intercepted a shipment of marijuana.) "This is an M-16 fully automatic," he says, looking out over the desert landscape of sagebrush and mesquite on a recent morning. "It's a war out here."

His war is intensely political, the us-versus-them battle heard throughout the debate over illegal immigration. "They've got no right to be in the U.S.," he says. "If the U.S. doesn't control this before too long we're going to have so many illegal aliens that we'll be no better off than Mexico." Barnett, who has been accused of vigilantism by immigrants-rights groups, says he's simply doing what the government is not. He also admits that the hunter in him enjoys tracking migrants. Earlier this year, friends from Ohio carved a free day into a business trip so they could join Barnett and his brother looking for illegals. They caught several dozen. "Humans," Barnett says. "That's the greatest prey there is on earth. They're your equal."

He pulls his pickup off the highway to a spot where he says migrants often hide while they wait for rides. The dog jumps the guardrail and starts barking. Barnett follows, his rifle slung over his shoulder. People are running away. "Hombre! Hombre!" he shouts. The dog corners them in a clearing, seven men and a woman. Barnett marches them out to the road and radios his wife to call the Border Patrol. The agent who arrives seems grateful for the help. "If I lived out here," he says, loading the migrants into his truck, "I'd pretty much do the same thing."

Barnett has many defenders, including Ray Borane, the mayor of Douglas. Borane has repeatedly asked for federal help to fight his immigration problem. In a recent letter to President Clinton, he wrote, "Your country is being invaded." For Larry Vance, who lives on the outskirts of town and heads a group of 234 county residents who want U.S. troops placed on the border, that invasion happens every night when he is woken up by immigrants racing through his property. Most evenings he scales a 25-foot tower behind his house to scan the brush with binoculars and call the Border Patrol when he spots illegals. A 43-year-old firebrand, he says that the fact his father was born in Mexico doesn't change his opinion that "the United States is full." In June, the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform flew him to Washington to testify before Congress about the problem. The immigrants "want to leave their poverty behind but try to bring their flag with them," he now says. "They want to change us."

They already have. In Douglas, 95 percent of the people trace their roots to Mexico; many themselves arrived illegally years ago and got U.S. citizenship under various amnesty programs. They are tired of migrants' hiding in their yards and crawling through the sewers in their attempts to dodge the Border Patrol. But they are also sympathetic. "These people come over here and they work in the fields picking lettuce, or washing dishes, doing things people here won't do," says 45-year-old Gilberto Maruffo, whose mother came to Douglas as an illegal immigrant in the 1940s. From his back porch at night, he can watch Mexicans scaling the fence that divides the border. He rarely calls the Border Patrol anymore and at times lets thirsty migrants drink from his hose before they move on. Says the mayor, Borane, whose father is from Mexico: "If you had anything other than a Hispanic majority, people would be marching in the streets."

Douglas, too, is living off the illegal-immigration business. "There is more money here now," says Maruffo, a furniture salesman who says some of his biggest customers live in Agua Prieta and pick out their furniture from videotapes he sends them. Last year there were seven taxis in Douglas. Today there are more than 50. The town's three towing services are doing fine business towing cars confiscated by the Border Patrol for hauling illegals. And at the Safeway grocery store, the butchers are running side businesses. One plans to refurbish five apartments he inherited in Agua Prieta. Two co-workers are nearing completion of 20 apartments in Douglas that they are hoping to rent out to new Border Patrol agents. Says Frank Padilla, one of the partners: "They're the only ones here who can pay $530 a month."

The coyotes, too, can thank the U.S. Border Patrol. Immigration officials say one aim of U.S. policy is to drive the price of crossing so high that migrants can't afford it. So far they have only succeeded in shifting the problem. In 1993, two thirds of the 1.25 million illegals caught along the Mexican border were in San Diego and El Paso. The next year, the government launched successful border crackdowns there, adding agents, floodlights, seismic sensors to detect footsteps and several miles of fence. This year, apprehensions around San Diego are at an 18-year low, more than 1.4 million illegals will be caught crossing into the United States from Mexico, and tiny Douglas will be the most popular spot to do it. Says Doug Massey, a University of Pennsylvania professor who has studied the coyote business: "We've created a more lucrative niche for the crime syndicates to operate in human smuggling."

So now the U.S. assault on illegal immigration has followed the coyotes to Arizona. The border there is being fortified with new agents and equipment. From the station in Douglas, a technician commands an infrared camera, tracking the migrants who move across his screen like characters in a videogame. He relays instructions to ground agents equipped with radios. "He's 10 feet to your left," the cameraman says, guiding an agent into a field to make an arrest. Later that night the camera detects a large group heading north, and the agents follow footprints until their flashlight beams hit human faces. There are 28 migrants trying to hide in the brush, packed together like a litter of puppies. Within two hours all are loaded into vans and sent through a revolving metal door back to Agua Prieta.

Therein lies the beauty of people trafficking. When drug smugglers are caught they usually go to prison and lose their shipment. When migrants are caught, the game merely starts over. "Drugs used to be No. 1. Now it's people," says a smuggler, who introduces himself as Victor. He says he is 41 and first crossed illegally into the United States in 1976. "I have a friend who got caught by the DEA for drug running. He's doing six years in prison. But we teach the people that if the border patrol catches us, don't say who the coyote is." Migrants rarely betray their guides, who are often under 18 anyway and immune from prosecution for people-smuggling in U.S. courts. To avoid attention, most sophisticated trafficking rings use newer cars and don't stuff them with migrants; U.S. authorities are also catching more white drivers. Though several smuggling rings have been broken up in the last two years, the bosses back in Mexico prove the most difficult to prosecute.

It is early afternoon, and Victor is in a restaurant in Agua Prieta, looking for new customers. He sits down at a table of three young men; their jeans and tennis shoes are caked with mud. They set out in a group of 30 the night before and were caught by the Border Patrol around 9 a.m. that morning. Victor places his mobile phone on the table and hands one of them a note. It says that he can cross them for $600 apiece, including lodging and food the night before the trip. He promises there will be only 10 minutes of walking. The men know better. They decide to stick with the same guide and try again later that night. One of the men, 21-year-old Emanuel Nava, says they will keep trying until they make it to Phoenix.

Back in Mexico City, Nava drove a taxi for a living. "I worked 13 or 14 hours a day for about $10," he says. Then Victor mentions the group of 20 he recruited earlier that week: "Four days ago, I made $800 in 20 minutes." With that kind of income gap in Mexico, the U.S. Border Patrol will be hiring for a long time to come.

The average price to cross the border is $800, from which the coyote has to pay his subcontractors. The guide gets $10 to $20 a person. Here's the rest of the chain:

1. The trip to the U.S. starts at Hermosillo, a major city.

2. Migrants travel to Agua Prieta, where recruiters get $20 to $70 a head to link them up with guides to take them across the border.

3. The safe-house operator in Douglas gets $20 to $30 a person for the night; the driver gets $100 to $250 a head for the trip to Phoenix.

4. From Phoenix, migrants travel to other U.S. cities.

ILLEGAL MIGRANTS APPREHENDED AT BORDER PATROL SECTORS:

      El Paso
      San Diego
      Tucson                                       

FISCAL YEAR 1993  531,689      92,639    85,781

FISCAL YEAR 1999* 166,151     416,591   100,099