A collaboration from International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and media partners in Latin America, Europe and the United States documents nearly 19,000 migrants’ journeys to the U.S. border under dangerous conditions.

“Cargo trucks: a trap for migrants,” is a reporting collaboration led by Noticias Telemundo and the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), with the ICIJ and Bellingcat. Pie de Página and its partners Chiapas Paralelo and En un 2×3 Tamaulipas reported in Mexico, Plaza Pública in Guatemala and Contracorriente in Honduras. In December 2021, 31-year-old Rafelín Martínez Castillo left the Dominican Republic for Panama, traveling to Guatemala before crossing the border into Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. His family had paid $26,000 to smugglers who had agreed to get him to the United States. Instead, 25 days after leaving home, the craftsman returned in a casket. Martínez Castillo was one of 56 people killed when an 18-wheeler that had been carrying dozens of migrants overturned on a Chiapas highway. Images of the tragic scene spread around the world and the day after the accident, officials from six countries, including Mexico and the United States, announced a new action group to investigate. But what could have been a turning point in curtailing the dangerous smuggling of migrants instead became an example of systemic failures. The action group only met once, in January 2022, and never released a report. Those cases represent only a small fraction of the millions of journeys to the U.S. border annually. “The situation of displaced people is so grave that they take all these risks,” said Tonatiuh Guillén López, Mexico’s former immigration chief who resigned in 2019 over disagreement with the government’s shifting immigration policies. He is one of several current and former Mexican officials that reporters interviewed — along with survivors, experts, migrants’ rights advocates and others — for the investigation. Their findings give a glimpse into what one advocate described as a “perfect cycle of impunity” that allows human smuggling to thrive.

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Deadly human smuggling through Mexico thrives in ‘perfect cycle of impunity’