Crimes against Central American migrants in Mexico—including kidnapping, rape, and murder—are one of the most systematically underreported large scale human rights violations in the Western Hemisphere. Most casual observers know that the journey is dangerous, but the extent of the dangers, the sheer number of victims, and the close ties to organized criminal groups are harder to see.
One reason that crimes against Central American migrants go unnoticed is that assigning real numbers to the scope of the problem is nearly impossible. Central American migrants are a shadow population moving through Mexico. We don’t even know with certainty how many Central Americans are on the move every year, although back of the envelope calculations suggest the figure is well over 400,000. This past year, around two-thirds of these migrants were families or unaccompanied children.
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Similar to Daniela and her family, most migrants don’t report crimes—since they don't trust the local police or fear being deported—making it hard to get a sense of problem’s true scope. But the few numbers that we have on kidnapping boggle the mind. A 2011 report from Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission reported knowledge of 198 mass kidnappings that included 9,758 victims over just a six-month period from September 2008 to February 2009. A second report noted 214 kidnappings from April to September 2010 that included 11,333 migrants. And these are just those kidnappings that the Commission was able to document.
Add this up, and it starts to become a pretty lucrative side-business for groups like the Zetas that also control human trafficking routes. Migration officials and business leaders estimate that these cartels or cartelitos (little cartels) are raking in somewhere between $100 and $250 million a year from kidnapping migrants.
