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Mexicans facilitate the passage of Central Americans planning to illegally cross the US border, and make a tidy profit doing so.One time I’d been in Guatemala and was returning to Mexico. I crossed the border near Tapachula, the largest Mexican city in the region, and purchased bus fare to go to Mexico City. The sold-out bus departed about 5 PM and we moved without stopping for several hours. During the night the bus stopped in an unpopulated area and the driver opened the door but did not turn on the interior lights.

A man boarded the darkened bus, ordered us to show our documents, and then proceeded to use his flashlight to inspect them. After taking each passport he ordered the passengers, one by one, off the bus and into a nearby shack. He never shined the light in our faces but only on our passports. All of us, except my seatmate, who showed his Mexican national identification card, were ordered off the bus.

We entered a small shack near the road, where we saw another man standing near an old steel office desk. The one from the bus entered with our passports and stood behind the desk. Under the bright light I saw they wore green uniforms similar to that of the army but with insignia of the Immigration Service.

The officer began sorting the passports as if they were a deck of cards, with one stack for Salvadorans, another for Hondurans, etc. He came upon an American passport, mine, and paused a bit, glanced up but didn’t see me since I was in the middle of the crowd. He shrugged and put it down near the other stacks and continued sorting.

When he finished that task he announced that there is a twenty dollar immigration fee for each of us. Central Americans are mostly of an Indian culture and are usually very submissive and unassuming. One however was bold enough to say “Hey, we all have visas to be in Mexico; our passports were checked at the border. We don’t have to pay you anything!” Both officers stood erect and the leader opened his coat to remind us he was armed. He said “You’ll pay it or you don’t get on the bus!”

He then picked up the top passport from the first pile and read out the name. After a short pause the passport’s owner appeared from the crowd with a twenty dollar bill. The officer handed him his passport and told him to get on the bus.

As this was going on I was thinking “No, no no. . . I’m not going to let this guy get away with this. If I’m forced into this extortion I’m going to make a lot of noise when I get to Mexico City, calling newspapers and television stations and just generally make a real pest of myself.”

The officer continued working from that one stack of passports, collecting the money and ordering the passenger back on the bus. He finished that stack and moved to the next, then appeared to recall that lone American passport off to the side. He picked up my passport, looked around until he saw me, read out my name and simply handed it to me and said to get on the bus. He must have picked up the negative energy I was sending out because he didn’t ask me for money, but also wanted me on the bus so I could not witness what he was doing. Well, he was a bit late for that!

I got on the bus and began talking to the other passengers. They were all angry but felt trapped into complying. My Mexican seatmate said that every bus on that route is stopped like that. Our bus alone yielded a net profit of $900 for those two officers, quite a nice income for just 15 minutes of work.

When we got to Mexico City, all the Central Americans got off the bus about two blocks from the terminal, fearing another shakedown from officials there. Mexico City was my final stop, as it was for my Mexican seatmate. All the others were going to the US border hoping to cross illegally.

US visas are very hard to get but Mexico gladly “sells” its visas to Central Americans, knowing that those people have no plans to tour Mexico. Mexico earns a lot of money by facilitating the movement of Central American illegals to the United States, not just from the legal fees for visas, and the illegal collection of other “fees”, but also revenue that bus companies, hotels, and coyotes generate.