MIGRANT CARAVAN CHOOSES TIJUANA AS GATEWAY TO THE US

Why is the caravan going all the way to Tijuana to reach the U.S. border when Texas is much closer? One reason is “El Chapo.”

Borderland Beat
November 18, 2018

Why is the caravan going all the way to Tijuana to reach the U.S. border? One reason is “El Chapo.”

Last week, after caravan members recuperated for several days at a Mexico City sports complex, they held a vote. The group opted to travel all the way to Tijuana, Mexico’s largest border city, instead of taking a much shorter route toward the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas.

So why would they decide to go more than twice as far to reach the U.S. border?

The simplest explanation is that the activist group guiding the caravan, Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders), has a strong support network in California, a “sanctuary” state where local officials and courts are more sympathetic to migrants.

But there’s another, idiosyncratic reason the caravan is going all the way to Tijuana: its reputation as a safer route, where migrants are less vulnerable to the kidnapping gangs and extortionists that prey on Central Americans.

This has to do, in no small part, with the legacy of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the indicted Mexican drug kingpin whose federal grand jury trial began this week in New York.

Over nearly three decades, Guzmán built the Sinaloa drug cartel into the world’s wealthiest and most powerful trafficking organization. And despite his capture, the Sinaloa group continues to dominate the most lucrative drug smuggling routes along Mexico’s Pacific coast and into California, including the grand jewel of the North American narcotics trade, the San Ysidro port of entry. Which is also the destination for the migrant caravan.

Connecting Tijuana to California, San Ysidro is the world’s busiest border crossing, receiving nearly 100,000 northbound vehicles and pedestrians a day. It is also the single largest gateway for high-value narcotics into the United States, accounting for nearly half of the hard drugs-- heroin, cocaine, fentanyl and methamphetamine-- seized along the entire border, smuggled mostly in fake vehicle compartments.

Under Guzmán, Sinaloa waged sanguinary warfare against its rivals, eventually winning control of the entire western portion of the U.S.-Mexico border. But Sinaloa became so dominant in the North American drug trade that the criminal groups along Mexico’s eastern border (opposite Texas) developed a different criminal portfolio, especially starting in the late 2000s, in order to compete.

The two most powerful groups there, the Gulf Cartel and its now-diminished but still-dreaded rival, Los Zetas, were overshadowed and outsmarted by Guzmán in the drug trade, so they looked to diversify into other sources of revenue. Central American migration to the United States was increasing, and these groups saw tens of thousands of Hondurans, Guatemala and Salvadorans passing through areas under their control to reach the Rio Grande. Many were riding on freight trains and buses. It wasn’t hard to find them.

In 2010, Los Zetas kidnapped and massacred 72 migrants on a remote ranch an hour south of the U.S. border, an act of horrifying depravity with a ruthless business objective. The group was determined to extract profits from every migrant and smuggling guide passing through its territory. Anyone who didn’t pay risked kidnapping, torture and death. And those who didn’t pay enough could be abducted and held for ransom until relatives living in the United States handed over their life savings. They knew that almost everyone heading north had a relative or loved one financing the journey.

Their reign of terror has taken a terrible toll. Mexican human rights officials have discovered more than 1,300 mass graves since 2007, and an untold number of Central American migrants have gone missing in the Gulf Coast Mexican states of Veracruz and Tamaulipas along the route to south Texas.

This sordid state of affairs never fully developed along Mexico’s Pacific Coast and the areas under the control of Guzmán Sinaloa cartel. The Sinaloans would sometimes abduct young men and impress them into service as drug mules, fitting them with marijuana-stuffed backpacks for a grueling trek through the Arizona desert. But some Central Americans viewed this as a mutually beneficial arrangement. A free guided trip into the United States was the price for carrying Sinaloan brick weed.

You would also hear from many Mexicans that Guzmán was a drug kingpin who lived by a code, like the Sicilian mob bosses or the Omar character in “The Wire.” A tunnel-digging, meth-making, cocaine-shipping mastermind, and a killer, but not a monster who kidnaps and butchers humble Central American migrants. This appeared to explain, more than anything, why Central Americans were routinely murdered and disappeared in one part of Mexico but not (or far less) in another.

So when it came time last week for caravan members to pick between a shorter route to Texas or a much longer one to Tijuana, they chose the latter.

One leads to the migrant version of Mordor. The other is merely dangerous.