How the drug cartels are ‘diversifying’ into baby-trafficking
Many of the women were lured with promises of easy cash jobs during the final months of pregnancy
On the morning of September 2, in Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexican law enforcement raided a remote safehouse and uncovered one of the most grotesque cartel operations they had ever encountered. They found not just the usual drugs but rudimentary medical equipment and bloodstained tarps. The evidence confirmed what many investigators had suspected but couldn’t prove: that growing US demand has created a black market in human babies. Police arrested a brutal female gangster, Martha Alicia Mendez Aguilar, who was allegedly running an operation that procured these babies, luring in young mothers and performing illegal C-sections. On the streets they call her La Diabla: the She-Devil.
For months, the US National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) had tracked La Diabla’s movements. The dossier they compiled before the raid described a woman who was an expert at seeking out impoverished, pregnant girls and reeling them in with promises of work or money. For the girls in La Diabla’s grip, the promises proved empty. The babies were cut from the young mothers’ bodies and sold for as much as 250,000 pesos ($14,000) to American buyers in El Paso, Texas. It has been alleged that many of the girls did not survive the ordeal and their organs became another product to be sold.
This seems almost too macabre to be true, but an account I heard from the mother of one victim persuaded me that the worst can and does happen. I talked to her in a cramped car in Chihuahua state as she clutched a rosary. “My daughter was a good person, she never wronged anybody… she was so excited to have her baby, investigators asked me if my daughter wanted to sell her baby, but that wasn’t the case. She was already buying everything for her son, and telling her daughter how she was going to be a big sister.”
Her voice broke as she described searching police stations, hospitals, morgues – any place that might give her answers after her daughter went missing. It was only after La Diabla’s arrest that investigators confirmed that her daughter had been one of La Diabla’s alleged victims, lured with the promise of money for prenatal care. In the end she was butchered for profit.
It would be one thing if La Diabla were a horrific anomaly but such stories echo across Mexico’s northern states, where women vanish daily into the machinery of organized crime. For years, Juárez has been synonymous with femicide, the killings of women often dismissed as collateral damage in cartel wars. La Diabla’s alleged operation is only the latest twist in the awful story.
Many of the women who fell into her operation were offered promises of easy cash jobs during the final months of pregnancy, others with invitations to make new friends or meet a man interested in taking them on a date. One woman told me she narrowly escaped La Diabla’s network. She had been promised simple, legal work for quick pay in Juárez, nothing that seemed suspicious at first. “My friend had been working with people in Juárez and making money, so I guess she told them to contact me. Over messages the guy made it seem like a good deal and I wouldn’t have to stay long. They said they wanted to help me because I’m pregnant and they kept telling me how much money I would make with them.”
Why would the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, one of the world’s wealthiest cartels, move into baby-trafficking? The short answer
thespectator.com