The Journal. - Smuggling Migrants Toward the U.S. Is a Booming Business

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

Hundreds of thousands of migrants try to get from South America to the United States each year. But first, they have to get past the treacherous Darien Gap, a 70-mile stretch of dense jungle. WSJ’s Juan Forero explains the booming business that has cropped up to help smuggle migrants through — or around — it. Further Reading: - Smuggling Migrants Toward the U.S. Is a Booming Business  - To Avoid the Jungles of Central America, Migrants Are Taking a Treacherous Sea Route  - Masses of Migrants Overwhelm Panama’s Darién Gap  Further Listening: - Texas Took On Border Security. Is It Working?  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Livia Pierrozzini lives in Venezuela, and she remembers the day her daughter approached her with a plan. Her daughter, whose name is Leo Marley, said she was planning to move to the United States with her husband and seven-year-old daughter. I didn't like her plan at all. I told her, no, people have to make do and try to get by little by little. I didn't like her plan at all. I told her, no, people have to make do and try to get by little by little.

She told me, no, one has to find a way to make a better life. Leo Marley was insistent. She said Venezuela had nothing to offer her, and she'd been planning to leave for months. In Venezuela, there's no sources of income. There's no way to get ahead. And my daughter, she had a daughter of her own, and she was pregnant with a son. And she told me, Mom, I have to find a better life for myself, for my children, and also to help you, my parents. That's what forced her and her husband basically to leave. But for migrants coming from South America, they can't get to the U.S. without first getting past one major obstacle, the Darien Gap. The Darien Gap is 70 miles of thick jungle

that connects Panama and Colombia. There are no roads, just trails. And it's incredibly dangerous. So, migrants like Leo Marley have two options. They can either hike through the Darien Gap, or they can go around it. Both options require paying a smuggler, and both are expensive. And as Leo Marley and her family would discover, both routes are also extremely treacherous.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Monday, January 22nd. Coming up on the show, the booming industry of smuggling migrants around the Darien Gap. We'll be right back. Leo Marley and her family are among a growing number of people fleeing South America and moving north. Migrant arrivals at the U.S. southern border are at an all-time high.

Border agents made over 2 million arrests last year. And many of the people coming from South America are coming from Venezuela. Here's our colleague Juan Ferreiro. There are 7.7 million Venezuelans who've left that country in the last 10 years. There are hundreds of thousands who've crossed over into the United States.

These are people who are escaping a dictatorship. I mean, a country where the economy is in crisis and has been for many years. I think that in most of these cases, we're talking about economic migrants who are weighing the possibilities, weighing the costs. The cost-benefit analysis that they do is, I think I'll be better off in the United States, and I think I'll get in. But for migrants coming from South America, the Darien Gap is a major hurdle along the way. Most migrants can't just fly over it, because it's difficult to get a visa to land on the other side, in a country like Mexico. So the first option is to pay someone to guide you through it.

Juan recently met with some migrants at a camping site on the outskirts of the Darien Gap on the day before they entered the jungle. So this is a place where many hundreds of migrants congregate before beginning their journey. It's an outpost. It's not a town. It's not a village.

And it's a place where they will spend one night. So there are places where they can pitch their tents, there are public showers and bathrooms there, and a few makeshift restaurants, outdoor restaurants where people are just simply cooking over a fire, and vendors who will sell them anything that they want, everything from tents to cooking equipment to sleeping bags, whatever you need for a journey. sleeping bags, whatever you need for a journey. When I was there, this was in July, about 1,200 people left on the day I was there. And I walked with them a couple of hours into the jungle. But the numbers rose after that. And there were days when there were 2,000 people going through there, even more so in one single day. If you have 2,000 migrants traveling through the Darien every day, they each pay about $350. I mean, some pay more, some pay less. It depends if they're in a group or whatever.

But all those fees add up to $20 million a month. Wow, that's a lot of money. It is. We're talking about a lot of people who are's a lot of money. It is. We're talking about a lot of people who are making a lot of money. And in some of these communities that are very poor and so forth, having, you know, hundreds of migrants traipse through every day means money is being directly injected into those communities. Now, that money goes to like the porters and the guides who take them through all kinds of mom and pop operators. One of the mom and pop operators allegedly catering to migrants was called Caravan.

Colombian authorities recently busted the group, giving prosecutors an inside look at how it was run. So these guys were offering a number of different packages at different prices. So you as a migrant had all kinds of possibilities in order to get from Colombia on up into Panama and Central America. They were also offering doctored documents, you know, fake documents for migrants. The head of the group had all the makings of a true salesman. Court filings show he used WhatsApp and other social media platforms

to promote his business and pitch himself to customers. And people were happy with his services. We have some of the messages from migrants who made it to the United States who wrote back to him to say, I'll recommend your services, you were great, etc. They were happy because they had made it to their destination. The head of Caravan pleaded not guilty to migrant trafficking and criminal conspiracy. He and other alleged members of the group are in jail waiting trial.

His lawyer didn't comment further. Groups like Caravan operate in and around the Darien Gap with the consent of the powerful cocaine cartel that operates there, which also gets a cut of the profits. Even with a guide, though, the Darien Gap is hostile. There's dangerous wildlife, steep hills, fast-moving rivers, and flash floods. And not only that, migrants also risk being robbed by armed gangs. Panamanian authorities say 60 migrants died going through the Darien Gap in 2022. But for migrants who have a bit more money,

there's another route they can take, one that avoids the Darien Gap altogether. This route goes over the ocean via an island called San Andres, which is surrounded by beautiful turquoise water. So San Andres is an island that is located about a two-hour flight from Bogota. This is in the Caribbean. This is extremely far from the Colombian coast, but it's pretty close to Nicaragua. And so the migrant smuggling networks and migrants themselves have discovered that if you fly to San Andres, you can get a boat in San Andres and take that boat to Nicaragua.

And if it's a high-powered boat, you can be there in just a few hours, two, three hours. This is the VIP route. If you are a migrant, it's going to take you a hell of a lot less time, and you don't have to trudge through 70 miles of jungle. So people want to do this route. But it's going to be a lot more expensive because if you pay a package deal, you're going to have to pay the smugglers for the airfare, for the hotel in San Andres, and then for the boat trip to Nicaragua. There are trips that can be done for under $1,000,

but some of them cost as much as $5,000. This is the route that the woman you heard about earlier, Leo Marley, decided to take with her family. But just because the San Andres route is more expensive, that doesn't mean it's any safer. That just because the San Andres route is more expensive, that doesn't mean it's any safer. That's after the break. Travel better with Air Canada. You can enjoy free beer, wine, and premium snacks in economy class.

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Leo Marley and her husband chose to go around it by taking a plane to the island of San Andres. They were traveling with their seven-year-old daughter and while Leo Marley was pregnant with their second child. Here's Livia again, Leo Marley's mom. They paid for a package. They paid a guide, a smuggler. They each paid $1,200 to get to Nicaragua.

They paid cash to the guide in San Andres. He picked them up from the airport. He kept them in a hostel. He gave them food, everything. The night that Leo Marley and her family prepared to depart, she called her mom one more time. The night that Leo Marley and her family prepared to depart, she called her mom one more time. My daughter called me on a Saturday at 7.36 in the evening.

And she told me, Mama, give me a blessing. We're traveling now. I was worried, but I gave her a blessing. And I told her, well, my girl, be very careful. The plan was to sail through the night, across hundreds of miles of open ocean, and make landfall in Nicaragua. From there, they would continue north by land, through Honduras and then Mexico. She said when she got to Nicaragua, she would contact me.

She told me the boat ride would be about six or seven hours, and she said she was scared. Since that moment, since 7.36 that night, I haven't had any more communication with my daughter, with my son-in-law, with any of them. The boat Leo Marley and her family were on has been missing since October. The small vessel also carried nearly 40 other migrants, most of whom were also from Venezuela.

So what happened? We don't know, but the boat never turned up anywhere else. It was never seen by any fishermen or anyone else. And some people do presume that it sank. It's been three months since the boat went missing. And I can't imagine that there's any other possibility that this boat had to have sunk in the ocean en route to Nicaragua. Have the smugglers said anything about what might have happened to this boat? Well, remember that this boat had two crew members, and both of those crew members are also missing.

Their families are also mourning, and their families haven't heard from them. And we don't know what other smugglers were involved in this. The last thing anyone heard from the smugglers about the boat was a voice message. One of the members of the smuggling group sent it the night after the boat set sail. He wasn't on board himself, but he said the vessel had encountered some bad weather and that it had stopped on a deserted island on its way to Nicaragua. He said the boat would resume the trip soon and that the migrants were all safe.

The migrants' families have sent him messages since the boat went missing, but he hasn't answered. No survivors have been found. and answered. No survivors have been found. Relatives of the people on board have been sharing updates in a Facebook group. Recently, a picture was posted that shows eight passports

belonging to some of the boat's passengers. Family members say those passports washed up in Costa Rica. This is not the first time something like this has happened. About a hundred migrants traversing the San Andres route have disappeared at sea over the last two years, according to a Colombian government official.

Leo Marley's mom says the smugglers share blame for her daughter's disappearance. Well, really, I think it's a business, what they're doing. I think it's maybe the best opportunity for them to find work. But there needs to be a law, a law that addresses these issues happening in San Andres. Why? Because they're playing with people's lives. They're playing with the lives of human beings so they can make their money. Will anybody be held accountable here for what happened to this boat and the people on it? It's difficult to say because as far as officialdom is concerned, they don't know what happened.

You know, they just don't know. The Navy has been pretty clear to the families that this was incredibly dangerous. I've been on these patrol boats. I was on one myself several hours from San Andres. And I got to tell you, it's frightening stuff. These are big waves out there. These are not ships. These are smaller boats. And with someone who doesn't know exactly what they're doing, I think it can be extremely dangerous. So this is the VIP route. Like this is supposed to be the easy way around this horrible Darien Gap,

but it sounds like the ocean is just as hostile. Very much so. No one said it was easy to get to the United States. And this is 100 miles of open ocean. So, you know, you can run into any problems there. And you're still far away from Mexico. You know, you still have to deal with gangs, with corrupt police officials, all the way up to the U.S. border.

Juan spoke to American and Colombian prosecutors who say it's hard to build cases against smuggling groups. While we talk about human trafficking, the migrants are not being forced to migrate. They end up entering into agreements with the smugglers. They're paying for a service. I spoke to an undercover cop who has had to pretend that he's a migrant and actually ask for the help from these migrant smugglers and then build a case that way. It's not easy and it takes time. And you often see news here in Colombia about another smuggling ring broken, and then another one, and then another one. But there's always someone who's going to fill their place.

That's all for today. Monday, January 22nd. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Jenny Carolina Gonzalez and Santiago Perez. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.