Last week, we pointed readers to a report by Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies exposing the human smuggling network along the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Today, we take a look at Part 2 of Bensman’s “A United Nations of Mass Illegal Immigration.”
Bensman has uncovered a bizarre, unofficial “town” along that border known as “La Trocha,” which is Spanish for a kind of rough road or shortcut. La Trocha, which he says doesn’t officially exist, is simply a hitherto largely abandoned road along an internationally disputed route, one side of which is Costa Rica, the other Nicaragua. Along both sides of this strange border road have sprung up dirt-floor shanties made of scrap lumber and tin, forming a squatter’s settlement. What distinguishes this outlaw settlement, however, is that it is a “smuggling town, pure pirate, run by two competing criminal gangs that move people and contraband from one side to the other, sometimes doing battle.”
Bensman writes:
Police, military, and journalists avoid this place. But it does seem to operate like a company town; everyone here makes their living as foot guides, stash house operators, and merchants of food, water, and outdoor clothing and gear for the constant arrivals and departures of migrants from very, very far away.
The far-away homelands of those migrants–10,000 of whom have come this way just since January–include Mauritania, Senegal, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, India, Haiti, and Cuba.
For Costa Rica, however outside the law and unofficial La Trocha is, it nevertheless is a part of an official government policy called “controlled flow,” adopted to “replace black market smuggling chaos with something more orderly and humane.” In effect, through controlled flow, Costa Rica–and its southern neighbor, Panama–have joined the pipeline managed by smuggling gangs that helps get “extracontinental” migrants up from South America along their way to everyone’s preferred destination, the United States. Bensman writes:
CIS met and interviewed Mauritanians, Senegalese, Eritreans, Haitians, and Cubans as they dickered with smugglers or were driven to areas around La Trocha. A local hotel log book in La Cruz showed that many dozens of Indians and Sri Lankans have come in this year, as well as Yemenis, Cubans, Haitians, Pakistanis, and from a dozen African nations like Nigeria and Burkina Faso.
Migrants from these countries represent, for the U.S., a “different kind of national security specter . . . because many are from countries of Islamic terrorism concern, from African war-atrocity zones, or from nations too distressed to provide criminal background checks.” He concludes:
Biden administration officials have yet to mention or discuss extra-continental traffic, either unaware that it is happening, uninterested, or averse to drawing attention to it lest they be forced to do something about it. And so the flood continues, at odds with U.S. national security.
For more, see CIS.org.