The control of human smuggling through northern Mexico

If you want English language news coverage of narco-trafficking or the gangs of El Salvador, there is only one place to go, the InSightCrime website.  Its most recent article is a collaboration with El Faro reporting on the 2010 massacre of 72 migrants in Tamaulipas, Mexico.  The article is titled How the Zetas Tamed Central America's 'Coyotes'.

From the introduction:

Why did the Zetas, in two massacres, murder 268 people, the majority Central American, Mexican and South American migrants? The history of some of the Salvadorans who died in these bloodbaths in northern Mexico, the voice of one of El Salvador's coyote patriarchs and some documents all indicate that everything was part of a process of making the coyotes understand that they either had to pay or could not pass. Not them, nor their migrants. The rules have changed. The coyotes are no longer the roughest guys on the road.

Read the entire article here.

Despite the perils of the journey, each day dozens or hundreds of migrants (quality data on the numbers is impossible to find) set out again from El Salvador to try and make the journey north.