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 News from Around the Americas | December 2007 
Illegal Emigration Mafia Stealing Boats From Miami
 Jean-Guy Allard — Granma International
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 |  | Immigrants are no longer arriving as rafters on U.S. beaches; instead, they are brought over by trafficking rings that have unleashed a wave of boat thefts.
- Agence France-Presse |  | |
Juicy business: Cuban-American drug traffickers who control the profitable illegal immigration racket, which benefits from a U.S. law called the Cuban Adjustment Act, steal the speed boats and luxury yachts that they use for their criminal activities from Miami and other cities in the Florida peninsula.
Immigrants "are no longer arriving as rafters on U.S. beaches; instead, they are brought over by trafficking rings that have unleashed a wave of boat thefts," according to the French news agency AFP in an article datelined in Miami.
This year, more than 300 boats were stolen in Miami-Dade County alone, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Most of them are used for trafficking immigrants, according to several government sources. Traffickers "bring people in stolen boats, and in many cases, in go-fast boats," according to Luis Díaz, a Coast Guard spokesman in Miami.
The most sought-after boats by thieves are medium or small yachts, no more than 12 meters long, which are easier to maneuver, especially speedboats, according to AFP.
The U.S. law, which is aimed at encouraging the illegal emigration of Cubans, grants them privileges that no other immigrant group receives when illegally crossing the U.S. border with Mexico.
In addition, this lucrative trafficking in people has led to a bloody war in recent months between criminal clans linked to the Cuban-American mafia.
Bello Melchor Rodríguez y Carrillo, federal prosecutor in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, revealed a few weeks ago that the city of Merida, Yucatan, is the Cuban mafia’s center of financial operations.
Cuban-Americans killed in recent weeks include Manuel "El Mani" Duarte Díaz, Luis Lázaro Lara Morejón, his friend María Elena Carrillo Sáenz, Jesús Aguilar Aguilar, Edwin Park Gómez and Maximiliano Rey Mota.
Lara Morejón was the liaison who received funds from the United States for trafficking carried out by Duarte Díaz, who was murdered in the Yucatan capital near the offices of the National Migration Institute. He later ensured payment for the polleros (smugglers) who bring Cubans to Quintana Roo’s coasts.
According to several sources, one of the gangs involved hired the thugs of Los Zetas, the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel, to execute its rivals.
The lime-covered, handcuffed bodies of Aguilar, Park and Carrillo Sáenz were found in a ditch near the Cancun-Merida highway, a site known as the "Los Zetas cemetery."
The FBI in Miami has stood out for its inertia in the face of Cuban-American mafia activities since the start of these gruesome events.
Translated by Granma International |
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