Women Are the New Coyotes

Editor's Note: This piece was part of a four-part investigative series for the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión.

"Gaviota" (not her real name) has six phones that don't stop ringing. Her booming business produces net profits of more than $50,000 a month. She has dozens of customers lining up for her in a datebook stretching three months ahead.

Gaviota is not exactly a college-educated professional, much less a businesswoman in a legal enterprise. But she has found "coyotaje" (illegal human trafficking) to be her best option of keeping the promise she tearfully made to her two children: "As long as they don't kill me, you won't live in poverty."

Gaviota is one of dozens of women along the southern border of the United States who are active participants and, often, the masterminds behind the world's third most lucrative illegal industry, after drugs and weapons: human trafficking.

Experts, authorities and the smugglers themselves agree that human trafficking networks are entering a new era, in which women have ceased to be the victims -- smuggled across the border and often raped along the journey -- and have become the ones that pull the strings in smuggling people ("goats," "chickens" or "furniture," as they call the undocumented).

"The old story of the man who runs the 'coyotaje' business is now just a myth. It's finally coming out that the big business of human trafficking is in female hands. As long as they make it known that they are women, they have lots of business all along the border," explains Marissa Ugarte, a psychologist, lecturer and founder of the Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition of San Diego, Calif.

In 2006, some 3,455 women were arrested for smuggling undocumented immigrants along the southern border, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). So far in 2007, another 1,606 women have been caught.

Female coyotes tend to employ other women -- most of them single mothers -- to line up customers, arrange food and lodging for the undocumented, and participate in cross-border money laundering.

"A real 'coyote' organizes everything for you. From who and where to take the 'goats' across, and where they will stay on this side of the border, to who will deliver them to the door of the customer (the immigrant's family). The other ones who just take you across the river or through the desert -- those bastards are just sleazebags and that's why we're eating their lunch," says Gaviota, whose smuggling network operates in Laredo, Tex. and transports migrants into the United States at border crossings or across the Rio Grande, depending on the customer's budget.

"The business is a real money-maker," says Ramón Rivera, a DHS spokesperson in Washington, D.C. "These women inspire confidence in the immigrants and when the authorities stop them and take them to court, they give them shorter sentences because they are mothers, daughters, because they are women. But when they get out, they go right back to doing the same thing, or worse -- they start going into other areas."

Many women have crossed the line that separates human trafficking from the trafficking of drugs, weapons and money.

"I took my first 'chickens' across when I was nine years old, and when I grew up I started moving drugs across the border. My mother taught us the business and made us tough. She hated poverty. For her, power was everything," says Cristal, daughter of the notorious drug smuggler Rosa Emma Carvajal Ontiveros, "La Güera Polvos," or "the Blonde Powder Woman." Carvajal Ontiveros was shot to death on Oct. 6, apparently by a hit squad, in Chihuahua's border zone with New Mexico, according to her family.

Just like their male colleagues, female coyotes put their lives at risk.

'Greasing the machinery'