Border Crisis: Coyote Cartel Controlling Migrant Passage – Rolling Stone
A couple of young guys in camouflage cargo shorts go around visiting with various groups of migrants. Their yellow traffic vests identify them as coyotitos, or smugglers assistants: gofers for the network of coyotes that operates from here all the way to Miguel Alemán, 60 miles farther inland, a notorious cartel redoubt scarred by 20 years of gangland warfare that has been the epicenter of mass migration in 2021. In March, an Associated Press reporter standing on the riverbank on the American side, in Roma, Texas, saw people coming across at the rate of 100 an hour. Photographers at the scene captured a veritable flotilla of inflatable boats, and scuffles between coyotes and Border Patrol agents as well as Texas state police, who in some cases tried to puncture the rubber rafts with knives, to keep them from being reused.
I ll soon have the chance to speak to one of the most prolific coyotes around, a 36-year-old who goes by the name El Comandante, and claims to oversee much of the human smuggling in this corridor. He confirms what U.S. law-enforcement sources and university researchers have already told me: Along the 250-mile stretch of border from Miguel Alemán to the coast, all the migrant smuggling is carried out under the aegis of the Gulf Cartel, Mexico s original crime syndicate.
The Cartel del Golfo, also known as the CDG, the Company, or the Hand, was founded in the Prohibition era by the legendary bootlegger Juan Nepomuceno Guerra. Nearly a century later, it holds a brutal monopoly on all forms of organized crime in the Rio Grande Valley, including human smuggling.