A Cruel Business: Investigations on human trafficking and drug cartels along the migrant route through the Americas

Ronny Rojas, The Caravan

On Tuesday, 10 May 2016, Brazilian federal police intercepted a parcel being sent from a DHL office in São Paulo to Johannesburg, South Africa. The parcel contained five passports with false visas issued to two Kenyans, two Somalis and an Eritrean citizen, apparently stamped by Brazilian consulates in Mozambique, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.

Coatzacoalcos, in Mexico’s Veracruz state, along the migrant route north through the Americas. FELIX MARQUEZ

Abdifatah Hussein Ahmed, a South African citizen residing in Brazil, was the sender. He had already sent two similar parcels in late 2015, one to a man in Angola and the other to someone in Johannesburg, as was later discovered by the police, who were investigating Hussein Ahmed on suspicion of heading a human trafficking cell.

Investigators followed Hussein Ahmed’s trail until they discovered he had two partners in the trafficking business: Abdessalem Martani, of Algeria, and Mohsen Khademi Manesh, of Iranian origin. The trio provided citizens of various African countries with fraudulent visas that allowed them to enter Brazil, Bolivia or Venezuela. The migrants then set out on their 8,000-kilometre-long journeys—sometimes longer, depending on the starting point—to the United Stated or Canada.

According to the police, Hussein Ahmed and his network transported Abdi Yussuf Wardere, a Kenyan, and Mohamed Ibrahim Qoordheer, a Somali, two alleged members of the armed Islamic organisation al-Shabaab, which has committed acts of terror in Somalia and Kenya. A joint investigation conducted by the Brazilian federal police and the US immigration service finally led to Hussein Ahmed’s arrest on charges of human trafficking in August 2019.

Details of these and other operations came to light thanks to a nine-month cross-border journalistic investigation conducted by the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), in partnership with the European journalistic group Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and 18 allied media houses from Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mexico, the United States, Great Britain, India, Cameroon and Nepal.

This investigation specifically included the review of numerous judicial files and intelligence reports, and interviews with international, national and local authorities, as well as academics and experts, local coyotes—smugglers who specialize in ferrying people through Latin America into the United States—and international traffickers, along with dozens of migrants in the Americas, Africa and Asia.

The journalistic alliance also found that the human smugglers operate through complex networks of front men, small businesses, travel agencies, hotels and money-transfer agencies around the world. They rely on lawyers, document forgers at embassies and consulates, and corrupt immigration and police officers at airports, borders and customs posts—engaging in complex dealings which can go years before being detected.

Brazil: a traffic hub 

The case of Hussein Ahmed reveals Brazil to be a hub for various criminal networks that coordinate small cells throughout the Americas. These cells profit from the global forces that push Asian and African migrants out of their countries: wars, political persecution or economic crises. It is a cruel business. These traffickers suck every penny from migrants and their families, promising to open the doors to the American dream. These migrants are passed along like merchandise—men, women and children—from one country to another, by plane, boat, bus and often weeks on foot, making their way across dangerous terrain without the necessary equipment or preparation.

In recent years, the trafficking business has boomed as new routes to the Americas have emerged, especially from countries such as Nepal, India and Bangladesh. Divergent policies in different Latin American countries—Brazil, Argentina and Ecuador have instituted more open migration controls while Mexico and Colombia have cracked down on the entry of migrants—have created the perfect breeding ground for smuggling networks.

Learning rapidly to exploit open policies wherever they exist, these networks set foot in the Americas. From there, they organise clandestine passage through borders with tighter restrictions. Brazil receives the most transcontinental migrants in the Americas. The country’s National Committee for Refugees (Conare) has had 47,124 active refugee claims from Asia and Africa since 2013, with the highest numbers of applicants from Senegal, Angola and Bangladesh.

Often, migrants grow tired of waiting for the outcome of their asylum application in Brazil and decide to carry on. During a July 2019 raid at Mohsen Khademi Manesh’s house, for example, Brazilian police found the asylum applications of two Pakistani women who were later detained without documents in the United States.

São Paulo is where the vast majority of human trafficking operations across the continent are coordinated. “Yes, it’s legitimate to say that [traffickers in Brazil] are the big controllers of the route, because they are the ones who charge the immigrants, they are the ones who get paid and eventually send money to the other partners in Central America,” said Milton Fornazari Jr, the director of intelligence of the federal police in São Paulo, the unit that investigates immigrant smuggling and human trafficking. “It is the smugglers here in São Paulo who decide when they will pay their associates.”

According to Nepali authorities consulted by the alliance, the main routes from Nepal to Brazil were discovered by locals who travelled to Latin America nearly two decades ago.

A Kathmandu police chief, speaking anonymously, recalled that a trafficker nicknamed “LB,” originally from Rukum district in western Nepal, was one of the pioneers in identifying and using the routes through Brazil.

“About 15 or 18 years ago, this man helped four or five people from his village to get visas for Mexico. He travelled with them and helped them cross into the United States. The trip showed him how the traffic worked. He understood that, if he could land in a Latin American country like Brazil, groups organised by Bengalis and Pakistanis could take care of the smuggling,” the officer explained.

Apparently, that idea bore fruit. Between 2007 and 2018, the number of undocumented Nepali citizens arrested by US authorities at their borders increased from five to 719.

Business profits: The commerce of human trafficking

Police investigation into another case in Brazil shed light on the scale of the profits made from human trafficking, and the methods traffickers use for moving money and documents smoothly across borders. 

Saifullah Al Mamun, a Bangladeshi citizen who has lived in São Paulo for six years, is one of the biggest human traffickers in the world, according to Brazilian authorities. He was arrested with his partners on 31 October 2019, on charges of operating an “extensive money laundering network” through a system of front men and legal entities. He even used the identities of the migrants he trafficked to forge documents, open bank accounts and evade police surveillance.

“Their criminal activity began and developed here in São Paulo … the main city where these smugglers carry out their criminal activities,” Fornazari said.

Al Mamun charged immigrants $11,000 for bringing them from Bangladesh to the United States. Of this, $6,000 was just for getting them to Brazil, with a foreign-resident card and other false documentation included.

According to court documents, Al Mamun received payments through front men, in staggered amounts, to bank accounts under the names of other immigrants and through transfers from banks in Brazilian border cities, especially Marechal Cândido Rondon, Cruzeiro do Oeste and Cianorte in the state of Paraná, near Paraguay. The Bangladeshi also used third parties to distribute the money to trafficking cells in other countries. One document, to which CLIP had access, details 222 money transfers from Al Mamun to people in Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama and Peru. During a phone call intercepted by police in May 2018, Al Mamun revealed that he was leading a team of twelve people.

Brazilian authorities blocked 42 bank accounts belonging to this group of traffickers, “but we still haven’t been able to identify all the assets, given the extreme professionalism of the money-laundering cell,” Fornazari admitted.

They offer their services mainly to citizens from Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. They used to collaborate with a Brazilian lawyer, arrested in October 2019, who helped them process fraudulent refugee applications, often in the name of immigrants who were not in Brazil.

“This group is extremely well articulated here. It made contact with immigrants through diverse technological tools, via WhatsApp, an application called IMO or via Skype,” Fornazari explained.

Among the documents used by Al Mamun to bring immigrants into the Americas were Bolivian passports and visas, and false Ecuadorian stamps on authentic passports. For this purpose, Al Mamun recruited a secretary working at the Ecuadoran consulate in São Paulo, with whom he met in early 2019. Despite being under police investigation in Brazil, the official was still on the payroll of Ecuador’s ministry of foreign relations last December.

Journalists from this alliance sent several questions to the Ecuadoran foreign ministry and its spokesperson regarding the secretary’s activities, but received no response despite repeated requests.

Al Mamun also obtained false Brazilian foreign-resident cards and used them to get Venezuelan visas, which he then mailed to South Asia. There, other traffickers would stick them into the passports of immigrants who would travel to Venezuela and then cross over to Brazil, passing through the city of Boa Vista, in the state of Roraima. Once there, they would cross to Peru to continue to the United States.

Fraudulent documents were recycled. In some cases, the police were able to verify that, once the immigrants entered Brazil, the traffickers removed the Brazilian visas from their passports and mailed them to Africa, where they would be placed in new passports to bring in new people.

The Al Mamun gang also provided false seaman’s books so that immigrants could enter without needing a Brazilian visa. Among the people who entered the country this way was Nabin Gurung, a Nepali from Kushma, a small town in the west of the country. The 37-year-old, Gurung, spent three months crossing Latin America before arriving in the United States in 2018, only to be arrested and sent back to Nepal.

Back in Kushma, Gurung told a journalist from this project that he had borrowed $44,000 to pay various trafficking groups, money that he still owes. First, he travelled to Delhi, India, to a hotel in the tourist district of Paharganj, and then to Ethiopia, where Nepalis can enter without a visa. From Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, he flew with three other compatriots to São Paulo, where they were received by a Brazilian man.

Speaking off the record, international police experts consulted by CLIP confirmed that one of the main routes used by migrants to enter Brazil is the daily Ethiopian Airways flight between Addis Ababa and São Paulo.

Another Bangladeshi migrant, interviewed in January 2020 at the Colombia-Panama border, said that his $18,000 journey to the United States had been sponsored by his brother. The Bangladeshi migrant had left his country for Delhi, then flown to Addis Ababa and changed to “a very long flight” before landing at the airport of “a big city,” the name of which he could not recall but from where he transferred to another plane bound for Ecuador.

Nabin Gurung said that in Brazil the traffic network was led by Bangladeshis, although his “agent” in that country turned out to be from Nepal. “I had to spend about $500 in Brazil, during the five days I was there. The contacts, whether Nepali or Brazilian, were determined to extort us,” he said.

A large number of the migrants moved by the Al Mamun network flew to São Paulo and then to Rio Branco, in the northern border state of Acre, a flight that takes about four hours. At Acre, taxi drivers who had been provided with the migrants’ names and pictures picked them up and drove them to Peru.

In São Paulo, Al Mamun operated the travel agency BD Tour Ltda, which provided migrants with plane tickets to travel to Rio Branco or other countries. Al Mamun also moved money by way of a currency-exchange contract in his company’s name with the financial institution OM Distribuidora de Títulos e Valores, which facilitated the wiring of money to other partners along the illegal route to the United States.

Read more: A Cruel Business: Investigations on human trafficking and drug cartels along the migrant route through the Americas

Source: The Caravan

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.