The cover of San Francisco Weekly (August 18 – 24, 2010) read “HELD CAPTIVE:  Inside the Brutal World of Kidnapping Immigrants.”  The article opened with “Coyotes Who Smuggle Immigrants Torture and Extort Their Victims, Helped by Our Government’s Failure to Enact Immigration Reform.”  Such accusation of the United States will not help solve the real problem.
 Many Mexicans and Latin Americans risk their lives to illegally come to the United States.  They often pay “coyotes” to smuggle them in.  So now, illegal human smuggling, like drug smuggling, has become big business.  Like drug smuggling, human smuggling has often turned violent.  This should not be surprising since criminals run criminal enterprises.
 
San Francisco Weekly tells us that Phoenix, Arizona, is labeled the kidnapping capital of the country due to drug and human smuggling out of Mexico.  Yet the writer argued, “it’s the smuggled immigrants—not the general public—who are overwhelmingly the primary victims.”  However, later the article stated “Law enforcement is concerned that violence may spread vastly beyond that [human smuggling] world to residents with no connection to it—as it has in Mexico.”  But if law enforcement is concerned, shouldn’t the general public be alarmed?  
 
According to the article, “in the absence of federal immigration reform, experts believe that immigrants will continue to risk their lives and rely on coyotes.” Congress places equal limits on the number of U. S. visas available to each nation; San Francisco Weekly sees this as one of the “major problems with federal immigration policy.”   The article suggests Mexico should have a higher limit than other countries.  But why should Mexico be given favoritism?  Why not Haiti—the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and that suffered a major earthquake?  Should the quotas be decided by what’s best for America or what’s best for another nation—including Mexico?  And should people who come here illegally be given favoritism over people who come here legally?
 
One solution to the violence of human smuggling is to improve living conditions in Mexico and Latin America.  Fewer people will want to leave badly enough to risk encounters with “coyotes.”  This will require cultural reform in Mexico and Latin America, not a federal immigration reform in the United States.  Short of taking over and running Mexico and Latin America, the United States can do little more than react to the problem.
 
Yet the San Francisco Weekly article said relatively little about what Mexico and Latin America could or should do to improve the living conditions of all its citizens.  The writer was not the first I’ve seen to do this.  Even when Arizona passed its anti-immigration laws, several high-level Mexican politicians attacked Arizona.  They did not seem to see each illegal immigrant as an indictment of their leadership.   Can such “leadership” be taken seriously?
 
Some law enforcers conflate the violence due to drug smuggling and the violence due to human smuggling.  If nothing else, drug violence threatens the living conditions in Mexico and Latin America and makes people want to escape.
 
So how can Mexico and Latin America minimize the drug violence?  Several European cities have set up “red-light districts” where drug selling and using are decriminalized.  This has helped abate the criminality of drug selling and thus much of the drug violence.  Should Mexico and Latin America set up some (or more) “red-light districts”—even near the United States border?
 
These are the type of questions I wanted to see Mexican and Latin American intellectuals, politicians and media debating in San Francisco Weekly.  But where are they?  Are they working to reform Mexico and Latin America for all their people and remove all repression?  Have they challenged their religions?  Their  values and attitudes?  Politics?  Free enterprise system?    Then maybe the market for coyotes will dwindle.

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