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December 26, 1995
Web posted at: 10:15 p.m. EST (0315 GMT)
From Correspondent Anthony Collings
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A Latin American ring that was smuggling thousands of illegal aliens into the United States has been broken up with the arrest of a Costa Rican woman, putting at least a dent in a burgeoning business, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
Gloria Canales, alleged head of the smuggling ring, is now awaiting trial in Honduras. U.S. officials who helped Latin American authorities arrest her said that she smuggled at least 10,000 people a year into the United States from India, China and Latin America, charging as much as $6,000 per person.
Doris Meissner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service said that such smuggling is a major problem. "The arrest of Gloria Canales is a real inroad into a very serious issue," Meissner said.
U.S. officials said Canales used an elaborate route to bring Indians and Chinese to Central America by air or ship, then overland through Mexico into the United States. INS investigators said they followed Canales' operation for a year and a half, then provided information that helped Ecuador arrest her and deport her to Honduras, the only Central American country where smuggling immigrants is illegal.
Canales faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted of smuggling, bribery and other charges.
Ever since a boatload of illegal Chinese immigrants ran aground near New York in 1993, smugglers have looked for new ways to get around U.S. immigration laws. They found their opportunities in Central America. "Unfortunately, with the level of corruption that you have in many of those countries, officials take bribes, they look the other way," said Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. "International operations know where they can do business and they know where they can do (it) with impunity."
U.S. officials say that they don't know how many of the estimated 300,000 illegal aliens who enter the United States each year do so with the help of smugglers, but they believe that it's a substantial part. And they contend that the smugglers brutally exploit those they bring in. "People who are victims have been killed, drowned, kept in inhumane conditions, deprived of food and medical care, (and) often are in transit around the world for months at a time," Meissner said.
The United States hopes that Central America will take the smuggling problem more seriously, but that may not be easy, given the amount of high-level corruption there. Earlier this month, two women pleaded guilty in Miami to smuggling immigrants. The women were members of the Nicaraguan legislature.
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