Along the border, a land held hostage

Bandits roaming the Arizona-Mexico frontier threaten immigrants, patrolmen, workers
By Stephen Kiehl
Sun Reporter

NOGALES, Mexico // They had made it across the border, 20 of them, through a hole in the barbed-wire fence in the dark Arizona desert. Juan Carlos Reyes Hernandez, 25, with two children at home and a third on the way, was among them. He planned to work in construction and send his earnings back home.

He had promised to pay the "coyote," or smuggler, two months' wages to lead him safely to Tucson. Instead, he walked into a trap. The group was less than a mile into the United States when three men with pistols set upon them. Hernandez believes the coyote and the gunmen were working together.

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Latino homicides on sharp increase
Gangs in Oakland, San Francisco cited as reason for growth
- Jim Herron Zamora, Chronicle Staff Writer

Changing demographics and rising gang violence have brought a dramatic increase in the number of homicides among Latinos in Oakland and San Francisco, even as the number of African American victims has fallen, police and community leaders say.

Oakland saw twice as many Latinos slain last year as in 2004, while San Francisco saw an increase of 50 percent during the same period. Authorities in both cities say the problem largely sneaked up on them because they were focused on the larger -- and still more prevalent -- problem of African Americans killing others of their own race.

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America Versus Mexico’s Ponzi Pyramid Scheme
By Justin Darr (01/22/06)

If there is anything people hate more than buying a used car, filling out tax forms, or visiting their attorney’s office it is meeting the glassy eyed enthusiasm of some acquaintance who wants to recruit you into a multi-level-marketing scheme. You know the ones. If you can make a list of everyone you know, and they can make a list of everyone they know, and each of you spend a few hundred dollars a month on some assorted widget or another, in three to five years you could be living on your own Caribbean island.

Fortunately, in the United States, the worse of these Ponzi pyramid schemes are illegal. But, imagine for a moment if they were not. Imagine also if, rather than toothpaste, insurance, and Saint John’s Wort, the product you were purchasing was the right to build a shed in your back yard, open a business, or avoid police harassment? And, what if this extortion was institutionalized to the point that it became the price of trying to live a normal life?

This is the case of the average citizen of Mexico. In 2005, a survey conducted by Transparency International showed that between 31 and 45% of Mexicans had someone in their family forced to pay a bribe to a public official in the past year.

Corruption is an endemic aspect of Mexican government. Extending from the local police who routinely shake down people who commit minor infractions for cash all the way to top government officials who habitually cut deals with political cronies and drug traffickers to shape Mexican law.

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'Osama's People' Smuggled Into U.S.?

Court documents in a Brownsville, Texas drug-smuggling case cite a wiretapped telephone conversation by one of the smugglers who said that "Osama's people" are ready to be transported across the Mexican border into the U.S.

The Brownsville Herald reported earlier this week:

"[Paperwork in the case] contains details of a December 2004 incident in which [one smuggler] tried to secure transportation for 20 Middle Eastern 'terrorists' waiting to enter the United States from Monterrey, Chiapas and Puebla in Mexico.

"Recorded telephone conversations authorized under the U.S. Patriot Act and a court order captured the [suspect] referring to the 20 men as 'gente de Osama.'”

According to these same court documents - the phrase translates into "Osama’s people.”

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Area Police Try to Combat a Proliferation of Brothels
2 Dozen Probed in Recent Years in Montgomery

By Ernesto Londoño
Washington Post Staff Writer

On one of the coldest nights this winter, an informant walked toward two suspected brothels operating out of garden-style apartments in Wheaton.

In what has become an increasingly common routine, two Montgomery County vice detectives waited in unmarked police vehicles outside the apartment complex near Wheaton Regional Park for the informant to tell them what he saw inside.

"One doorman, one girl," Detective Thomas Stack told his partner, Leland Wiley, on the radio after being briefed by the informant, a recent immigrant from El Salvador who has helped them obtain search warrants for similar brothels. "Thirty dollars for 15 minutes."

Such brothels, law enforcement officials and authorities in human trafficking said, have proliferated quietly in recent years in Washington and other metropolitan areas with large pockets of Hispanic immigrants, many of whom left their spouses in their home countries. They operate in an underworld invisible to most -- a subculture that local and federal authorities have started to unravel only in recent years.

The brothels, which have surfaced in several recent federal indictments, cater exclusively to immigrants from Latin America and charge about $30 for 15 minutes of sex.

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Operation Linebacker finds 25 immigrants
Michael D. Hernandez
El Paso Times

El Paso County sheriff's deputies found 25 undocumented immigrants in Tornillo Sunday during an Operation Linebacker patrol.

At about 9:50 a.m., 21 immigrants were discovered in an abandoned house in the 19000 block of Cobb; then, two hours later, four more immigrants were found along Oil Mill Drive in the rural town southeast of El Paso, sheriff's officials said.

All 25 immigrants were turned over to the Border Patrol and no arrests were reported during the incidents.

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Ice Removes More Than 2,000 Illegal Aliens From The South Texas Region During December
Southwest Border Initiative aims to quickly return illegal aliens to their home countries

SAN ANTONIO, Texas - U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced today that the office here deported 2445 non-criminal aliens during the month of December under the new Secure Border Initiative (SBI).

SBI is a two-month-old program announced by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff during his recent visit to Texas. One SBI aspect allows ICE to quickly remove “other than Mexican” (OTM) illegal aliens to their home countries under an “expedited removal” process. Those OTMs removed from the South Texas Region had been arrested by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) - which includes the Border Patrol - and ICE along the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas.

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Illegal alien held in twin slayings, kidnap
Brothers, 14 & 7, beaten to death in family basement
By WAYNE PARRY
Associated Press

STAFFORD TOWNSHIP, N.J. - A family who took in an illegal immigrant as a boarder paid for it with the lives of their two children, whose skulls he bludgeoned with a hammer before kidnapping their mother, authorities said yesterday.

Shivering and soaking-wet after hiding in a drainage ditch near a Garden State Parkway rest area overnight, a coatless Richard Toledo, who also may be known as Richard Toledo Gonzalez, surrendered meekly to authorities yesterday morning after a Spanish-speaking state trooper convinced him to give up.

It was a far cry from the violence authorities say he perpetrated the night before at the home he shared with the woman who took him in and her sons, ages 14 and 7. The boys' bloodied, battered bodies were found in the basement Thursday night by their father after he got a call from his wife saying she had been kidnapped.

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Study Gives Snapshot of Day Laborers
By PETER PRENGAMAN
Associated Press Writer
LOS ANGELES

The immigrant day laborers who wait for work on street corners across the United States have families and attend church regularly, and the people who hire them are more likely to be individual homeowners than construction contractors.

The first nationwide study of day laborers also found that one in five has been injured on the job and nearly half have been cheated out of pay.

Among the other findings based on the interviews conducted in July and August 2004:

_Three-fourths were illegal immigrants and most were Hispanic: 59 percent were from Mexico and 28 percent from other Central American countries.