Coyote Inc.

Jaime Cordoba, smooth-faced and barely 18, sits crossed-legged in a corner of Agua Prieta's central plaza, sketching a map in the dirt. His audience is a family of five that has just gotten off the bus in this dusty Mexican border town with hopes of getting to Phoenix, Ariz. Cordoba makes his pitch: "You'll cross in one day. And you only pay if you make it." The price is $650 a person. From a nearby pay phone, the father calls relatives in Colorado, telling them to be ready to wire the money to Phoenix in a few days. Then Cordoba hands him a slip of paper with the address of a hotel a few blocks away. His instructions are simple: "Wait there until tomorrow."

From here other men will take over. And taken over they have. In the last year, Agua Prieta, with a permanent population of 120,000, has become the people-smuggling capital of Mexico, and Douglas, Ariz., the town of 15,000 across the border, the latest battleground in the U.S. war on illegal immigration. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of illegals a day evade the U.S. Border Patrol, prompting some American ranchers to round up illegals themselves. The coyotes, as smugglers have been known since the days when their trade was a series of mom-and-pop operations, have evolved into a highly organized, multimillion-dollar network, widely believed to have overtaken drug trafficking as Agua Prieta's leading industry. Its success is driving an economic boom. "I think there is more money in smuggling aliens than there is in drugs," says an agent in the Border Patrol's smuggling-investigation unit. "One reason why we are seeing the organizations getting more sophisticated is that the narcotics smugglers are switching over to aliens."

Some simple math shows why. In March, the peak of the migrant-worker season, the more than 1,200 Border Patrol agents covering the 281-mile stretch of Arizona border known as the Tucson sector caught 60,537 migrants, almost half of them in the 30-mile section around Douglas. The total for the sector this year is expected to top 450,000, or about 51 an hour. By the most conservative estimates, at least twice that many are getting through, often only after several rounds of being caught and returned to Mexico. At $800 a head, the average price this year, that adds up to $900 million--nearly as much as the Border Patrol spent last year nationwide trying to stop them.

The business is as old as illegal immigration itself. But just a decade ago, the trip to Phoenix cost $200--if migrants bothered to use a guide at all--and the money was paid in advance. Now, few illegals attempt the journey alone, and the smugglers offer a guarantee: you don't pay until Phoenix. The coyote is still the boss of the operation, but he employs several subcontractors (graphic). A street-level recruiter works in Agua Prieta and throughout Mexico and is the only person in the chain who gets his money even if the migrants are turned back. A guide uses a mobile phone--and in some cases even night-vision goggles--to deliver migrants across the border, either to a waiting car on the highway or a safe house in Douglas. A safe-house operator keeps migrants overnight until they are picked up. A driver delivers the migrants to a house in Phoenix, where they stay until the money is wired from a relative in the United States. From there, they fan out across America by land or air, with the arrangements made by the smuggler. In the last four months, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents have arrested and deported more than 3,000 illegals in various sting operations at Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport, but the traffickers are caught far less often.

None of this would be possible without the U.S. Border Patrol. In 1994, authorities began a crackdown at the border's busiest crossing spots, dramatically reducing the number of illegals coming through Texas and California. But instead of stopping the flow of illegals, the clampdown only diverted it--turning Agua Prieta into the headquarters of Coyote Inc.

Agua Prieta bulges against the U.S. border. At times, the population has swelled to 200,000, with thousands arriving each day. The flow of migrants starts at the airport in Hermosillo, the nearest major city, five hours south. (More people arrive there on one-way plane tickets than to anywhere else in Mexico.) Buses leave for Agua Prieta nearly every hour. The bus station where passengers get off is one-stop shopping for the journey north. Inside, bottled water sells for twice the standard price. Next door there is a shoe store and a pharmacy.