By MARIA VERZA

CIUDAD HIDALGO, Mexico (AP) — The first place many migrants sleep after entering Mexico from Guatemala is inside a large structure, with a roof above and fenced sides, in a rural ranch. They call it the “chicken coop” and they can’t leave it until they pay off the cartel that runs it.

Migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border reached their lowest level in four yearsbut days before the US elections, where immigration is a key issue, migrants continue to flock to Mexico.

While U.S. authorities give much of the credit to their Mexican counterparts for stemming the flow to their shared border, organized crime maintains tighter control over the people who move here than the handful of federal agents and guards nationals standing by the river.

Kidnapped migrants who pay the $100 ransom for their release carry a stamp indicating they have paid. From January to August, in this southernmost region of Mexico alone, more than 150,000 migrants were intercepted by immigration officials, representing a fraction of the flow.

Six migrant families interviewed by The Associated Press, who were first kidnapped and held until they paid, explained how it works. A Mexican federal official corroborated much of this information. They all requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Mexican immigration agents encountered 925,000 undocumented migrants through August of this year, far more than last year’s annual total and triple the 2021 total. Yet they only expelled 16,500, a fraction of previous years.

The Rev. Heyman Vázquez, a priest in Ciudad Hidalgo, along the Suchiate River that divides Mexico and Guatemala, sees it daily.

“It’s them (the cartel) who decide who passes and who doesn’t,” Vázquez said. “The number of migrants they take away every day is significant and they do it in front of the authorities. »

Pay to continue north

On Monday morning, Luis Alonso Valle, a 43-year-old Honduran traveling with his wife and two children, stepped off a raft moored with inner tubes and boards from a truck that had transported them across the Suchiate to Mexico .

They had not gone 50 meters towards Ciudad Hidalgo before three men on motorbikes approached to tell them they could not continue walking. Then seeing the journalists, they left. The family looked scared.

In the central plaza of Ciudad Hidalgo, Valle requested a van that could take them the 37 kilometers to Tapachula, considered the main entry point into southern Mexico. As they boarded, the driver asked in a low voice that the journalists stop recording. “They (organized crime) are going to arrest me,” he said.

This is often how migrants arrive at the ranch. Taxi or van drivers working for the cartel take them there and return them. They are forced to sleep on the floor.

“There were more than 500 people there, some had been there for 10, 15 days,” said a Venezuelan woman released on Sunday with her husband and two children. “Whoever doesn’t have money stays and whoever decides to pay leaves,” she said.

A 28-year-old Ecuadorian baker was escorted to a bank to withdraw money to free himself, his wife, daughter and four other relatives. His family was held as insurance until his return.

Once payment is made, the migrants are photographed and their skin swabbed.

Armed men stop vans and taxis heading to Tapachula and check the stamps. Those who don’t have one are fired. The migrants said that once they arrived in Tapachula, they were asked to wash them to avoid trouble with other gangs.

According to the non-governmental organization Fray Matias de Cordova de Tapachula, at least a third of the hundreds of migrants welcomed this year arrived with a stamp. Director Enrique Vidal Olascoaga said those who cannot pay are often sexually assaulted.

None of the families interviewed by AP reported being injured.

The official with knowledge of the migrants’ statements to investigators said more than 100 migrants released by security forces in Ciudad Hidalgo in September, as well as a group of several dozen migrants who were shot dead by soldiers on October 1, had experienced similar scenarios of kidnapping and extortion.

Border controlled by cartels

Tight control of organized crime on Mexico’s southern border is accompanied by increasing violence generated by fight between the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels. The state of Chiapas is just one of their battlegrounds, but it is key to controlling the smuggling routes of people, drugs and weapons from Central America. Migrants have become the most lucrative commodity, according to experts.

The increasingly aggressive presence of cartels is becoming an obstacle to organizations trying to help migrants. Earlier this month, gunmen killed a Catholic priest in Chiapas. And Vidal said that sometimes the groups prevent migrants from receiving humanitarian aid.

President Claudia Sheinbaum said the government was confronting the violence but refusing to take on the cartels. It appears to be maintaining a tactic begun under the administration of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, cycling migrants from the north to the south depleting their resources and keeping them far from the US border – exposing them to more kidnappings and extortion.

Ciudad Hidalgo Mayor Elmer Vázquez said he knew nothing about migrant shelters operating in the area and said his city was still caring for migrants.

But Rev. Vázquez (no relation to the mayor), who spent two decades defending migrants, said the prosecutor’s office, the National Guard and the special prosecutor for crimes against migrants do nothing, even when crimes are reported.

“They are in cahoots with organized crime and, of course, they make it look like they are doing their job,” he said.

Race against time

In August, the The US government has expanded access to CBP Onean online portal used to schedule appointments to seek asylum at the border in southern Chiapas. Mexico requested the move to ease pressure on migrants to travel north to secure an appointment.

The Mexican government then opened “mobility corridors” to help migrants with CBP One appointments travel safely from southern Mexico to the U.S. border. Nominations are only the first step, but most applicants are allowed to wait out the lengthy process from the United States.