The New York Times has a fascinating investigative report on immigrant smugglers from Ecuador:

In collaboration with The New York Times, a reporter from El Tiempo, a newspaper in Cuenca, Ecuador, took the eight-day voyage, covering 1,100 nautical miles from a cove near this scruffy Ecuadorean beach resort to the northern coast of Guatemala. Her journey as a client of smugglers — and sometimes a hostage — provides a rare look inside one small part of the vast pipeline that carries untold numbers of migrants to the United States each year.

Not surprisingly to us, the real portrait of the smugglers differs considerably from that advanced by American law enforcement:

Up close, the typical migrant smuggler is unlike the sophisticated, violent mastermind portrayed by American law enforcement officials. Most never went to high school. They are often unarmed. They are motivated by the same poverty that drives migrants from their homelands. The smugglers run a business built for the poor by the poor, relying on willpower and wooden boats to move thousands of people. They do not always prey on migrants. Their business is based on trust that runs deep in communities that have sent migrants to the United States for decades.

The Ecuadoran route is one of the newer favorites in an industry generating $20 billion a year --second only to drugs: