A Working Paper from the North and Central American Task Force on Migration
In this report, we wish to highlight the importance of increasing public security by strengthening the fight against organized crime, other criminal groups, and corrupt officials who are increasingly critical players in the migration equation. We believe that a new, concerted effort at the regional level is required to fight organized criminal networks that smuggle and traffic people across borders and, more recently, across the oceans to the United States’ southern and northern borders. Meanwhile, some countries — notably Canada — must play a more vigorous role in going after narcotraffickers, criminal syndicates, and money launderers and their enablers, who play an increasingly central role in human trafficking and illegal migration.
At the same time, it is essential to recognize at the outset that not all smugglers are part of transnational criminal groups; many are poor residents trying to support themselves by guiding migrants across borders. As Luigi Achilli and Gabriella Sanchez, who have been studying and interviewing smugglers for years, note: “The characters at the center of this drama, rather than being men from the Global South at the helm of powerful criminal syndicates are often poor people — including women and children — who act on their own behalf and for their own survival. Of course, this does not mean that illicit markets do not overlap or that hierarchical criminal organizations are never involved. The web-like network of criminality is multi-tiered, often colluded with the state, the elite capitalists and the military, as a plethora of studies on drug trafficking and other transnational crimes have extensively shown.”
