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HUEHUETENANGO, Guatemala — He called himself a simple onion farmer, a Mayan Indian with four kids and a fourth-grade education.

By his late 30s, Felipe Diego Alonzo had built a crime route stretching from Central America to Texas, allegedly paying off Mexican drug cartels along the way. He tooled around Guatemala’s western highlands in a loaded silver Ford Ranger pickup. When the police finally raided his ranch, they found a study in rural narco-chic: wooden chalets, a swimming pool, a show horse valued at $100,000.

What they didn’t find was a narco. Alonzo’s business “was more profitable than drug trafficking,” said one of the Guatemalan officials who detained him.

He was part of a human smuggling business that has exploded in recent years, enabling a record number of migrants to reach the U.S. southern border. At least<a href="https://ohss.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-12/2023_0703_plcy_fiscal_year_2022_border_security_metrics_report_2021_data_0.pdf" target=_blank> 80 percent of unlawful border-crossers hire smugglers</a>, according to a 2023 report by the Department of Homeland Security. Even as <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/kamala-harris/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Kamala Harris</a> spar over migration, each presidential candidate pledging tougher controls on the border, smugglers are creating an ever-more-efficient pipeline to get people there.

They guide people through <a href="https://www.crisisgroup.org/latin-america-caribbean/andes/colombia-central-america/102-bottleneck-americas-crime-and-migration" target=_blank>treacherous jungles on the trek from Colombia to Panama</a>. They whisk migrants over remote Guatemalan border crossings and up traffic-clogged Mexican highways. With revenue estimated at $4 billion to $12 billion per year, the smuggling of migrants has joined drugs and extortion as a top income stream for groups like Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, increasing their economic clout throughout the hemisphere.

Daniele Volpe

Yet until the day <a href="https://apnews.com/article/guatemala-migrant-smugglers-arrested-df888efc7a75fa51c46629a262007d41" target=_blank>Alonzo’s property was raided</a> — Aug. 2, 2022 — the U.S. government had done little to prosecute and dismantle smuggling networks.

“It is a major omission in our law enforcement strategy,” said Christopher Landau, who served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico in the Trump administration.

A boom in cocaine production and the expanding power of criminal organizations pose a growing threat in Latin America, the United States’ biggest trading partner. In a multi-part series, The Washington Post is examining how organized crime groups have vastly expanded their influence, corroding the region’s democracies, strangling commerce and propelling thousands of people to the U.S. southern border.

Latin America is producing more than twice as much cocaine as it did a decade ago. Nearly every one of its mainland nations has become a major producer or mover of the drug, feeding booming markets in the United States, Europe and South America.

Organized crime groups have moved well beyond narcotics. They’ve created sprawling illicit industries in extortion, migrant smuggling and gold mining. Their power has become so great that they form a new kind of insurgency, infiltrating government operations.

For years, prosecutors have complained that they lack even the most basic tools to break up human smuggling rings. Sentencing guidelines are far lower than for drug trafficking, and authorities have less hard intelligence on the groups moving migrants, analysts say. “There’s a great deal of effort that goes into mapping how drug trafficking works” in Latin America, said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute. “That doesn’t happen with migrant smuggling.”

And several U.S. administrations focused almost exclusively on hardening the border, not disrupting the routes to it.

By the start of the Biden administration, the Justice Department had realized it needed to try something new. Attorney General Merrick Garland created a task force to seek out partners in Mexico and Central America and put human smuggling chains out of business.

Alonzo became a test case. This story about the investigation of his network is based on thousands of pages of U.S. and Guatemalan court documents and interviews with more than two dozen people. Several spoke on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns or to be frank.

The Justice Department would come to regard the<a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-defendants-extradited-guatemala-sentenced-roles-deadly-international-human-smuggling" target=_blank> prosecution of Alonzo’s ring</a> as a breakthrough. Twenty people were convicted, including Alonzo, regarded as one of the biggest human-smugglers in Central America. U.S. prosecutors also found themselves a crucial partner, Stuardo Campo, a dogged 37-year-old Guatemalan prosecutor who had built a reputation as a corruption fighter.

But ultimately the case would spiral in an unexpected direction, underscoring the fragility of the U.S. strategy.

“You can find extremely brave prosecutors in Latin America who are willing to risk everything to ensure justice,” said Juan Pappier, the Americas deputy director at Human Rights Watch. “But the strategy is constantly being threatened by the broader democratic backsliding and expansion of organized crime.”

Migrant smuggling has been around for decades, with “coyotes,” or guides, a fixture in many Central American and Mexican villages. Only recently has it ballooned into a transnational, industrial-scale activity, involving sophisticated criminal groups, fleets of tractor-trailers, and hotels and warehouses that can hold hundreds of migrants a night.

U.S. policy, in part, explains the change.

In the 1990s, as illegal immigration mounted, Washington began a major buildup on the Mexican border, doubling the number of Border Patrol agents, building walls and barriers, and adding sensors.

Yet the incentives for migration remained unchanged. American employers were hungry for cheap labor. Mexicans and Central Americans were fleeing poverty and violence.

As the border became more fortified, “these individual mom-and-pop organizations realized they had to transition to a more businesslike approach,” with larger teams and more logistic support, said Jayson Ahern, a former acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Alonzo was part of a new generation of migration entrepreneurs. He grew up in the smuggling heartland of Guatemala, the northwestern state of Huehuetenango, a landscape of craggy mountains and dirt-floored shacks, where the occasional mansion painted in candy colors — tangerine, lime, cherry — signaled the potential rewards of heading north.

His family was poor, an acquaintance recalled, “and suddenly they started going around in luxury cars.”

Alonzo was building a smuggling business that would eventually pull in at least $20 million a year, according to prosecutors’ estimates. He came to employ dozens of people — migrant-recruiters, transporters, money launderers, guides and operators of stash houses, U.S. and Guatemalan court documents allege.

Alonzo developed contacts with the cartels that control land corridors through Mexico, starting with Guatemalan crossing points like the tiny town of Gracias a Dios, or “Thank God,” prosecutors said. The drug traffickers generally don’t move migrants themselves. Rather, they collect hefty “taxes” from the smugglers who move through their territory.

In Gracias a Dios, the charge is $500 a head, several local people and officials said.

Past the tiny Mexican immigration office, past the young men mumbling into cellphones as they monitor border crossers, lies a checkpoint run by armed gangsters. According to residents, they work for the Sinaloa cartel.

“You can only cross if you pay,” said one official.

Garland unveiled the smuggling task force on June 7, 2021. The announcement was timed to coincide with <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/06/07/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-and-president-giammattei-of-guatemalain-joint-press-conference/" target="_blank">Harris’s first overseas trip as vice president, to Guatemala</a>. Apprehensions at the U.S. border had more than doubled in the four months since President Joe Biden had taken office, and the administration was scrambling to contain the surge.

<a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1401991/dl" target=_blank>Joint Task Force Alpha</a> would bring together federal prosecutors and “a wide range of intelligence resources,” Garland said — drawing on the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI. It would take aim at two stubborn problems.

First, U.S. prosecutors had few allies in Mexico or Central America to help build cases against the smuggling honchos; many of the region’s justice systems were strapped for resources and threatened by organized crime, U.S. officials said. Second, U.S. federal sentencing guidelines for smuggling were low, often resulting in a jail term of just a few months, according to prosecutors. That made it hard to pressure low-level offenders to testify against their bosses, the way attorneys did in drug-trafficking cases.

“We don’t have nearly the hammer to hold over people” to get them to cooperate, Jim Hepburn, co-director of Task Force Alpha, said in an interview.

Prosecutors needed to find cases connected to bigger crimes or longer penalties. The task force leaders called it “target selection.”

When a woman’s crumpled body was found in western Texas, they discovered a target.

The victim’s name was Marta Ana Raymundo. The 21-year-old had left Guatemala’s western highlands in March 2021, headed for Atlanta, where her father was living. Weeks later, after a grueling hike through the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico and a ride in a packed SUV through Texas, she reached a stash house in Odessa, according to Guatemalan diplomats. Exhausted, she collapsed and died.

The smugglers sent her father a crude map showing where they had left her body, outside a gas plant in the Texas city, officials said. Raymundo’s family declined to be interviewed.

Prosecutors quickly realized the significance of the case. This was a smuggling operation ending in death — a crime punishable by decades in prison.

HSI agents <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-guatemalan-nationals-plead-guilty-human-smuggling-conspiracy-resulting-2021-death-migrant" target="_blank">raided the Odessa stash house</a>, arresting two Guatemalans and seizing detailed ledgers, financial receipts and more than 100 cellphones, according to the Justice Department. As the investigation progressed, prosecutors said, it became clear that Alonzo was the ringleader. The case became a springboard to Guatemala.

But the U.S. government had had little success in securing convictions of smugglers operating abroad. Nearly three-quarters of those convicted in U.S. smuggling cases were Americans, mostly low-level operators, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Guatemala hadn’t extradited a migrant-smuggler in years. And its justice system, at that precise moment, was in chaos.

For a decade, young Guatemalan prosecutors aided by a U.N.-backed commission had led a campaign to investigate the politicians who’d robbed the country blind over the years. As the attorneys unveiled massive corruption, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/how-a-peaceful-political-uprising-happened-in-war-scarred-guatemala/2015/09/05/88664b34-5195-11e5-b225-90edbd49f362_story.html" target="_blank">Guatemalans took to the streets</a> and toppled a president. But by 2021, a backlash was underway.

The State Department accused <a href="https://www.state.gov/united-states-announces-actions-against-seven-central-american-officials-for-undermining-democracy-and-obstructing-investigations-into-acts-of-corruption/" target="_blank">Guatemala’s attorney general, María Consuelo Porras</a>, of transferring or firing anticorruption prosecutors. In September 2021, it put her on the Undemocratic and Corrupt Actors list, making it unlikely she could get a U.S. visa. Guatemala’s Justice Ministry rejected the allegations as “false and unfounded.” Then-President Alejandro Giammattei protested the “lack of respect.”

Amid this mess, the U.S. task force got an unexpected break.

“Stuardo was critical,” said Hepburn.

Stuardo Campo never expected to prosecute smugglers. He had been a legal star, overseeing about 100 people in the Guatemalan justice department’s anticorruption division. Suddenly, he found himself reassigned to the tiny migrant-smuggling unit.

Campo arrived at his new office and looked around. The computers and furniture were pristine, still bearing the red-white-and-blue stickers of the U.S. Agency for International Development. But there were only three prosecutors, five junior lawyers and one car — with no money for gas.

“I found a prosecutorial office practically in ruins,” Campo recalled.

Within days, though, he was dining at an Italian restaurant with a U.S. prosecutor from the antismuggling task force who had just moved to Guatemala.

“From the beginning, we hit it off,” Campo recalled.

The Americans were impressed by the Guatemalan attorney. He was a strategic thinker who knew how to handle complex cases, the U.S. prosecutors said. And he was driven; he had grown up working-class, attending law school at night.

“I can’t say the word ‘relationship’ enough,” Hepburn. “That’s really what builds these cases.”

And, for all the turmoil in the justice system, Guatemala’s government had pledged to cooperate with the Biden administration on migration. When Campo sought to add prosecutors to the antismuggling office, Porras obliged.

The lawyers began reviewing ongoing investigations. They discovered that Guatemalan prosecutors had been looking into a ring linked to Alonzo’s group for years.

A lot of smuggling networks are loose-knit — webs of small players who each handle one segment of the journey. Alonzo’s was different. He ran a full smuggling route, from Guatemala to Texas, with his own stash houses, according to court records and prosecutors. “The trip was practically guaranteed,” said one of Campo’s investigators. Alonzo moved thousands of Guatemalans a year, charging upward of $10,000 each, prosecutors said.

John Moore

Johan Ordonez

For all his savvy, though, he made one serious mistake. Alonzo ran his business from his cellphone, rattling off orders on an open line. And the Guatemalan government had developed very good phone-tapping capabilities.

Campo’s team discovered conversations between Alonzo and his employees about Raymundo’s death in Texas. They would prove crucial in the U.S. case.

“Did she die?” one smuggler asked, according to transcripts of the recordings in court documents.

“Yes,” responded another. “Adolfo says of the shock.”

“Maybe it’s a heart attack or something,” said a third.

In a series of calls, they discussed how to dispose of her body.

“Have him go leave it at the side of the street,” Alonzo told an aide, referring to another employee. “On the street, dude.”

On a chilly summer morning in 2022, Campo rode in a convoy of police trucks down a rutted dirt road into Alonzo’s ranch, as Guatemalan law enforcement fanned out across the country. They detained Alonzo and 18 of his alleged accomplices. The operation was one of the first big victories for the U.S. task force.

Putting the worst offenders out of business

In March 2023, <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-historic-guatemalan-human-smuggling-extraditions-joint-task" target="_blank">Alonzo was extradited to Texas</a>. He pleaded guilty to participation in a migrant-smuggling operation resulting in death; the Justice Department dropped three other charges.

“I’m very regretful for what happened to this young woman and the pain that this has caused her parents,” Alonzo told the judge at a November hearing. “Poverty caused me to commit this error, and I will never be doing that again.” He was sentenced to 19 years and seven months in jail.

Five of his accomplices — three others extradited from Guatemala, and the two arrested in Texas — received between 10 and 30 years. Fourteen other members of the ring have been convicted and sentenced in Guatemala, according to the attorney general’s office.

The prosecution became a model for other U.S. investigations. The most important involved the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/28/san-antonio-migrants-trailer/" target="_blank">death in June 2022 of 53 migrants in a tractor-trailer in San Antonio</a>, the deadliest human smuggling event in U.S. history. Several of the victims were Guatemalan. An investigation launched by Campo eventually led to the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/08/22/human-smuggling-migrants-texas-arrest/" target="_blank">arrest of seven alleged smugglers</a>.

When Task Force Alpha marked its third anniversary this past June, it could boast of <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/news/2024/06/11/readout-joint-task-force-alphas-third-anniversary-meeting" target=_blank>300 domestic and international arrests of smugglers</a>. The prosecutions were sending a message, Hepburn said at a news conference: “Smugglers will not operate with impunity.”

Still, in Guatemala, authorities acknowledge that the smuggling industry continues to thrive.

Peter Andreas, a Brown University political scientist, said both the smuggling of migrants and drug trafficking are driven by complex supply-and-demand factors. Perhaps the most U.S. prosecutors can do, he said, is punish those who are the most violent or abusive.

“You can’t put migrant-smugglers out of business,” said Andreas, author of the book “Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide.” “But you can put the worst offenders out of business.”

Collaboration with Latin American prosecutors remains a challenge. While the task force continues to cooperate with Guatemala, dozens of prosecutors have fled the country, many facing criminal investigations over their anticorruption work. “Without a doubt, they were some of the very best prosecutors in this country — and perhaps in Central America,” Pappier said.

Two months after Alonzo was extradited, Campo became a case study of what could happen to those who remained.

His wife was dropping their 7-year-old son at school when she got the phone call. “It’s happened,” her husband told her. Police swarmed Campo’s car as he was about to go to work.

Campo has been accused in three cases of failing to adequately supervise the work of his employees in antismuggling and anticorruption cases, resulting in errors. He calls the charges a farce. “I attribute this to my having carried out investigations against people who had, or have, a lot of power,” he said in a recent interview at the prison in Guatemala City where he is being held.

The Justice Ministry, in a statement, denied that Campo or the other prosecutors were being targeted for their anticorruption work. It said that it “has the obligation to respond to complaints by victims” and that judges had found sufficient evidence to press charges.

Part of a Post team named as finalists for Pulitzer Prize for reporting on terrorism post-9/11

Overseas Press Club Robert Spiers Benjamin Award for Latin America coverage, 1998

Nieman Fellowship, Harvard University, 2012-13

Knight-Bagehot Fellowship, Columbia University, 1992-93

College of the Holy Cross, BA in English

Mary Beth Sheridan is a correspondent covering Mexico and Central America for The Washington Post. Her previous foreign postings include Rome; Bogota, Colombia; and a five-year stint in Mexico in the 1990s. She has also covered immigration, homeland security and diplomacy for The Post, and served as deputy foreign editor from 2016 to 2018.   

Mary Beth Sheridan

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As smuggling rings made billions from migrants, the U.S. was sidelined

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