Word: minatitlan
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When detectives came calling this summer at the 25-acre ranch of Lucio Avianeda, outside Minatitlan in southern Mexico, their mission was to arrest Avianeda and his alleged partner in crime, Constantino (Coty) Andrade. But before the lawmen got to the ranch house, they heard voices coming from the stables. Inside they found a dozen undocumented Central American migrants who had been locked up for three days with no food or water. Some lay unconscious in the stifling heat while horses munched hay a few feet away. The cops were not completely shocked: Avianeda and Andrade are reputed people smugglers...
...house to make arrests, something frighteningly unusual happened. Instead of scattering like the desert animals that migrant smugglers are named for--coyotes--henchmen working for Avianeda and Andrade fired at the cops with automatic weapons. "We've never faced that kind of resistance from coyotes," says the Minatitlan detective commander, Simitrio Rodriguez. "They're usually not even armed." None of the police were hurt. When the gunfight was over, Avianeda, 39, and four others were under arrest. Andrade, 28, had fled, and is still at large...
...Mexican authorities fear that incidents like the shootout at Minatitlan may also signal the start of a new wave of violence along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border. The U.S. believes organized smuggling rings are responsible for a dramatic increase in illegal traffic along the border--and in the unprecedented numbers of migrants dying in their attempts to get in. This year more than 250 migrants have perished along both sides of the border, including at least 100 this summer, when crossings are the most dangerous because of the desert heat. (In Arizona, 50 migrants died in July alone...
...more migrants are left to die on Texas highways and in Arizona deserts. Gonzalo, 19, a Guatemalan, barely escaped that destiny. "Last year I paid a coyote organization $2,000, and that's what finally got me into Arizona," he says as he sits in a detention pen near Minatitlan, facing deportation back to his country. "But then they just left me in the desert. I had to be saved by U.S. immigration officials, who deported me." What's more, violence between rival smuggling cells is on the rise: three coyotes were killed in an Arizona parking...
Coty Andrade exemplifies the new coyote ambition. Raised in a farming family near Minatitlan, he tried drug trafficking as a teen, according to Mexican investigators. He crossed into the U.S. as an undocumented migrant in the '90s, then worked for minimum wage in Chicago restaurants and North Carolina poultry-processing plants. In 2000, investigators say, he returned home to join his father and brother as a smuggler. But he had bigger plans than his kin. He had learned in his brief narco days how to intimidate competition, says Rodriguez, who adds that Andrade has an "impulsive, psychotic and violent profile...