Migrants run Mexican gauntlet to make leap of faith to US ~ Salsa Circuit latin news| salsa music| salsa dance

Massacre in Tamaulipas by Zetas drugs cartel fails to stem tide of Central Americans risking el brinco – the jump across Mexico.

Salsa music piped from the radio and the bus had a name, Teresita, but there was nothing jaunty about the young men with small backpacks who filed aboard in silence, avoiding eye contact.

Behind them was home, Honduras, ahead lay the United States, and in between was el brinco, the jump. Also known as Mexico. Not so much a leap as a roll of the dice.

The passengers were illegal migrants and they were bracing for perils which, as they travelled through northern Guatemala to the Mexican borderwards Mexico, could strike at any time: betrayal, kidnap, murder.

A landscape of stunted trees, cattle and the occasional police checkpoint passed with barely a word spoken on the crammed little bus. There was plenty to say but, as one passenger explained later, better to stay silent. "You don't know who's listening."

Extortion by police, falling off a train and getting lost in the desert have always been risks, but the journey has become much worse since organized criminals started preying on travelers.

Fifteen Nicaraguans were shot and burned on a bus outside Guatemala City, allegedly because the driver was transporting cocaine without the permission of drug gangs. Mexico is the real danger: mass abductions, ransom demands, tortures, massacres.

The bus stopped at the San Pedro river, deep in a tropical forest once ruled by the Maya. The passengers piled out, forming groups of four or five. Canoes would take them to El Ceibo from where they would hike into Mexico. "You've got to be optimistic," said Juan Colindres, 25, expressing hope over experience. Five times he had headed for the US and five times he was foiled in Mexico – robbed by police, robbed by his guide, deported.

Each time organised crime's breath felt closer, he said. There was no safety in numbers. Armed gangs would stop trains with hundreds of migrants clinging to the roof and herd them into waiting buses. "Better to go in a small group so you can dodge a bit," said Colindres, wriggling his hand.

But even small shoals get hooked. Some are sold to gangs by guides, others by fellow migrants known as enganchadoras. Others are handed over by corrupt police and immigration officials. With their backpacks and accents, migrants are easily identifiable.

Groups such as the Zetas drug cartel in Mexico find it profitable to demand ransoms from captive migrants' relatives, especially if they are in the US. They recruit some hostages as footsoldiers.

Rumours circulated from about 2006 but the phenomenon exploded into public consciousness only last August when Zetas massacred 72 people – mostly Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadoreans – at an abandoned farmhouse in the north-eastern state of Tamaulipas.

About 300,000 migrants pass through Mexico each year, the vast majority Central Americans, but keeping track of them is impossible, said Flora Reynosa, head of a state office in Guatemala City tasked with defending migrants' human rights. Kidnapping had become a plague, she said.

Families trek to Reynosa's little office to supply names of missing relatives. That morning a father had registered the disappearance of a son who left in February, with no word since.

Thelma Schaub, a psychologist in the office, said that families' anguish often leads to neuroses, such as compulsively watching TV news bulletins in the hope of spotting loved ones.

Casas del Migrante, a network of church-funded shelters in the region, receives chilling stories.

Carlos Lopez, who runs one such centre in Guatemala City, recalled a Honduran who escaped from a farm in northern Mexico with more than 200 captive migrants. Those left behind, and whose ransoms were not paid, were dismembered by "the butcher", a stocky killer who seemed to enjoy his work.

The brinco used to refer to the final jump into the US, but now also refers to running the gauntlet that Mexico itself has become.

It started a decade ago when authorities began intercepting migrants to reassure the US that an immigration accord with Mexico would not open floodgates from all Latin America. The crackdown but pushed the flow into the shadows.

Mexico's declaration of war on the drug cartels in late 2006 triggered a brutal competition among gangs to stamp authority on their territories. All vulnerable groups were fair game, few more so than migrants. A few thousand dollars' individual ransom added up, as victims multiplied, to a lucrative sideline.

Some of the most travelled routes passed through Zeta territories. When not doing its own dirty work, the organisation lent its fearsome name as a sort of franchise to smaller gangs.

A National Human Rights Commission report in 2009 documented hundreds of mass kidnappings involving about 10,000 people in a six-month period. Victims said police and immigration agencies colluded with gangs.

The Tamaulipas massacre is thought to have been a warning to human traffickers who tried to bypass the Zetas.

One survivor said three migrants accepted an offer to join the Zetas, for a $1,000 (£615) weekly salary. The rest were blindfolded, ordered to lie on the ground and shot.

The outcry prompted a law in April guaranteeing migrants' rights. But they remain subject to arbitrary detention and deportation.

The same month authorities freed hundreds of captives from safe houses, mostly in Tamaulipas. One group said it had been ordered off a bus by immigration officials and passed on to a gang.

It is a measure of Central America's poverty and unemployment that so many still risk the journey.

"There's nothing in Tegucigalpa [the capital of Honduras] for me. And there's an excellent chance I'll make it back to the US," said Edwin Omar, 22, as he waited for a canoe by the San Pedro river.

He had been working as an interior decorator in Miami, Florida, before being deported seven months ago.

Coyotes – the name given to those who specialise in human smuggling – offer different "packages".

For $5,000 you are escorted from Honduras through Guatemala and Mexico to the US. Make it to the US border on your own steam and you pay $1,500 for help with the final brinco. Prices include three attempts.

The El Ceibo crossing into Mexico has few official controls, reducing the risk of deportation, but is rife with Zetas. The El Carmen crossing is the reverse.

For many the journey is a rite of passage. Seven Honduran teenagers in a Guatemala City shelter said they left home on a whim but were now marooned, having used all their cash to bribe police at checkpoints.

Odanis Acuna, 35, a Cuban asylum seeker, warned them against Mexico. "I was robbed and stripped naked. I'm lucky to be alive." Two of the teenagers are resolved to return home.

ven without predatory gangs, journeys can end in tragedy. Cristobal Tambriz, 17, lost his grip and fell under a train in central Mexico. It sliced off his lower right leg. The Red Cross is helping with a prosthetic limb but a bleak future awaits on the family's dust-blown farm. "I wanted to send back money, now I won't even be able to work here."

Last September Laura Coc, 22, left the family's hilltop house near Yesuj, outside Guatemala City, to join a brother and boyfriend in New Jersey. The family went into debt to pay a coyote 20,000 quetzals (£1,550).

Coc apparently died of sunstroke in the Arizona desert. No body has turned up, tormenting her mother, Maria, 50. "I want to bury her," she said, crying. "I want my daughter home."

Source Rory Carroll in Flores and Jo Tuckman in Mexico City