Colombia Traffickers Make $10 Million a Month Helping Illegal Migrants Reach the US

Biden vowed to “end the illicit movement” of people through the Darién jungle in Colombia. But the profits are too big to pass up. A record 360,000 made passage this year. That’s well above the record 250,000 for all of 2022.

Politicians and other human traffic smugglers in Colombia charge a minimum of $170 a head, not to reach the US, but simply to get through the Colombian jungle on route to Panama. And that’s just for a guide. The all inclusive package is $500 or more.

The Math

• $170 * 360,000 = $61,200,000
• $500 * 360,000 = $180,000,000

The Colombian politicians and helpers have made somewhere between $61 million and $180 million this year selling services that the Biden administration vowed to end.

This story is not from radical rightwing newsletters, it’s from the New York Times. I have a free link below.

‘A Ticket to Disney’? Politicians Charge Millions to Send Migrants to U.S.

Please consider ‘A Ticket to Disney’? Politicians Charge Millions to Send Migrants to U.S.

“We have organized everything: the boatmen, the guides, the bag carriers,” said Darwin García, an elected community board member and former town councilman in Acandí, a Colombian municipality at the entrance to the jungle.

Now, Mr. García’s younger brother, Luis Fernando Martínez, the head of a local tourism association, is a leading candidate for mayor of Acandí — defending the migration business as the only profitable industry in a place that “didn’t have a defined economy before.”

More than 360,000 people have already crossed the jungle in 2023, according to the Panamanian government, surpassing last year’s almost unthinkable record of nearly 250,000.

“This is a beautiful economy,” said Fredy Marín, a former town councilman in the neighboring municipality of Necoclí who manages a boat company that ferries migrants on their way to the United States. He says he transports thousands of people a month, charging them $40 a head.

the business is run by elected community board members like Mr. García, through a registered nonprofit started by the board’s president and his family. It’s called the New Light Darién Foundation, and it manages the entire route from Acandí to the border with Panama — setting prices for the journey, collecting fees and running sprawling campsites in the middle of the jungle.

The foundation has hired more than 2,000 local guides and backpack carriers, organized in teams with numbered T-shirts of varying colors — lime green, butter yellow, sky blue — like members of an amateur soccer league.

Migrants pay for tiers of what the foundation calls “services,” including the basic $170 guide and security package to the border. Then a migration “adviser” wraps two bracelets around their wrists as proof of payment.

“Like a ticket to Disney,” said Renny Montilla, 25, a construction worker from Venezuela.

Hanging over the entire business is a large and powerful drug-trafficking group called the Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces, sometimes known as the Gulf Clan. Its control over this part of northern Colombia is so complete that the country’s ombudsman’s office calls the group the region’s “hegemonic” armed actor.

The New Light Darién Foundation is helping to turn that natural barrier into something much more passable, with restaurants, camps, porters and guides.

Once Through Darien, Then What?

There is much more to the article. Importantly, once through the Darien Gap, everyone is on their own.

“On the Panamanian side, small criminal bands rove the forest, using rape as a tool to extract money and punish those who cannot pay,” notes the New York Times.

People need to cough up more money to make it through Panama to Mexico, then from Mexico to the US border, then still more money from the US border to the US.

People without adequate funds are subject to rape or torture or death.

This is what’s become of US immigration policy.

Thanks to the New York Times for sharing.