Crackdown begins after investigation

  BY SUSANA HAYWARD
  Knight Ridder News Service

  MEXICO CITY - Two weeks after the deaths of 19 migrants in Texas, Mexican President Vicente Fox has launched a major offensive against cross-border human smuggling rings.

  A strike force composed of more than 600 federal police, soldiers and secret service agents seized operatives of at least six smuggling bands in the first few hours after the crackdown began late Thursday. The arrests were mainly in Sonora state on the southern border of Arizona, and in Quintana Roo state on the Yucatan Peninsula coast.

  Interior Minister Santiago Creel said the crackdown followed several months of investigation into smuggling operations that he regarded as ``organized crime.''

  Creel said some captured smugglers had links to criminal organizations in Chiapas state, bordering Guatemala, through which illegal immigrants from Central America enter Mexico. Other smuggling networks, he said, delivered illegal immigrants to Mexico and the United States from as far away as Asia and Eastern Europe.

  RAID FOLLOWS MEETING

  The raid came hours after President Fox and U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza met Thursday afternoon. Fox would not comment on their meeting, but Mexico has been pressing the Bush administration to take up its concerns over migration, including problems of illegal immigration.

  Law enforcement units arrested 27 smugglers in Thursday's raids, some caught in the act and others on warrants issued, in connection with deaths of 14 migrants in the Arizona desert in August 2002, police said.

  Among the arrested were brothers José Enrique and Gustavo Mota Cienfuegos, identified by the Mexico City daily El Universal as owners of a Sonora-based transport company with a route between Sonora and Arizona.

  Of the 19 migrants who died from asphyxiation in a truck on May 14 in Victoria, Texas, 14 were Mexicans.

  Creel said 22 arrest warrants were issued in connection with this case. Eight smugglers were detained and 10 vehicles were impounded.

  ALLEGED LEADER HELD

  Police said they captured Florinda Rojas Jiminez, alias Doña Flor or La Tia, the alleged leader of a smuggling operation in Queretaro state in central Mexico. They said she also operated out of Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

  Also arrested were Brazilians David Sierra Luzagaray, alias El Diablo, and his son Félix Francisco Sierra Valenzuela, two leading smugglers of Brazilians, police said.

  During the sweeps of hotels, businesses, homes and along rural roads in Sonora and Quintana Roo, 581 undocumented workers, including six children, also were found among the smugglers, Creel said.

  News reports said agents flew in to their targets from Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo, in Nuevo Leon state; Culiacan, in Sinaloa, and Mexicali, in Baja California.

  ''The criminals take advantage of the desert harshness of the border zone between Sonora and Arizona, through which it's estimated that a thousand migrants pass each day,'' Creel said. ``So far this year, 130 of them have died.''

  Creel denied that Mexico was yielding to U.S. pressure to crack down on human smuggling.

  He said that the strike force sweeps will continue.