Enrique’s Journey | Chapter One: Along the Tracks: Carlos and Leonicio

“If you have money, they let you go,” says Carlos Roberto, 17, pressing against the bars of his cell at the municipal police station in Tapachula, Mexico. Three times in four days, he says, officers stopped him and took 20 pesos, or about $2.

Finally, when he ran out of money, he says, they arrested him.

In a 1999 Mexican study, “Migration Between Mexico’s Two Borders,” a coalition of professors and migrant support groups says officers from a dozen law enforcement agencies, including immigration authorities, hunt for migrants and rob them as they move north through Mexico to the United States.

At Mexico’s Interior Ministry, Javier Moctezuma Barragan, undersecretary of Population, Migration and Religious Affairs, who oversees immigration officers, says the administration of Mexican President Vicente Fox has taken steps to curb corruption. “I think we have made some progress,” he says. “We hope that the corruption has gone down, but we hope it will go down more.”

Police agencies deny that their own officers rob migrants, although some accuse officers from other agencies of doing it. “The judicial police stop the train to rob the immigrants, pure and simple,” says Reyder Cruz Toledo, chief of the municipal police in Arriaga, a town along the railroad in the southern state of Chiapas.

Genaro Garcia Luna, national director of the Agencia Federal de Investigacion, the judicial police, did not respond to requests for comment. But Sixto Juarez, the AFI chief in Arriaga, says his agency focuses on investigating federal crimes, much like the FBI, and that migrants do not fall under his purview.

“I don’t think I have one rotten officer,” Juarez says.

Some denials are not so absolute. Elias Gonzales Gomez, a municipal police commander in Tapahcula, where Carlos was jailed, says allegations that the police rob immigrants are not true. He adds that Tapachula’s 400 officers earn only about $210 a month. “Maybe,” he says, “there are a few bad ones.”

A cleric who helps migrants says robbery under the color of authority is pervasive. “Se han suelto aqui los perros,” says Father Flor Maria Rigoni, at the Albergue Belen migrant shelter in Tapachula. “The dogs have been set loose on these people.”

By the time immigrants get to Tapachula, just 12 miles across the Guatemalan border into Chiapas, Father Rigoni says, 80% of those who stop at his shelter have been robbed, beaten or victimized by extortion, often by Mexican law enforcement officers.

Abuse by law enforcement is so pervasive, says Jorge Reinoso, head of Ferrocarriles Chiapas-Mayab, the railroad in southern Mexico, that he has seen fighting between municipal and state police officers over who gets to rob a particular group of migrants.

In Nuevo Laredo, Leonicio Alejandro Hernandez, 33, says four municipal officers approached him on the banks of the Rio Grande and said, “We charge 1,000 pesos [$100] to cross this river.”

Hernandez balked, and the officers lowered their price. “If you don’t give us 500 pesos, 10 days in jail!” he says one yelled.

He says another warned, “Throw yourself into the river, and I’ll kill you.”

Hernandez says he paid them and swam away.

Octavio Lozano Gamez, the municipal police chief in Nuevo Laredo, acknowledges that of his 720 employees, “a small minority of police officers in the city have this problem of robbing people.”

Lozano doubts, however, that even his corrupt officers would pick poor immigrants to rob. “Any smart police would seek out someone with more money, gold chains, wristwatches.”