CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico—In the dead of night this fall, 12 migrants left the small northern Mexican town of Coyame to enter the vast Chihuahuan desert, hoping to cross into the U.S. by way of the Texas border. Among them was a 14-year-old boy from Southern Mexico who was dreaming of being reunited with his family on the other side of the border.
Before taking off on the journey on Sept. 25, a 32-year-old man with the group reportedly called his wife to tell her that he had paid 25,000 pesos (roughly $1,200) to a smuggler to guide him all the way to Odessa, Texas, where he would get a job, all in an effort to support his two young children, a 7-year-old and an 11-year-old, back in Mexico.
That was the last time anyone heard from a member of the group, all of whom disappeared except for the 14-year-old who was traveling with them. According to local Ciudad Juarez media reports, the teenager managed to escape what he said was an orchestrated kidnapping. He told Mexican authorities that the group was stopped in the middle of the desert by several heavily armed men in three pickup trucks. The 12 migrants and the smuggler were taken away, but when their captors noticed the boy was underage, they reportedly let him go.
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The migrants had entered a treacherous mountain area in the Chihuahuan desert—dubbed a migrant “Bermuda Triangle” by local reporters. In the last few years, dozens of migrants, including children, women, and complete families, have vanished in the area without a trace, according to local reports and official figures.
The latest disappearances are part of a growing trend occurring in the same corridor, used mostly by people handing themselves over to human smugglers—or as locals call them, “coyotes”—to be illegally taken into the U.S.
In May of this year, an indigenous 31-year-old woman was reported missing while trekking through the same area. A local Mexican newspaper reported she was abandoned by her smuggler after getting tired on the hike. In the first days of June, another woman, a 20-year-old from Southern Mexico, was also reported missing. She last spoke with her family right before leaving for the desert on her way up to the U.S. border. Her whereabouts remain unknown.
In the last two years alone, more than 35 migrants have disappeared from the area while trying to reach the U.S., according to Chihuahua’s State General Attorney’s Office. Considering that many of these cases go unreported to Mexican authorities, the real number is likely even bigger.
Security sources in Mexico told The Daily Beast that most of the migrants who never make it to the United States are either kidnapped or killed by cartel members fighting against each other in the desert. That, or they die from dehydration during the grueling walk that often takes as long as six days.
“Disappearances around Ciudad Juarez and Texas have been happening more often than before. Organized crime is more and more involved in human trafficking and now the operations are as large as drug trafficking,” Howard Campbell, an expert on national security at the University of Texas at El Paso, told The Daily Beast.
A Mexican official who agreed to speak with The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity, and who is involved in the investigation into the disappearance of the 12 migrants, said they also could have been abandoned in the desert by their smugglers.
“Smugglers don’t care about migrants. In many cases they just abandon them in the middle of the desert and during summer or winter a few hours out without the proper gear could get you killed,” the source told The Daily Beast.
“In many other cases they are handed over to cartels who kidnap them or force them to smuggle drugs before being killed,” the officer added.
After much pressure from the families of migrants who disappeared in September, Mexican authorities launched a search operation in the Chihuahuan desert on Sunday, covering the general vicinity where the migrants are thought to have disappeared. But so far, the search has been unsuccessful. Authorities have only found old belongings, burnt vehicles and human remains believed to have belonged to people who were living in the area before the 12 migrants stepped foot there.
“My husband decided to migrate to provide for our daughters, he’s always been very responsible and he worked hard to get the money for that journey,” the wife of one of the 12 migrants who disappeared, told The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “I never knew something like this would happen, we never thought about it since we did not do research or read news about this happening in that area.”
The aerial search that took place over the weekend included a Blackhawk helicopter, officials from the Mexican Immigration Institute, the National Guard, the Mexican army, and state police, according to a press release published by the Chihuahuan government.
Concerns about the safety of migrants have raised alarm among human rights activists since the launch of the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), a program that requires non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for months before appearing in a U.S. immigration court to plead their asylum cases.
The order began in 2019 under the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump. It was suspended for a few months earlier this year, before being relaunched by the Biden administration in December—a move that sparked backlash from migrant activists and lawmakers across America.
Critics say that this measure has allowed criminal organizations to cash in on desperate migrants who hand themselves over to smugglers only to be kidnapped and, in many cases, killed when the ransom is not met.
A report by Human Rights First, an international Human Rights advocacy organization, has found that at least 7,000 people have been abused, extorted, kidnapped, or killed while waiting for their court dates in Mexico
“Migrating is not a crime and he was not committing any crime or doing anything wrong,” the wife of one of the missing migrants told The Daily Beast. “We just want to know he is alive.”
