MEXICO CITY — Oscar Medrano from Honduras lost a leg and 2,000 dollars — a veritable fortune for a poor, would-be immigrant — in his attempt to make it across Mexico on his way to the United States after paying a "coyote" or people trafficker.

"I'm still alive, and that's the important thing. I'm going back to my country," Medrano told IPS by telephone, shortly before leaving an immigrant aid centre in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, on the border with Guatemala.

Some 160,000 undocumented immigrants, mainly from the impoverished Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, are detained and deported every year by the police in Mexico as they attempt to reach the United States.

Medrano was not arrested. But when he tried to climb up on a freight train heading towards central Mexico, he fell, was trapped under the train, and lost his leg.

After he was injured, he was held up by young gang members, who stole his last 200 dollars -- on top of the 1,800 dollars he had previously paid a coyote. "I don't want to remember anything anymore. I just want to go home to be with my family and I don't want anything to do with coyotes or any of that, because they abandoned me," he said.

Immigrants along the border between Mexico and Guatemala face terrible dangers and suffer abuses of all kinds, said the president of the independent governmental National Human Rights Commission, José Luis Soberanes.

According to a report by the Commission, undocumented immigrants are highly vulnerable to maltreatment from all sides. They are harassed, sexually abused, extorted, robbed and otherwise mistreated by immigration agents and police, and are assaulted, raped, held up and sometimes killed by gang-members and thieves.

The Mexican government of Vicente Fox says it enforces strict controls along the country's southern border, and periodically arrests coyotes and their victims -- immigrants who are travelling hidden in trains or trucks, or by other means.

But independent studies and official statistics show that the inflow of undocumented immigrants continues to grow, along with the activity of people trafficking rings.

In 1988, Mexico arrested and deported 108,000 undocumented immigrants, a number that had increased to an average of 160,000 in 2002 and 2003.

Mexico, a traditional gateway to the United States for immigrants from Central and South America, and to a lesser degree for people from Asia and the Middle East, shares a 1,150-km border with Guatemala and Belize, many parts of which are remote and poorly guarded.

IPS contacted a coyote to inquire about prices and the system used for getting into the United States. Suspicious and wary, the trafficker did not give his name, but said that for Central and South Americans, the trip costs between 1,500 and 4,000 dollars, and over 10,000 dollars for people from Europe and Asia.

"Half of the money is paid ahead, and the rest when the immigrant reaches the other side (the United States), where our people will be waiting," he said.

When asked about the potential abuses that a traveller could face, the coyote said the "service" carried a "guarantee" -- he did not explain what that consisted of -- and insisted that there would be no problems.

The United States and Mexico, divided by a 3,200-km border, have signed agreements for combating people trafficking. But migrants have little choice but to turn to coyotes, due to the increased vigilance along the U.S. border.

"The coyotes' business is booming, precisely due to the increasing difficulty of making it into the United States," said Guillermo Alonso, a researcher at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a college in northern Mexico that specialises in migration issues.

"It is clear that the U.S. government's immigration policy has been a failure," said Alonso, the author of the study 'Clandestine migration over the northern border of Mexico: crossing strategies and mortality.'

Every year, around 390,000 undocumented Mexicans make it into the United States, many of them paying a coyote to get across the border. But more than one million are deported. (END/Copyright IPS)