Honduras-Comalapa Border: The trafficking route

The Chiapas municipality that made headlines as a dispute territory for organized crime has been a trafficking center for years where Honduran women are sexually exploited and give birth to children without nationality.

This is the story of an illicit business that operates with impunity, of its victims, of the midwives who care for them and also of women who managed to escape from their captors.

On a street in Frontera Comalapa, in Chiapas, on the border between Mexico and Guatemala, is the birth house, where Ana and Rosa, two Honduran sisters, wait to see their friend Daniela, who has just given birth to her baby.

“We want to leave now,” Rosa says, overwhelmed. Ana agrees. They arrived about four hours ago and the heat and humidity are already weighing them down. 

The time they can spend outside their home is limited. They look towards the entrance constantly, in a state of alert. That day in November 2021 they are there to accompany Daniela, but now their minutes are running out because their lives are under the control of someone else, a man they describe as powerful and violent.

Ana, 21 years old, calls him “my Mexican.” Rosa, four years older, tenses and takes a deep breath when she hears it. Neither of them mentions her name. He is a member of a criminal group and also has a relationship with Ana. He is the father of her daughter.

Both women from the region and neighboring Guatemala and, for more than fifteen years, victims of trafficking of Honduran origin come to this birthing house. It is a simple block and cement construction with a waiting room and another for giving birth. The toilet and sink are outside, in a cool garden larger than the house.

The three young women are forced to work in bars and cantinas in Frontera Comalapa – the name of the municipality and its main population – where organized crime has built a lucrative business trafficking Honduran women for sexual exploitation.

Human trafficking means “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, using the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, kidnapping, fraud, deception, abuse of power or a situation of vulnerability, or the granting or receipt of payments or benefits to obtain the consent of a person who has authority over another, for the purposes of exploitation”, in accordance with the Palermo Protocol , adopted by the UN in 2000. It can include sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery, servitude, and organ removal. 

Frontera Comalapa made headlines on September 23, when armed men identified as members of the Sinaloa Cartel paraded with artillery vehicles among a crowd celebrating their victory over the rival group, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). Both organizations fight for control of drug, weapons and migrant trafficking on the border.

The Sinaloa Cartel has a presence in the area dating back to the late 1980s. But it was in 2018, an election year, when violence between criminal groups intensified, according to a report by Avispa Midia . The arrival of the Morena party coincided with the incursion of the CJNG.

To carry out this report, in which most of the names are fictitious for security reasons, victims of trafficking in Frontera Comalapa, witnesses to the crime, members of organizations that document these events, and local midwives, a total of sixteen sources; Tours were also made along the migratory route from 2017 to 2022, and through the Chiapas municipality between 2019 and 2022.

’With us or against us’

For years, Josefina helped women victims of trafficking in Frontera Comalapa. Until 2018, when Honduran women began to arrive "at the drop of a hat", after being forced to flee the "cuarterías" - neighborhoods, small hotels or steam-made constructions, with numerous small rooms to rent - in which they lived, because the criminal order had changed. The fight between the Sinaloa Cartel and the CJNG began.

In 2022 he decided to leave the place; He knew that an upsurge in violence between the cartels that were fighting for control of the territory was imminent. 

In May 2023, this struggle caused the displacement of more than 3,000 people , who left their communities to escape the violence. The population of Frontera Comalapa had two options, according to published testimonies: flee or obey the orders of the CJNG through Maíz, the acronym for the Left Hand group , considered the social base of the cartel.

Two years earlier, in August 2021, the main access roads to Frontera Comalapa – the entrance from San Gregorio Chamic and the exit towards Motozintla – had been closed by members of the Jalisco cartel. “The drug groups that had control grabbed all the organizations, both civil and peasant, merchants and others. They took hold and said: ’Let’s see, gang, you are with us or against us,’” a local resident then explained to me. 

A large number of organizations dissolved to join the Maíz. Public transport buses and shops have their logo. If an incident occurs, the criminals ask their members to block the roads, not to allow passage.

The violence has not stopped. In the first days of January 2024, clashes , power outages and road blockades were again recorded in different communities in Frontera Comalapa and nearby municipalities such as Chicomuselo and Motozintla. Reforma published that, according to the residents, neither the Army nor the National Guard managed to enter the conflict areas.

Frontera Comalapa is a silenced area. It took several years to get the details of how traffickers operate. At each step of the process we had to attend to security recommendations, avoid evasion, sources who agreed to speak and later regretted it, conditions of anonymity and warnings. 

They are the stories of Josefina, who for years secretly protected the victims of crime, and the nun Lidia Mara Silva de Souza, who in Honduras witnessed the violence of traffickers; of Honduran women like Ana, Rosa and Cony, who try to escape or resign themselves to the fate that brought them to Frontera Comalapa, and of the midwives who worry about their health, so that they can give birth to strong babies, who allow us to tell the journey of trafficking, its starting point and its end, sometimes luminous, when they manage to leave their captors behind. 

Human trafficking is part of an illicit business that, according to the UN, generates profits of up to $36 billion a year worldwide .

Migrant limb

Rosa and Ana arrived in Frontera Comalapa in 2018. Three years later, they live in a barracks and work in a central bar in the town. It is a prison without bars. Their steps are monitored by the criminal organization that paid to bring them, headed in the municipality, as they say, by “the Mexican.” 

“I have my Mexican who mistreats me. "He notices everything I do, that’s why I don’t go out anymore," says Ana in the birthing house, which smells clean and has a patio dotted with pebbles that were once in a river that runs and can be heard very close.

Before its founding, in 1928, the town was called Cushu, which in the Mam language means “roasted corn.” Other versions collected by anthropologist Enriqueta Lerma Rodríguez affirm that Cushu is derived from cusha, the alcohol produced by the “drink factories.” In her book The Other Believers she includes a testimony that she attributes the name of Frontera Comalapa to the desire to mark the territorial limit with the Guatemalans, who would have always lived in the place.

It was in the second half of the 90s, writes researcher Nicanor Madueño Haon, when the “first migratory wave” of Hondurans arrived in Frontera Comalapa, which coincided with the increase in the militarization of the state after the emergence of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. The growth in the number of canteens in those years, run by foreign women, is related to “the phenomenon” of human trafficking in the region, he points out. 

In 2012, the Government of Chiapas reported that in five years it had managed to dismantle 33 gangs dedicated to human trafficking. Between 2015 and September 2022, the state prosecutor’s office initiated 36 investigation files for this crime, he specified via transparency. He did not have specific information on the number of Honduran victims.

The Diagnosis on the situation of human trafficking in Mexico 2021 , prepared by the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) also with information from the state prosecutor’s office, records an increase in the figures: between August 2017 and July 2021 They opened 62 investigation files for human trafficking in Chiapas, and 40 criminal cases were initiated at the local level, none at the federal level. 84 victims were also reported. There were five convictions and two acquittals, and eight people imprisoned in the state for that crime. 

At the national level, according to the report, 3,896 victims of trafficking were identified in the same period, of which 2,934 were women. 93 percent of those whose identity could be established were Mexican. The majority of foreign victims were Colombian (41), Honduran (40) and Venezuelan (38).

Two officials from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) who investigate crime in Central America assure that between fifteen and seventeen people participate in the trafficking chain between Honduras and the Comalapa Border, from when the women are hooked until they are sexually exploited. , including public officials. “There is the one who captures, the one who transports, the one who hosts in the transfers, the one who houses [at the destination], the one who cooks for them,” explains one in an interview.

Those who operate the business work with people who manage to enter the victims’ inner circle. The first contact is a family member or friend who is responsible for convincing them to move to the municipality with the promise of a well-paid job.

Between the two ends of the chain there are men and women who travel with them. It is common to see how traffickers show several passports, accompanied by their victims, at the windows of immigration controls in Guatemala, without the agents asking them questions or trying to stop them. There are also people hired to receive them in that country. And the managers of hotels where no one tells the authorities what is happening inside.

Once in Mexico, after crossing through official or unauthorized border crossings, more officials and public servants intervene – immigration agents, police, prosecutors – who see them and do not act. The victims remain under the control of criminals and members of criminal groups.

That is why there is a constant traffic of Honduran victims of trafficking, women who, when they become pregnant, go to birth centers in Chiapas to give birth to their babies, without being able to process their nationality because the Civil Registry does not recognize the birth certificates. birth that midwives extend, according to the testimony of the midwives themselves.

For these certificates to be valid, midwives must be registered in an institution in the health sector; If they are not, the birth must be recorded in a health unit. In the latter case, the midwives limit themselves to delivering a delivery document, with no official value.

Ready to escape

Rosa is the one who talks the least. She lulls herself in a rocking chair; She says that she already wants to leave, but doesn’t feel like stopping. She without desire for anything, with a sadness of years. She wears shorts and a cotton blouse. Today she rests from the obligation to wear a dress and put on makeup.

Ana is sitting on the edge of a wooden chair, with her back straight and her hands on her knees, as if ready to take off at any moment. She is wearing an orange strapless dress. She pays attention to the voices coming from the street and the sounds of cars and motorcycles.

The meeting with the Honduran sisters is an opportunity to learn about the business of trafficking. An intermediary, a friend of hers, set the date, time and place of the interview with Rosa. What was not planned is that her friend Daniela gave birth that day.

Rosa and Ana’s cuartería is in the center of the municipal seat, a few blocks from the central park, in an area full of street merchants, collective taxis and vans. In their other rooms live more Honduran girls forced to work for traffickers.

On any given day in the hot and hectic Frontera Comalapa you see young women on their way to the bars. Their phenotype gives them away; Although they try to go unnoticed, they stand out among the women of the region. They tend to be taller, with a Caribbean accent.

“These catrachas are whores, they always tell us on the street, anyway,” says Rosa.

Some walk from their rooms to a nearby bar, where they dedicate themselves to “checking in”: the more alcohol they get clients to consume, the higher their commission. Others take taxis to travel to canteens in rural communities.

Sometimes, the young women do not return because they run away, disappear, or because they are killed and their bodies are abandoned somewhere. Many end up in the common grave of the municipal pantheon, according to Josefina, the woman who protects victims of trafficking. “Here they kill women all the time and bury them wherever,” says Rosa.

With the sunset the heat drops a little. Ana talks about her anger, that she does not accept living in shackles by her “partner”, the head of the criminal group – she did not want to say which one – that brought her to this place. She no longer wants to live like this, without freedom. “They say there is work in Tijuana. I have contacts in the United States,” she repeats as if it were a mantra.

He has decided: he plans to flee the next day to Tijuana; He already bought tickets for her and her two children.

But it is not easy to escape from Frontera Comalapa.

The bosses

One spring night in 2021, three Honduran men and a woman took a bus with the task of bringing some young women from their country to put them to work in bars in Frontera Comalapa.

In the same vehicle that left La Mesilla, in Guatemala, less than 20 kilometers from the Chiapas municipality, behind the group of traffickers was a person who carries out field work for the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS, for its acronym in English). , the first international humanitarian organization that was established in Frontera Comalapa to serve the migrant population forced to stay in the place.

On public transportation in the area, it is common to hear radio advertisements from evangelical pastors and healers who sell “miracles,” coyotes who offer to take people to the United States, and moneylenders who provide money to pay the coyote. The radio spectrum is full of promises related to migration… and human trafficking.

That day, the criminals sent audios to their contact in Honduras, and played their responses on loudspeaker. Their interlocutor was the first link in the trafficking chain, generally a relative or close friend of the young women they planned to pick up the next day.

“They told them where they were going to wait for them, because only the truck arrived in Honduras and they returned [at the next exit]. From there they told them not to worry, that [the girls] were ready,” says the JRS employee.

On the bus, the traffickers responded that the girls – they did not specify how many there were – were going to “return safely.” When they stopped exchanging audios, they began to talk. “They said that a bar owner, a boss, had promised them money for these people.”

There are many bosses in Frontera Comalapa. They are essential for the business because they are in charge of receiving the young women, hosting them during the first days and telling them, when the time comes, that they fell into a trap. The bath of reality is in dribs and drabs, because a boss makes sure that the victims do not escape. They master the art of subtle threats and blackmail; They are the ones who do the makeup and deliver them to the owners of the bars, although sometimes they can also be the owners.

The witness’s account of the conversation between the criminals continues: “They talked about how they are paid very well. They were happy and happy. We went at night. “Someone told them ’shhhh’ because they were talking out loud.”

The bus was stopped several times on its way through Guatemala by police who got on, recognized the traffickers and charged them to let them continue the trip. It wasn’t a problem, they were prepared. “They already knew that situation and brought enough money to pay,” said the source, who has been traveling those routes for five years.

When they arrived in the capital of Guatemala, the criminals took another bus to Honduras and the witness lost them. He doesn’t know what happened to those girls they were going to look for.

The promise
In Victoria, a municipality in the department of Yoro, in northern Honduras, there was a young man named José who knew Ana and Rosa. He lived on the same block as him, he was a friend that “we already had time to know.” In 2018 he told them about a very nice place in Mexico, with “good jobs in restaurants.”

“Secure work” was for them an irrefutable proposal. Thus, José convinced them and took them. It was a two day trip. They left Victoria for the Greater Metropolitan Central of San Pedro Sula, where they took a bus north, passing near Ocotepeque, a coffee-growing town that is a usual rest stop for traffickers and polleros.

After crossing the border of Agua Caliente, a mountain town that marks the border of Honduras, they headed to Esquipulas, in Guatemala, where they did not stop to visit the venerated Black Christ, a ritual performed by millions of Central American migrants.

In the line that forms in the basilica in front of the 16th century image there are both adults and solitary children, families, and groups of people who are taken by the coyotes to say a prayer before beginning the most difficult part of the path. .

They continued on until Guatemala City. Ana and Rosa talk about hotels near Zone 1. No authority comes there to ask questions; They are accommodation and, at the same time, safe houses.

At this point, the women were stripped of their passports and IDs. The trafficker asked for them, supposedly to carry out paperwork, and he did not return them. During their first night in Guatemala, staying in a small, dirty and uncomfortable hotel, the sisters sensed that something was wrong. But they were already trapped. They were outside their country and without documents. They were on a train that they couldn’t jump off.

They then traveled more than 300 kilometers until they reached the border crossing that separates La Mesilla, in Guatemala, from Ciudad Cuauhtémoc, in Mexico. Backpackers abound in the Guatemalan town; They come from San Cristóbal de las Casas, in Chiapas, to travel to tourist destinations in the Central American country such as Lake Atitlán, or the cities of Panajachel and La Antigua.

In La Mesilla there are commercial premises with rusty metal structures about to fall, people offering to exchange quetzales for pesos and vice versa, wholesale sales of basic foods such as beans, rice, milk, and cleaning and hygiene products, in a large informal market.

It is easy to recognize tourists; They observe, as if they were on a safari, a precarious world that is foreign to them.

Cross without a trace

The victims of trafficking who travel to Frontera Comalapa, on the other hand, are not easy to distinguish. They are led by elusive criminals.

There is a grocery store in La Mesilla where people enter and never return. They cross the counter, walk through the interior of the house and come out onto a dirt road that leads to the Pan-American Highway, now on the Mexican side. This is what one of the victims tells it. The chips and sodas are just part of the facade.

Rosa and Ana crossed the border and arrived in Ciudad Cuauhtémoc with only what they were wearing, “without anything.” There José, the friend from the block, left them in the hands of an unknown woman, a boss. For them, he will always be the traitor who caused them to fall into the "Mexican’s" network.

“I didn’t imagine that’s why I came to work,” says Ana.

The sisters entered the national territory without going through immigration controls, without leaving an administrative record. As if they didn’t exist. They met the agents of the National Migration Institute (INM), the prosecutors and the police later, because some of them “touched their buttocks” in the bar where they worked, of which they were clients.

The boss took them north; They traveled by car along the Pan-American Highway, as if they were going to San Cristóbal de las Casas, the Lagunas de Montebello or the Lagos de Colón. But no: after traveling 6.4 kilometers they turned left, near the community of Paso Hondo. At that moment Mexico swallowed them.

They headed to Frontera Comalapa along a road parallel to the border line. Guatemala was on the other side, beyond a chain of mountains that look like a succession of pyramids swallowed by vegetation.

On the 24 kilometer route from Ciudad Cuauhtémoc to Frontera Comalapa they crossed San Gregorio Chamic, a community with less than 200 inhabitants that is part of the municipality. From there it is possible to cross into Guatemala through clandestine routes, between corn fields.

The homes are few and separated by enormous distances. They are places where there are birthing houses. And bars. Josefina’s refuge was also there.

In the town of Chamic, as it is known, and in the rancherías, Honduran women live confined in small rooms, with their lives mortgaged, working in miserable businesses in which they are forced to sexually serve the criminals who dispute the control of “ the plaza”, according to the testimony of Josefina and residents of the area.

Before the drug trafficker parades that made Frontera Comalapa famous in the country and in the world, there were already seasons in which violence forced the suspension, starting at five in the afternoon, of public transportation on the highway that crosses the community.

The municipality of Frontera Comalapa, with intense commercial activity, with its 222 locations distributed over an area of 717 square kilometers, is mostly rural. The main town, with around 20 thousand inhabitants, is small, a vehicle takes less than ten minutes to travel through it; Then follows a three and a half hour trip through mountainous landscapes and countless curves until you reach Tapachula, the main border city of the region.

“[Frontera Comalapa] is like a cornerstone of this direction. Many municipalities have Comalapa as the main border. There are a lot of unofficial crossings, it is a super permeable border,” explains Sergio Torres, a teacher from the area.

The strength of the quetzal – 1 quetzal is equivalent to 2.20 Mexican pesos, according to the February 2024 parity – makes Guatemalans from La Mesilla and its surrounding towns travel to Frontera Comalapa to do their shopping. “For example, at Christmas, people from Guatemala come and empty the Coppel, the Aurrerá and all those big stores. That is why Comalapa has been growing so much,” says the professor.

After crossing Chamic, Rosa and Ana arrived at Frontera Comalapa. The sisters prefer not to tell what their first months were like. Rosa focuses on the present; She talks about the heat, that she must leave now, but still doesn’t want to leave.

’The dead woman is from a bar’
Ofelia is a midwife. She lives in a ranch in Chamic. She treats Mexican and Guatemalan women, but her main patients are Hondurans who “come to the last pains to be treated”, in the final months of pregnancy, accompanied by the manager of a bar.

She is young, very active. She moves through the rancherías of that area of Frontera Comalapa; She rubs bellies, arranges babies, listens to her heart with a stethoscope, receives them at birth.

“Right now there are three [Honduran women] in the house,” he says one day in December 2021. “I don’t know if they will get relief because then the lady [the boss] takes them away.”

Many times, since she does not know the girls’ names, Ofelia records her babies in a notebook with a foot print marked on the paper.

In Chamic, Josefina remembers that in 2005 the first victims of trafficking began to arrive at her business, asking for food. Food, no matter how simple, filled their stomachs and served to open their hearts. From plates of soup they moved on to talks, then to confidences.

They told her that they are forced to do “aberrant things” in bars and at parties by “heavy people” who control the business, Josefina says one hot morning in 2022 in a vacant lot, sitting next to an unpainted wooden table, under a mango tree.

“Honduras, just like here, is very religious. Most of the young women come from a Christian background. When you have a person who has lived under fear and guilt, it is the best way to control them. Commonly, when they start living that life they no longer want to return to their country. They don’t feel worthy. It is awful".

For years, the young women have opened their world to Josefina, who has given them massages, affection and care. She was able to help them without it being known; she had the ability to be nobody in the region. If she had been discovered, she wouldn’t tell.

A few meters from where we are talking are the little rooms in which she exercises her healing skills. She herself helped build that shelter where children have been born and women who try to escape from Frontera Comalapa have slept.

“In the beginning there was a lot of abortion,” he says. “They were forced to abort even in an unsafe way. That type of work is very risky, but the owners [the bosses] of the houses gave them a lot of pills. “They came here in terrible pain.”

Josefina attended to them. The only limit to it were cases in which women could not expel the placenta. If that happened, they had to come out of hiding and enter a hospital in the region.

He says that in bars there are often conflicts between young women; There are those who “get into everything”, and others who resist. “If you judge them, you don’t understand. These practices [abortion] distance them from themselves until they forget their origin. In the spaces that we have given them they can recover. We provide them with antibiotics, medical check-ups, and emotional support. After an abortion, she is no longer the same woman. She changes everything.”

The owners of the drugs are usually also the owners of the bars where the women work, he says. “Sometimes these kids fall in love and it’s terrible. They are controlling and abuse their economic power; then they say ’I don’t want you to work here anymore’, and [they] say ’that’s fine’; They always dream of someone rescuing them and having a home. They take them, but they don’t trust them.”

It is an uncontrolled border, says Josefina, where people are used to encountering dead bodies. “Bodies of women appear in [the community of El] Pacayal, [in the neighboring municipality of Amatenango de la Frontera]; They kill them [there] and they appear here, and vice versa.”

The insecurity crisis in the region intensified in July 2021, when the CJNG claimed responsibility for the homicide in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state capital, of the Chiapas operator of the Sinaloa Cartel, Gilberto Rivera Maravilla, the Junior . 

“Frontera Comalapa became a strategic center for drug trafficking,” says Professor Torres. The border crossings are the main loot, he points out. But the fight between criminal groups for control of illicit businesses has also reached the bars, adds Josefina. 

“They are hunting the owners. They take them out and they don’t come back again.” These businesses are also a loot, because the women generate a double benefit for the criminals: they earn money by prostituting them, and they also require them to fulfill their sexual whims.

The State Attorney General’s Office (FGE) reported on sixteen cases of Honduran women victims of intentional homicide and feminicide in Chiapas in the period from 2009 to 2022. These are crimes whose investigation is based in ten municipalities, among which Frontera Comalapa does not appear. Of these cases, in nine there was a connection to proceedings and in only one a sentence was issued. The Attorney General’s Office claimed to have no information on murders of Honduran women in Mexico in the same period.

In the area there is a lapidary phrase that is frequently heard: “The dead woman is from the bar.” It’s just when crimes are not investigated. “There is never anyone looking for them,” Josefina laments.

Sophia Martinez