Drug Cartel Now Traffics Illegals Across US Border

Mexican drug lords have cooked up a new scheme to make money and to deflect attention from their lucrative drug trade on the US-Mexican borders. Due to the crackdown on the United States border, drug traffickers have had to resort to smuggling human beings along with their high profit drugs. The purpose of the Cartel is to distract authorities away from 'mules' who are hired to smuggle drugs worth billions of dollars into this country. The drug lords have taken over routes used by coyotes, or human smugglers, and have absorbed that crime as it's own. Protective money is paid by the migrants to guarantee safe passage into the US while creating a distraction for Immigration and police who watch the borders.

Newly constructed fences along the borders, aided by more visible military presence by National Guardsmen, have tightened up the ease in which Cartels have imported their lucrative trade of illegal drugs into the US. A spokesman for the US Border Patrol made the statement that many of the previously known drug routes have been sealed due to added resources and more technology. The spokesman claimed that a tremendous amount of drugs are being seized daily. This has forced the drug chiefs to come up with another way to carry on their multi-billion dollar business.

The new mode of conducting business was detected in December, when a group of heavily armed men stopped several vans loaded with 200 illegals on an isolated road just south of the US border and Mexico. The men ordered all of the migrants out of the vans, doused the vehicles with gasoline and then set them ablaze. No one was hurt but the message to the migrants was clear. They were now in charge. Members of the Sineloa Cartel has almost complete control of the main routes into Arizona while using migrants to distract US security. Near Sasabe and the Arizona border, armed men stop vans full of people trying to sneak into the US and charge them around $90 each to cross the border when and where they are told. Sometimes the illegals are made to cross in large numbers clearing the way for a large drug shipment into the country. The Sineloa's main rival the Gulf Cartel, has become involved in smuggling illegals into Texas.

People smuggling is an effort to diversify, after US custom agents has seized up to 20% of the cocaine and 28% more marijuana crossing the border. Last month Mexican police made the world's largest seizure of drug cash, more than $207 million neatly stacked in a Mexico City mansion. The money was claimed to be from a methamphetamine factory that could have produced up to 3 million pills a day in the US.

President Felipe Calderon has vowed to crack down on drug smuggling violence that is currently plaguing the borders. Headless or tortured bodies are becoming a daily find , usually included with notes threatening local authorities. On one day in April alone, 20 bodies were discovered across Mexico. One of two men found bullet-ridden on Monday near Arizona, appeared to be a coyote, or someone that smuggles people across the border for a fee. Since border crack downs, illegals face ugly choices to get into the US. One is being captured by Immigration officials and returned to Mexico without the money they have painstakingly scraped together and spent for nothing, or being forced by the crime ridden Cartels to do their bidding. More and more the migrants are choosing to stay at home.