Money trail fuels migrant smuggling
Cash, wire transfers, extortion part of network that holds families hostage
Fleeing war, persecution and poverty, migrants desperate to reach Europe are paying thousands of dollars apiece to become pawns in a multimillion-dollar trafficking network that stretches from the Sahara to Sweden.
By the thousands, they’re handing themselves over to abusive smugglers who hold them hostage in wretched conditions in Libya until their families cough up the cash to fund their trips, using companies like Western Union or more often the informal money transfer network known as hawala that is common in much of the Arabic world.
Those payments fund treacherous trips across the Mediterranean that have killed hundreds of people in recent weeks. And even if migrants survive the crossing, the exploitation doesn’t end there: Smugglers, acting more like illicit travel agents than criminal gangs, arrange passage to safe houses in Sicily, buy bus tickets for new arrivals and even accompany their charges to their final destinations north, for thousands of dollars apiece.
Interviews with migrants, prosecutors, police and aid groups provide a portrait of the money trail that is fuelling the record migra- tion wave hitting Europe, creating a new migrant mafia that so far has sidelined Italy’s traditional mobs. It’s the Mediterranean piece of the global human-trafficking pie that the United Nations says helps generate some $150 billion US in illicit profits from forced labour each year.
“Human trafficking has become such a lucrative business for criminal gangs around the world, it’s probably rivalling the drugs trade,” said Itayi Viriri of the International Organization for Migration.
It’s a Thursday night and along a tree-lined parkway a 10-minute walk from Milan’s Central Station, a small clutch of Eritreans who arrived in Sicily a few days earlier plot their next move. Their arrival coincided with the Mediterranean’s worst shipwreck disaster, which claimed more than 800 migrants, nearly half of them Eritrean.
“I have no telephone and my relatives don’t know if I am in the Sahara or in the sea,” said Abraham Russom, fingering the one possession he still has: a silver ring with a cut black stone. His mother has borrowed almost $4,000 US to get him this far, a near fortune in a country where the average military salary is $10 a month and many flee to avoid forced conscription.
Russom said he left his wife and two children behind after he was imprisoned for six months for being accused of losing hundreds of travel passes in his job with the army in Asmara. He walked for 12 days through the desert to Sudan, lacking the travel documents necessary to pass police roadblocks.
There, he hooked up with smugglers who charged $1,600 to drive across the desert to Libya. The fee bought him a spot in the back of a Wrangler truck with 25 other people packed in four rows for the two-week journey.
He spent two months in Libya waiting for the funding to come through for the next leg of the journey: $2,000 to be ferried across the sea.
In both cases, Russom said, his mother back home in Eritrea gathered money from friends and relatives, making drop-offs that in retrospect seem more like ransom payments than down payments for a trip: Someone would call her and tell her where to drop the money, then instruct her to leave. She never saw who took it. Russom managed to avoid being fingerprinted by Italian authorities and wants to join his aunt in Sweden, the promised land for many new arrivals.
“If she can send money, I will leave Sunday,” Russom said.
As director of the Eritrean Initiative on Refugee Rights, Meron Estefanos has come to learn the smugglers’ modus operandi: “They go to refugee camps, approaching new arrivals and offering them a trip with no down payment,” Estefanos said.
Many take the bait because they know their families would never put together the money up front.
“But once your loved one calls you from Libya, we know there is no way back across the Sahara, so you are forced to pay the smuggler,” she said. “There is no other option.”
Migrants themselves recount stories of handing themselves over to their kidnappers, who then blackmail their families to finally “free” them for the final leg of the journey.
Engida, an Ethiopian currently living in a Tripoli camp who asked to be identified only by one name, says he has been “arrested” five different times by Libyan militiamen since he first came to the country in 2012 hoping to reach Europe. Each time, he has had to pay his way out, using person-to-person money transfers because migrants like him don’t have legal status in Libya to open bank accounts.
“Details of the people receiving the money, place and time of dropping the money and type of car they will come with will be discussed by phone,” he explained.
He recounted dramatically worsening treatment for migrants these days, with women being raped and migrants executed, robbed and cheated by their smuggler captors.
“There is no return home for me now. I have spent a lot of money already,” he said by phone. “I have taken money from family and friends. If I return, I will become an embarrassment.”
“Though I don’t have any money at the moment, I hope things will change one day and I will reach Europe,” he says.
The smuggling networks are “50 per cent delivery services and 50 per cent tour operators,” said Palermo Chief Prosecutor Francesco Lo Voi.
Remarkably, the organized crime group that doesn’t have a piece of the action is Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia. Calvino believes the Italian mob has stayed away simply because it doesn’t have men in Libya, ground zero of the smuggling network.
“It’s not their country, their language,” he said.