Smuggling Migrants Toward the U.S. Is a Booming Business

In audio and video clips on social media, he sold himself and his partners as trusted guides to clients who angled to get into the U.S. “I run this group in charge of all the routes," Giraldo said in one audio recording heard by The Wall Street Journal. “Everyone knows my work. I do it right. I’m serious, sincere and very responsible."

Colombian prosecutors and special operations police working with U.S. officials recently dismantled the group, arresting 11 people in four cities. They called it an important strike against migrant smuggling through the country. But success stories in that fight are fleeting, Colombian and U.S. authorities say, because others are always eager to step into the void.

“They see opportunity for business," said Hugo Tovar, the top prosecutor overseeing migrant trafficking investigations for the Colombian attorney general’s office.

Pervasive networks of smugglers and freelance guides have thrived on demand from a desperate clientele looking to begin new lives in America. U.S. Customs and Border Protection estimates 2.4 million migrants arrived at the country’s southwestern border in the year ending Sept. 30, topping the previous year’s total—a minority of them at legal border crossings.

Moving them up north has become big business from South America to northern Mexico, and a source of income for residents of poor towns and cities where well-paid employment is scarce. A 2021 United Nations study estimated that migrants from three countries—Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador—paid $1.7 billion a year to smugglers.

Organized crime groups steeped in drugs and other contraband play an important role. They include Venezuela’s feared Aragua Train, a prison-based gang that charges smugglers to use routes it controls along Venezuela’s border with Colombia. Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels do the same for migrants closing in on the U.S.

In Colombia, the big player is the Gulf Clan cocaine trafficking group, which collects $3 billion a year in revenue from its drug business and wields immense power across a swath of the country’s far north.

Then there are small, individual groups that operate in the shadows, usually with the consent of crime organizations. People in those smaller groups often play different roles, including recruiters, guides to stash houses and drivers, said Kenneth A. Polite Jr., who until August headed the Justice Department’s criminal division, working with prosecutors in the Americas to dismantle migrant smuggling outfits.

Caravan—the group prosecutors say Giraldo ran out of Medellín—charged migrants as much as $5,000 for their services, according to Colombian police. Offerings included a journey by car from Ecuador, followed by a boat or plane ride to Central America.

Giraldo pleaded not guilty to migrant trafficking and criminal conspiracy before a judge, said his lawyer, Andrea Colorado, who didn’t comment further. Giraldo and other alleged members of Caravan are in jail awaiting trial.

Jungle trek

Most migrants go for a lower-cost route, paying about $350 for an essential boat trip across the Gulf of Urabá in northern Colombia, followed by a motorcycle trip to an outpost called Las Tecas, where they stay overnight, and finally a guide through the heavily traversed Darién Gap, a span of dense jungle around the border of Colombia and Panama.

The number of U.S.-bound migrants crossing through the Darién Gap this year has surged to a record 449,653 as of Tuesday, Panamanian migration officials say, up from a total of around 248,000 in 2022.

On a recent morning, the Caribbean sun beat down on a fiberglass boat loaded with more than 60 migrants in Necoclí, a tourist town of small hotels and open-air restaurants on Colombia’s far northwest coast that now attends to hundreds of migrants who arrive daily.

Most in the boat were Venezuelans who had paid to get into Colombia via clandestine routes run by armed groups, or who decided to uproot from Colombian cities where they had struggled to make ends meet.

Moises Villalobos, a 26-year-old Venezuelan, had already traveled more than 4,000 miles from Santiago, Chile, where he had tried to make a go of it working in a restaurant. Another Venezuelan, 22-year-old Yeremy Pulgar, had crossed into Colombia five years ago. He, his wife and their 3-year-old daughter hoped to begin anew in New York. There were a few Africans, too, who had flown to Brazil and then journeyed across the continent.

All knew that this stage of the journey—crossing the Gulf of Urabá’s choppy waters—was the beginning of weeks or months of hazardous, exhausting travel.

“We’re paying for a service—they are getting us to where we need to go," Kevin Chiluisa, one of 11 family members and friends from Ecuador traveling together, said as the vessel bobbed up and down. “It doesn’t bother me too much. People have to make a living, though they do try to charge as much as they can because you are a migrant."

Las Tecas, a campsite in a patch of cleared forest, is a monument to the business of migrant smuggling. U.S. and Colombian officials say it is run by small local networks that are tough to crack down on, with a cut going to the Gulf Clan.

Shelters with black-tarp roofs provide a dry night’s sleep for those heading north the next day. Rows of bathrooms offer a last private shower, and restaurants a final hot meal. Shops hawk rubber boots, canned tuna, tents and flashlights for the trek.

On a recent morning, hundreds of migrants at the site were up before dawn and gathered in front of a heavy wooden gate manned by guides.

“Ready? Everything is going to be fine," one of the organizers, Jeyfer Martínez, told the migrants. “Let’s clap for God."

They clapped, and Martínez finished by telling them to watch themselves and stay close to their guides, who were outfitted in numbered red T-shirts.

“Be careful," he said. “Don’t give your stuff to anybody."

When the gates opened at 5:50 a.m., migrants lugging giant jugs of water, backpacks and small children burst forward as in a marathon, steered by guides—all young, fit men who knew the route. It was the start of a 70-mile journey to outposts deep in Panama that could take two days to a week. From central Panama, migrants can more easily take buses to the U.S. border.

“We don’t see ourselves as traffickers," said Edilberto Escobar, a 32-year-old guide with two children. “We are providing a service, economic and social. The government doesn’t even involve itself around here."

Escobar said he earns about $125 for each trip, which he does every two weeks. It’s steady work and more than he made when he was a day laborer.

“There are hard days, some are easy," he said. “Sometimes, there are lots of women with children to help. Sometimes the rivers are very high. The walk can be very long, and you get tired."

Travelers with more money can hire porters, paying $20 a day to carry a backpack or $500 to carry an infant for three days. Some of the porters, who wear pink T-shirts to differentiate themselves from the guides, positioned themselves at the top of the first big hill, calling out, “We’ll carry your bag, we’ll carry your bag."

Local economy

Along the Darién, groups of locals have divvied up the business, which provides jobs to 3,000 people directly, said Martínez, one of the organizers at Las Tecas. He started out as a guide and porter before helping lead a business for moving migrants that calls itself the Saving Lives Foundation. There’s work for 224 guides and 400 porters tied to his organization, he said, plus 150 people who work for stores that supply migrants.

Sitting under a shelter where migrants were setting up their tents, Martínez said the group was merely making it easier for people who would be on the move anyway. “This is a right migrants have," he said. “If we trafficked people, we’d be detaining them. But they freely come and go. They come every day."

The guides who take migrants to the Panamanian border, he said, ensure that they arrive unscathed. “My role is simple—to keep people safe," he said. “We don’t want people to be robbed, to be beat up."

Migrants face the danger of robbery and rape by armed gangs that roam the Darién, especially in the longer, more remote Panamanian section. Panamanian border police say they have recovered more than 100 bodies in the Darién since the start of 2022, and acknowledge there are likely more they haven’t found.

With 2,000 migrants now traveling into the Darién every day, at $350 each, the basic fees they pay local groups add up to more than $20 million a month. U.S. and Colombian investigators say that the Gulf Clan—a group made up of former paramilitary and rebel fighters who had participated in Colombia’s long civil conflict—takes a major cut of those fees.

“They serve as a sort of checkpoint and they charge what is basically a toll," said Tovar, the prosecutor overseeing migrant trafficking cases for the attorney general’s office.

VIP routes

Clients who paid for Caravan’s services began their trip far from the Panamanian border, in Ecuador to the south. Police said Caravan used cars, often valuable models so as not to arouse suspicion, to fetch migrants who had crossed into Colombia.

Some took VIP routes, traveling by boat on the Pacific from the Colombian city of Buenaventura to Jaqué, Panama—a course police said wealthier clients from Russia, Nigeria and other countries favored.

Others were driven nearly 600 miles to Medellín, police and prosecutors said, and stayed in safe houses before flying to a Colombian archipelago in the Caribbean with doctored documents. From the island of San Andrés, they traveled by powerboat to Nicaragua.

“They moved up from Ecuador, Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan," said John Patiño, an undercover officer with the special operations division of the Colombian National Police who worked on the Caravan case. Most went from Ecuador to the Darién, paying $1,000, police said.

One Caravan worker told the group’s clients in May the journey would take 3½ to four days, according to an audio recording used by prosecutors.

“Do you have food for four days?" the man asks. “Food is the most important thing. That is what is going to keep you healthy. Is that clear?"

Business was good, according to investigators and intercepted calls used by prosecutors. In October 2022, Giraldo rang his mother about a problem he had in Medellín.

“Mom, I don’t know where I’m going to put all these people," he said.

He didn’t want them in a fleabag hotel, he told her. She had a solution: a friend with extra rooms in her house.

“The first four are on the way," Giraldo told her.

Prosecutors said audio and video clips from thankful migrants were posted on Facebook and in text chats as references.

Some migrants were so pleased with the service that they kept in touch with Giraldo and his colleagues. “Thank you very much, Anderson, for the attention and the service," wrote one migrant who had reached his destination. “I’m going to recommend you."

Even without Caravan, the work of smugglers continues.

“Migration is never going to end," said Martínez. “Migration began when Moses escaped Egypt."

Jenny Carolina González contributed to this article.

Write to Juan Forero at juan.forero@wsj.com