High-Level Informer Details Shakedowns, Abuse Of U.S.-Bound Immigrants by Officials and Police

By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service

VERACRUZ, Mexico -- Victor Manuel Romero liked to fan himself with big wads of cash, bribe money paid to him by illegal immigrants. It helped fight off the heat
of this steamy port city, and it was good for his image as an untouchable gangster.

He wore a tangle of gold necklaces, lifted from the necks of illegal immigrants. He flaunted a badge that identified him as a Mexican immigration agent and even dyed
his hair yellow and red, boasting that no matter how much attention he drew, the local policemen he was paying so well would never come after him.

But they did, throwing him in jail, and now Romero is tattling. He is supplying investigators with some of the most damaging information ever made public on how
Mexican officials operate an underground immigration highway to the United States.

Romero, known on the street as the "godmother" of crooked immigration agents and police, has outlined how he and his colleagues, rather than arresting
undocumented Guatemalans, Salvadorans and other foreigners, sold them safe passage toward the U.S. border. Sometimes they even charged extra for rides in their
police cruisers.

President Vicente Fox, who took office in December pledging to fight corruption, has promised Washington to crack down on the flow of U.S.-bound illegal
immigrants. But at the same time, workers in the government he now heads make part of their living off the human traffic. And it pays well. Some immigration officers
in Veracruz who earn about $400 a month in official salaries wear Versace and other designer clothes and drive $25,000 sport-utility vehicles, said Alejandro Cossio
Hernandez, the new head of the immigration office here.

Cossio, like Fox, is from the National Action Party, which last year defeated the Institutional Revolutionary Party that had ruled Mexico since 1929. That closed
system bred untold amounts of corruption. Now, as outsiders like Cossio have taken over federal offices, they are uncovering fraud and abuse along with missing
records, inertia and reluctance to prosecute.

"In the transition, many files in this office disappeared," including what was called the "black folder" detailing corruption by immigration officers, Cossio said.

Interior Minister Santiago Creel, the cabinet member responsible for immigration, said in an interview in Mexico City that he was unaware of the Romero case. But
he acknowledged that for decades in Mexico, where there has been illegal immigration, there has been corruption.

He told a startling story to illustrate his point: A few weeks after he started his job in December, he was working at his desk at 1 a.m. when a young aide came into
his office, looking pale and shaken. The aide said a federal police commander was in his office, just yards from Creel's, with a suitcase filled with $50,000 in cash.
The police officer said the young man could have the money if his office could arrange passage to the United States for a plane load of illegal Asian immigrants being
held at an airport in southern Mexico. Creel said he had the officer arrested.

Although not on the payroll of Mexico's immigration service, the National Immigration Institute, Romero had an immigration badge and uniform when he was arrested
four months ago on drug charges. He said those drug charges were trumped up because of a police squabble over the spoils from a bus load of undocumented
people. Rather than having people think he was a narcotics trafficker, Romero agreed to cooperate with authorities.

Romero's affidavits and videotaped testimony -- together with extensive interviews with Cossio and other new immigration officials, with Roman Catholic priests
sheltering undocumented Central Americans and with the immigrants themselves -- show a remarkably organized immigrant highway through Veracruz state. Bribery
is so common along it that people refer to it as a "toll."

Mexican officials have divided up the highways, bus stations and airports, staking out claims to the money and belongings of the thousands of foreigners passing
through their territory. Immigration agents and police use radios and cell phones to call in the license plate numbers of the bus loads of immigrants who have paid their
bribe, so those vehicles are waved on. Some groups who have paid their bribe are marked with special plastic bracelets. Other times, a bus driver slips a matchbox
to a police officer after writing on it how many undocumented people are on the bus. More people let through means the official will get more money from the
smuggler leading them.

After passing through Veracruz state, on the Gulf of Mexico 200 miles east of Mexico City, many undocumented people then travel through the border state of
Tamaulipas and into Texas.

Immigration officers also pay cab drivers, bank tellers and others to tip them off when they notice an outsider with a foreign accent or a suitcase. If these new
customers do not have the cash to pay the bribe, they are sometimes beaten, raped or held in run-down rooming houses, like the one Romero had in the center of
town here, until relatives in the United States wire money for their release.

"It's disgraceful," said Cossio, a biomedical engineer who took over the Veracruz immigration office five months ago. "It's organized crime and it's very, very serious."

While much recent attention has focused on smugglers who rob and abandon Mexicans migrating to the United States, the non-Mexicans who pass through Mexico
on the way to the U.S. border face additional abuse -- and it often comes from uniformed Mexican officials. Mexico deported more than 150,000 foreigners trying to
use the country as a transit route to the United States last year, and for every one caught many more are believed to make it.

Mexican officials' long-rumored involvement in the underground highway to the United States has been difficult to prove. Undocumented people do not report crime
for fear of being deported. If they try, they are told they must remain in Mexico for a year or longer to be a witness in the court case.

"It's nasty, ugly, what is going on. These people are defenseless," said the Rev. Benito Lopez Francisco, a Catholic priest who shelters as many as 10 Central
Americans a night, often to save them from abuse from Mexican officials.

Lopez said the church is becoming more active in helping Central Americans in Mexico because of what he sees as stepped-up abuse by police and immigration
officials. Posters have been tacked to the entrances of local churches giving illegal immigrants phone numbers to call to find safe houses. Lopez said that of the 150
undocumented people he has recently counseled, many had been robbed and abandoned on roads by officials, and eight women had been raped by officials or
thieves.

Sitting beside Lopez in a church here was a 23-year-old Guatemalan who described how police ordered him off a bus, then forced him to strip and stand naked
while they searched for money sewn into the lining of his clothes. They took everything, about $1,000.

"When I asked for a few pesos for food, they said you can have something better -- your freedom," he recalled.

The man, who was traveling with his wife and 3-year-old daughter, made his way to the church and is still aiming for his destination -- a $7.50-an-hour dishwashing
job in Los Angeles.

"Yes, it is worth the pain," he said. "In Guatemala you work and work and work and you are still in the same situation."

Felipe de Jesus Preciado Coronado, head of the National Immigration Institute, said many obstacles frustrate his fight against corruption. For starters, his agents, who
face daily temptations, are very poorly paid. Preciado is now lobbying for higher salaries.

Romero told Cossio that his group of officials shook down 30 to 60 immigrants a day, or 11,000 to 22,000 a year. It is unclear how much money was raked in. Not
all immigrants carry the same amount of cash or pay the same toll. Smugglers typically include bribes for Mexican officials in the price they charge their customers.

One undocumented Guatemalan said he decided to travel without a smuggler and figured he needed $2,500 for the one-month journey to the U.S. border. Most of
that was for paying off Mexican officials, he said. "It's all a matter of luck. From the minute you enter Mexico, you don't know how many times police will stop you or
how much they will demand."

Ana Mejia, a Honduran who recently passed through here, said Romero charged her $100 on the spot, and an additional $1,000 for safe passage toward the
border. "He gave me two choices: pay him or get arrested," said Mejia, 23, who was interviewed by telephone from her Honduran home in the town of Puerto
Cortez.

Mejia said she had been traveling for 20 days when Romero's gang found her taking a cold drink at a Veracruz restaurant just after she got off a bus carrying a
suitcase. Even after she paid her money to Romero, she said, she could not continue north because she became so ill she had to be hospitalized. Officials then
deported her.

Mejia said the word on the street is that Veracruz is the easiest path toward the United States. "People told us, 'Go through Veracruz because that is where the
polleros[guides] have their connections to get you through,' " she said.

Cossio said Romero has provided photos, names and telephone numbers of officials and bus and truck companies involved, addresses of safe houses used by
officials and other specific information. "All of this shows me that he is right," he said.

Cossio said he felt he must expose what is going on in Veracruz because it is not being cleaned up. In February, the National Immigration Institute turned over to the
federal attorney general's office details of official involvement in human trafficking in Veracruz. Since then, Cossio said, "We have had no communication from them . .
. the investigations are not moving."

The attorney general's office, headquartered in Mexico City, has historically been inefficient and corrupt. The federal police, who belong to the attorney general's
office, have been implicated in this corruption scheme by Romero's allegations. In response to numerous calls, the attorney general's office said it had no information
to release about the Romero case.

Cossio, meanwhile, said he has received death threats. Three of the threats were traced to his own office switchboard: "They told me I have to allow them to work or
they were going to kill me."

But he has not been quiet about his belief that the majority of the 80 immigration officials in Veracruz are taking money from human trafficking, as are a number of
federal police and other officials. As he awaits legal charges against his men, he has transferred and separated many of them and stopped many road checks, not
wanting to make it easier for his officers to fleece undocumented immigrants.

"In six months you can't change a country," Cossio said. But it is disheartening, he added, that more is not being done to try.

                                               © 2001