Human trafficking, kidnapping, extortion, robbery, ties to cartels.
All this and more included, according to US authorities, the criminal portfolio of the Mexican organization Hernández Salas.
Your leader, Ofelia Hernandez Salasbetter known as “Doña Lupe” either ““La Güera”was sentenced this Wednesday to 11 years in prison by a federal district court in Arizona for her role in the “prolific” network that operated for years on the border between Mexico and the United States.
The 64-year-old woman was arrested in Mexicali, the city in the border state of Baja California from which she operated, in March 2023, and extradited to the US, where she pleaded guilty to the charges against her the following year.
“Transnational human trafficking represents a direct threat to our national security”declared Deputy Attorney General A. Tysen Duva, of the Legal Division of the US Department of Justice, in a statement upon hearing the sentence.
“Illegal border crossings are already incredibly dangerous; the defendant only increased the potential for mortal danger they faced by adding theft to their criminal acts,” he concluded.
But what is known about Hernández Salas? How did the gang that bore their surnames really operate? And how relevant was it in the broader context of migrant trafficking to the United States?
Decades in business
“Although the sentence responds to crimes charged more recently, according to testimonies from those who knew her, she had been working for more than 25 years” in migrant trafficking, Mexican security analyst David Saucedo tells BBC Mundo.
The beginning of his criminal activity, however, goes back even further.
Originally from the state of Guerrero, Hernández Salas He would have started his criminal career in the 90s with identity forgeryaccording to investigations by the US Department of Justice.
In March 2008 she was arrested in Orange County, California.for having reentered the country without permission, and in 2011 a judge sentenced her to 18 months in prison and three years of supervised release until she was released and deported to Mexico in October 2012.
His record also includes arrests in Mexican territory prior to the one that led to his trusty conviction.
In 2019, agents of the then State Preventive Police (PEP) of Baja California arrested her at a home located in the Fronteriza neighborhood of Mexicali, where They found four people from India under their protection.
As reported at the time by state authorities, a natural individual from the state of Guanajuato who was also arrested at the scene stated that he had been in the city for eight months with the intention of crossing into the United States, but that “Doña Lupe” offered to pay him to transfer the foreigners to a point from where they would try to enter the neighboring country.
A federal grand jury in Arizona indicted the woman in 2021with adversary in the cases of 15 migrants who declared having hired their services between May 2020 and June 2021.
As a result, she was definitively arrested in March 2023 in a house in the Zacatecas neighborhood of Mexicali, after an operation deployed by state security forces of Baja California and the Popular Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic (FGR) and coordinated with the International Legal Police Organization (Interpol).
He was also taken into custody with her. Raul Saucedo Huipioconsidered his necessary accomplice.
In June of that year, the Office of Foreign Assets Adjustment (OFAC) of the US Department of the Treasury sanctioned “Doña Lupe”, considering her the leader of a transnational criminal organization, as well as several “members and entities of her support network.”
“The US and Mexican authorities estimate that victims pay between $10,000 and $70,000 for human trafficking services. “Hernández Salas and the members of his organization use facilitators in other regions to transfer migrants to the US border,” read the statement published then by the Treasury Department.
The network “is involved in document falsification and corruption in Mexico to smuggle undocumented immigrants into the US across the southern border, and has ties to the Sinaloa Cartel“, he added.
OFAC also blacklisted Jesús Gerardo Chávez Tamayooriginally from Sinaloa, for “facilitating the crossing and receiving payments for human trafficking services,” as well as Fatima del Rocío Maldonado Lópezfrom Chiapas, whom he pointed out to be in charge of altering the documentation of migrants.
They were also sanctioned Federico Hernandez Sanchezoriginally from Guanajuato, for “illegally entering undocumented immigrants” into United States territory and Saucedo Huipiofrom Guerrero, for “facilitating transportation and accommodation.”
According to the Treasury Department, the network world with contacts on both sides of the border to which they all belonged helped people from Mexico and Central America, but also from countries as far away as Bangladesh, Yemen, Pakistan, India, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Russia and Egypt, to access US territory.
“Trafficking people and providing them with fraudulent documentation undermines the US asylum system, damages public confidence in the vetting process, and jeopardizes access to protection for vulnerable people fleeing conflict, famine, and persecution,” the Treasury Department statement underlined.
Modus operandi
Following her arrest, in September 2023 “Doña Lupe” was extradited to the United States, where the following year she pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to bring foreigners to the United States and human trafficking for personal financial gain.
According to the statement regarding his guilty plea, his network adopted as modus operandi picking up migrants at a bus station in Mexicali, to later transfer them to safe houses, where They hid them until they considered it was a good time to cross the border..
Relatedly, the Treasury Department also sanctioned two hotels “for having assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, field or technological support, or goods or services” to the network.
When the day comes, traffickers placed ladders for migrants to cross the fence and they placed a plank for them to pass over a canal, as detailed.
However, according to the accusation, the organization led by “Doña Lupe” not only profited from the crossing of migrants: I also assaulted them.
“Ofelia Hernández Salas and her co-conspirators endangered our communities by illegally bringing in foreign citizens from more than a dozen countries on a large scale,” Deputy Attorney General Duva stressed in his statement this Wednesday.
“Not only did they take away immigration authorities’ ability to properly verify these people, but she and her co-conspirators robbed these people of their personal belongings at gunpoint or knife point,” he added.
One among dozens
“Members of the Hernández Salas organization took the migrants to different points bordering the United States, especially Arizona, but along the way they detained them, communicated with their families and asked for a ransom to release them so they could continue their journey,” confirms researcher Saucedo.
And in that sense – says the expert – it operated like so many other entities along the border area. “The gang became important in its area, but it was a very focused case,” he emphasizes.
The specialist speaks of three types of criminal structures dedicated to migrant trafficking today.
On the one hand there are those who are called the “classic chickens” or traditional, small cells of up to five members that have operated on the border for decades, generally businesses that were passed down from generation to generation and that remain in the family.
At the other extreme is organized crime, the large drug trafficking cartels that since the early 2000s, seeing that there was profit in it, began to include migration in their criminal portfolio.
“Little by little the cartels have been absorbing and displacing the polleros and to gangs dedicated to trafficking, carrying out activities of greater impact, kidnapping migrants, especially women of a certain age range and complexion for purposes of sexual exploitation and young people for forced recruitment,” he explains.
And between both structures, the expert places organizations like that of Hernández Salas, intermediate gangs, with contacts on both sides of the border, high rates and linked to drug trafficking.
In the case of “Dona Lupe”, “She was not part of any cartel but she did have contacts with them”explains Saucedo, explaining that he also used migrants to smuggle drugs north.
“But just like this one, there are about 30 or 40 mid-level gangs that are dedicated to this activity along the border area,” he emphasizes.
“They are members of criminal structures, but at a medium level. They are not on the front line,” he points out, trying to put the sentence against Hernández Salas in context.
“How much can the arrest and conviction of (the leader) of a gang dedicated to border crossings impact human trafficking? The migrants, not being able to count on her, go looking for others,” he concludes.
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- Mexican Ofelia Hernández Salas, “Doña Lupe”, is convicted in the US for leading a “prolific” migrant smuggling network
