“Just a few years ago, the cartels had nothing to do with people – neither human trafficking nor smuggling. There were groups that specialized in human trafficking and groups that specialized in smuggling, while the cartels took care of drugs and other things,” Avila said.
However, according to him, drug cartels have gradually realized that smuggling and human trafficking are financially lucrative, and so they have gradually brought the groups dedicated to these activities under their control.
La Linea, originally a group of corrupt police officers who worked as contract killers, is gradually losing power, and rival cartels are coming to the fore—but a new business focused on demand from American gay couples suggests that the cartel's activities are not over despite its retreat.
Journalist Luis Chaparro gained access to details of the Texas security forces' investigation, as well as a photo of the arrested Mexican woman Martha Alicia “N,” known as La Diabla. He published all the details in his program Pie de Nota.
Alicia “N,” who was arrested on U.S. soil, was allegedly one of the main players in the cell responsible for trafficking babies.
“The arrested woman is said to have recruited women in the last months of their pregnancies to work as drug dealers, packers, money launderers, or so-called halcones (observers) within the gang,” writes Infobae.
Cutting and incising
However, the women were deceived. As the arrested cartel member told American investigators, the mothers were invited to a private home in the city, where their personal freedom was restricted and they underwent a cesarean section—without any hygienic measures, which led to their deaths.
“The photo provided to us by investigators is very sensitive and disturbing—it shows the body of one of the women buried in these houses with an opening in the abdominal area, which would practically correspond to a primitive cesarean section,” Chaparro specified.
According to the information received by the journalist, the cartel, which has been involved in cesarean sections for several months, has sold about five babies so far. The purchasing homosexual couples from the US picked up the “merchandise” in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, which meant that the cartel members did not risk border controls.
According to available information, La Linea has shifted its focus to mothers after Mexican security forces began to better combat their attempts to kidnap businesspeople.
As the País portal reported in a report at the end of July, the trade in children in Ciudad Juárez and their various forms of abuse is on the rise, and children who are members of cartels are being used as assistants in the illegal activities of criminal groups. However, the trade in children taken from their murdered mothers is also a novelty in Mexico.
The reason?
Although the adoption of children by homosexual couples was not clearly regulated in the US until 2017, it is now completely legal. So what makes it sensible for homosexual couples to pay for a kidnapped half-orphan from Mexico, whose parents are unknown and whose genetic disorders, if any, are unknown?
What seems incomprehensible at first glance can be solved with the help of arithmetic: the couples paid around 250,000 Mexican pesos (around 11,400 euros) for the abducted child of a murdered mother, which is equivalent to 13,430 US dollars.
However, the cost of legal adoption, surrogacy, and the associated legal fees for a child in the US can rise to over $100,000 for couples, both heterosexual and homosexual. As a rule, however, the cost of adopting a child ranges between $20,000 and $45,000.
