This is the hometown of San Francisco’s drug dealers

Siria Valley, Honduras — Thirty-five hundred miles southeast of San Francisco, a dirt road in Honduras shared by pickup trucks and oxcarts cuts through mostly abandoned farmland. On the outskirts of a small village, a jewel-toned mural appears like a mirage: the Bay Bridge, sparkling at night, stretching across a 10-foot-high wall.

In a nearby town square, a skinny child in a Steph Curry T-shirt climbs a tree. A few blocks away, a three-wheeled mototaxi whizzes by, a San Francisco Giants sticker affixed to its bumper.

More extravagant emblems of San Francisco appear unexpectedly and often, alongside crumbling adobe huts, stray roosters and heaps of singed garbage. Handsome new homes, some mansions by local standards, some mansions by any standard, rise behind customized iron gates emblazoned with San Francisco 49ers or Golden State Warriors logos.

One mango-colored mansion is an homage to the city: a Golden Gate Bridge sculpture on the garage door, a San Francisco Giants logo on the balcony’s ceiling, two 49ers logos on the front gate and “Civic Center” splayed across its security bars.

This is the Siria Valley, a cluster of villages about 80 miles north of the capital, Tegucigalpa, in the Francisco Morazan department of central Honduras. A typical resident here earns $8 a day doing farmwork and scoops buckets of water for showering, washing dishes and flushing toilets out of a tub known as a pila.

The valley is also the hometown of a high concentration of people who, fleeing poverty and a country with one of the world’s highest murder rates, migrate to San Francisco, where they ultimately sell drugs, according to an 18-month investigation by The Chronicle.

The investigation included interviews with 25 Honduran migrants who sell drugs or previously did so and an extensive review of police data and thousands of court cases.

Most Hondurans reaching the cities in the Bay Area or elsewhere in the U.S. find legal work. But in San Francisco, more than 200 Honduran migrants have been charged with drug dealing since 2022, the investigation found. This number does not include Honduran dealers who were convicted in previous cases or others who have never been arrested.

The majority of the Honduran dealers in San Francisco are from the Siria Valley, according to multiple dealers and court records, with many coming from the same families or having grown up together in the same small villages.

One dealer from the Siria Valley who first arrived in San Francisco in 2004 said that, as a child, he would watch as others returned to Honduras after selling drugs in the Bay Area. They were “popular because of the cars and money,” he said. “So everybody wanted the same.”

While some current and former dealers said they struggled to eke out a living, others who sell drugs successfully told The Chronicle they can make as much as $350,000 a year — or even more if they help run a local operation. At least some of that money is sent back to the valley’s villages, where it is fueling a real estate boom.

Valley resident Ofelia Raudales Varela, 88, said that while many of the migrants from the villages send remittances from legal construction work in San Francisco and Atlanta, they’re not the ones building the mansions. “There’s no other option for them to make a house in that way if it wasn’t for selling drugs in the United States,” she said.

The dealers, some of whom refer to themselves as “Hondos,” are one of many groups selling drugs in the Bay Area. But they began dominating the open-air drug markets in the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods during the pandemic, so much so that some dealers complain that the presence of too many countrymen cuts into their earnings.

Leydis Cruz, who was convicted of helping to lead a family-run fentanyl trafficking operation in the Bay Area, said the people from her home village in the Siria Valley love San Francisco.

The Golden Gate Bridge, she noted, has emerged as a popular neck tattoo.

“But what they love, what gives money, is drugs,” she said.

While these migrants from Honduras are the street dealers, the narcotics they sell come from Mexico, produced and controlled by the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels, which ferry them up the West Coast, said Wade Shannon, who ran the federal Drug Enforcement Administration’s San Francisco office before his recent retirement.

Those drugs include fentanyl, the cheap, highly addictive synthetic opioid that is driving the current record pace of overdose deaths in San Francisco. Overdoses fueled by the drug have claimed more than 2,200 lives since 2020 — 346 in 2023 as of the end of May.

The cartels make the drug with chemicals purchased from China, transport it to stash houses in Oakland and distribute it to the Honduran dealers, some of whom ride BART into San Francisco, alongside commuters from Oakland to Civic Center Station, to sell it, the investigation found.

One Honduran migrant, arrested numerous times for dealing, said from a local jail that he understood the pain that drugs have caused San Francisco. A week earlier, his brother fatally overdosed in the city.

“I watch the news and I read the newspaper and everything, and I realize that it really is something very difficult. I went through it,” he said. But, he said, the people selling drugs here are merely pawns.

“We are, so to speak … some nobodies.”

A retired police officer said Honduran dealers have had a presence in the Tenderloin for at least 35 years, when he first started on the job. Now, they are the newest group to control drug sales in the open-air markets, which have plagued the city for decades.

Like many other U.S. cities, San Francisco shifted years ago to treating drug use more like a disease than a crime. The heavy policing approach of the War on Drugs era failed to slow dealers or decrease demand while overcrowding jails and disproportionately punishing people of color, studies show.

Now one of the most progressive cities in the nation is fracturing over concerns that it has become too permissive. What to do about the Honduran dealers is a key political issue as a major citywide election approaches in 2024.

On a weekday afternoon in June, a man in his early 30s lay motionless on a SoMa sidewalk outside the Federal Building. On his right, a dozen users smoked fentanyl and crack cocaine or hung bent at the waist, heads suspended at their knees. To his left, a handful of dealers, cloaked in black but for the space around their eyes, continued selling while a passerby revived the man with Narcan, the nasal-spray antidote to opioid overdoses, and as paramedics arrived to treat him a few minutes later.

“I’m so mad at them for ruining my neighborhood,” said Kevin DeMattia, who owns Emperor Norton’s bar and has lived in the Tenderloin for the past 25 years. “Businesses are dying because people don’t want to come to the Tenderloin.  They’re ruining the neighborhood in so many ways. They’re poisoning people. … They’re this cancer, this aggressive, metastasizing cancer on the Tenderloin — the dealers and the addicts.”

Newsom, the onetime San Francisco mayor, brought in the California Highway Patrol to help police the drug markets starting May 1. On June 28, he expanded the initiative to include middle-of-the-night “surges” to confiscate drugs and weapons and arrest dealers.

In late June, the San Francisco sheriff deployed an emergency team of 130 deputies in the Tenderloin. The goal is to arrest dealers and compel people using drugs into treatment, Sheriff Paul Miyamoto said.

But research shows that low-level dealers are quickly replaced when policing escalates, and there is little effect on drug markets where strong demand still exists. How this new round of enforcement will affect the open-air drug markets in San Francisco, and the construction in some of the Siria Valley’s villages, remains unclear.

One afternoon last November in El Pedernal, a village of 1,600 residents, a longtime San Francisco dealer on a visit home rested on his balcony as he oversaw about a dozen workers laying concrete for his new driveway. The unnamed dirt roads below him vibrated with hammers and buzz saws as crews assembled the new homes of his neighbors.

The three-bedroom home occupied by his wife and children cost him $150,000 — the equivalent of about five good months of drug sales for him in the Tenderloin — but he marveled at the grandeur of some of his neighbors’ properties.

“A little boy, 17 years (old), he built this house,” the dealer said, pointing to a mansion under construction. “You open the door — beautiful.”

Probing the fentanyl crisis

While San Francisco leaders have acknowledged that a portion of people arrested for drug dealing migrated from Honduras, their presence and relatively recent rise in the city have never been explored in depth and are poorly understood.

Breed was called xenophobic and racist for saying last fall that “a lot” of the dealers are Honduran. She later apologized, saying it wasn’t her intention to single out one community or place the blame solely on them.

San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said there is no value in studying the demographics of potential offenders. “We do not consider race or nationality in how we police,” he said. “We focus on behavior. If we see someone selling drugs, we’re going to arrest them.”

To better understand the open-air drug markets, The Chronicle interviewed more than two dozen current or former dealers from Honduras and approximately 100 others, including prosecutors, defense attorneys, immigration and human rights advocates, police, drug users and local business owners.

The interviews were conducted in English and through interpreters in Spanish, in the Bay Area and in two trips to the Siria Valley, in jails, coffee shops, homes and on the streets of the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods.

The Chronicle additionally analyzed data obtained through public records requests from the San Francisco Police Department, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, the District Attorney’s Office and San Francisco Superior Court, examined court data from more than 3,400 local and federal drug cases and reviewed five years of detainer requests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The dealers interviewed ranged in age from 21 to 68 and had varying amounts of experience in the drug trade. Some said they did lawful work in the U.S. before becoming dealers, while others said they migrated to the Bay Area intending to sell drugs.

Some of the dealers said they’d prefer to work legally. But most said they are noncitizens without proper paperwork or the education required to land high-paying work in the U.S. Many left school before age 10.

“The difficulties of the jobs there in Honduras made me come here, because I had to work and work,” said Melvin Lopez, 28, a former dealer from Orica, a town near the valley. “We are a house of nine siblings. If you doubt, come work there for a while. I have a little sister who is 5, another who is 7, 9, 11 and so on. So I had to come here, to the United States, to give them a better life.

“I searched in many, many, many places … to see if they would give me a job, and they told me no, that you have to have … your Social (Security documentation) and everything.

“I spent a few days without working, without doing anything,” he said. “And then you have to pay rent and all that.”

Three of the dealers who spoke with The Chronicle said they were forced or coerced into the trade. They said they have continued dealing drugs either because they owed money to human smugglers, known as coyotes, who helped them cross the U.S. border illegally, or they have no better way of making money to send home. Quitting, they said, could lead to them or their families being physically harmed.

Of the 25 dealers interviewed, most said they were not trafficked or were unaware of anyone being forced to sell drugs.

Public defenders have begun arguing in court that Honduran migrants facing drug charges should be viewed as trafficking victims and therefore found not guilty. California defines human trafficking as a crime that involves compelling or coercing a person to provide labor or services.

The trafficking defense has been asserted in three cases, which involved people who were not interviewed for this story. Each resulted in a hung jury. None of the cases will be retried.

Many of the dealers consented to interviews while acknowledging that doing so could put them or their families in danger. Because of these safety concerns, The Chronicle is limiting the personal information it publishes about sources, including the current and former Honduran dealers, and identifying only people who gave explicit permission to use their names.

Winston Guerrero, a 26-year-old former San Francisco dealer who now works at two gas stations, said he used his drug earnings to build a house in his native Honduran village, replete with a Giants logo on its door, though he never plans to live there. His uncle stays there rent-free.

“San Francisco gives me the money, the free money,” Guerrero said in explaining the Giants symbolism. “San Francisco is my city.”

Guerrero and Lopez are among a handful of dealers The Chronicle found who have left the streets and are now working in legal jobs. Guerrero developed his own addiction during three years spent as what he calls “a gangsta.” He said his moment of clarity came about three years ago, during a conversation with his 6-year-old nephew.

“One day, he told me, ‘Oh, I want to be like you,’ ” Guerrero said. “I was like, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because you’re my uncle.’ … I was thinking, like, that’s not my life.”

San Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city makes it more attractive to the Honduran dealers, some of them said, because it means a lower risk of lengthy jail time and deportation if convicted. Under the central tenet of the sanctuary law, the city jail does not allow ICE to place holds on local prisoners so they can be picked up upon release and deported. The only way most dealers face deportation is if they are arrested on federal charges or in another city.

Elected leaders across California regard sanctuary policies as a boon to public safety, saying cities benefit when residents — regardless of their immigration status — feel safe to report crimes and enroll their children in school.

A few of the new homes in El Porvenir, a village in the valley whose name means “The Future” in English, showcase logos of the Denver Broncos or University of Utah. Honduran drug dealers operate in a handful of other large Western cities, some of which have adopted sanctuary city policies.

But one Honduran dealer said many choose to work in San Francisco because they’re less likely to be deported. Another dealer interviewed in El Pedernal echoed this sentiment, estimating that half of the dealers from the municipality sell in San Francisco.

“The reason is because, in San Francisco, it’s like you’re here in Honduras,” he said. “The law, because they don’t deport, that’s the problem. … Many look for San Francisco because it’s a sanctuary city. You go to jail and you come out.”

Until last year, San Francisco police were arresting fewer people on suspicion of selling drugs. Police made 1,273 arrests for narcotics dealing in 2015. Total arrests steadily fell to a low of 734 during the pandemic in 2021, according to records provided to The Chronicle. Arrests picked up again in 2022, with a total of 929, or about 2.5 a day. In 2023, there were 426 by the end of May, or 2.8 a day.

Almost all of the alleged dealers are released on their own recognizance before trial, which means they do not have to post bond but may be required to check in regularly with a case manager. Some get assigned to diversion programs or have charges dismissed, while others plead guilty to lesser, non-drug charges. The rest either go on trial or skip court proceedings and have warrants issued for their arrest.

Six percent of people charged with drug-sale crimes in San Francisco from 2018 to 2022 have so far been convicted on a drug charge. Others pleaded guilty to lesser crimes, had charges dismissed or completed diversion. Sentences ranged from one day to three years, with an average of 168 days, records show. About 75% of the 2022 drug cases were still winding their way through the court system as of March, and do not have a disposition yet, compared with just 10% of 2018 cases.

The most common charges used in drug-sale plea agreements are for accessory and accessory after the fact, which carried an average sentence of 38 days in jail.

Drug sale penalties are significantly steeper in federal court, particularly for undocumented immigrants. There, many defendants are held without bail, handed multiyear prison sentences upon conviction, and swiftly deported upon release if they’re noncitizens.

But federal cases represent a small fraction of the city’s drug sale prosecutions, so many dealers view the risks as minimal. And deportations can be futile. The Chronicle interviewed numerous dealers who were deported but re-entered the country illegally and returned to the Tenderloin shortly thereafter.

One has done it nine times.

Decades of extreme poverty

Exhaust fumes and kicked-up dirt settled into a thick coat of grime on a truck dashboard and its passengers’ skin on a drive through El Pedernal last winter.

But the windows would stay open, said the driver, the longtime San Francisco dealer. It’s a rule that allows a group of armed residents to prevent local criminal gangs from infiltrating the village unseen.

At one point, a man with thinly braided hair and a handgun tucked into his waistband rode his motorcycle alongside a sport utility vehicle that was driving behind the truck and ignoring the open window rule. He lifted his shirt so the SUV’s occupants could see the gun and yelled.

“Vaya, vaya, baja la ventana pues. Pareces loco. … No sabes donde andas?”

“Hey, hey, lower the window. You seem crazy. … Don’t you know where you are?”

A few weeks earlier, residents had successfully waged an armed fight against the criminal gangs to keep them from implementing an extortion scheme. At one point, the Honduran military police had to be called in, according to local media reports.

With the criminal gangs, who have no direct involvement in the San Francisco drug markets, still active, locals repeatedly told Chronicle journalists to leave the villages by nightfall.

A month later, a priest in the valley said in a phone call that he was counting about one murder every 15 days. Another local resident said he stopped driving his car for a while after hearing there was a hit ordered on someone with the same color and model of car. He resumed driving only after the target was killed.

The valley seemed more relaxed during The Chronicle’s second visit in early July. The military police were gone, and a sign near El Pedernal that read “windows and helmets down” lay on the ground. But concerns about extortion attempts against residents benefiting from U.S. drug remittances still existed. A similar sign remained up on the other side of town the next day.

“The local gangs, I’m sure they know where the wealth is coming from,” said Oscar Estrada, a Honduran author who wrote a book on drug trafficking’s impact on the country.

Honduras has long been one of the world’s most dangerous places. In a March 1 travel advisory to U.S. citizens, the State Department warned: “Violent crime, such as homicide, armed robbery, and kidnapping, is common. Violent gang activity, such as extortion, violent street crime, rape, and narcotics and human trafficking, is widespread. Local police and emergency services lack sufficient resources to respond effectively to serious crime.”

Violence in the Siria Valley is rooted in more than four decades of extreme poverty. Before the mid-1980s, the area was a poor but self-sustaining agricultural region where farmers cultivated corn and beans to sell at a grain-processing factory in El Porvenir.

Miguel Angel Cabrera, a Honduran historian and poet who grew up in El Porvenir and still lives in the country, said the plant shut down in 1985 after farmers began turning to more lucrative crops such as cotton and tobacco.

The farmers had a few good years with the new crops, Cabrera said, but the industry never took off, and by then there was no infrastructure left for grain cultivation.

So when a Nevada gold mining giant, the now-defunct Glamis Gold, approached the Honduran government with a project proposal for the valley, many of the locals were supportive. They expected the project, which opened in 2000, to allow them to sell their land at a high profit and provide badly needed jobs.

“The mine bought land for very cheap. It promised jobs, but at the end of the day, not a lot of people from the town profited,” Cabrera said. “It created this illusion that riches were attainable, and it was all a house of mirrors.”

Worse, according to Cabrera and academics who studied the long-term effects of the mine, the project contaminated the valley and nearby villages with toxic heavy metals, sickening residents and killing livestock.

El Pedernal, downstream from the project site, was hit particularly hard.

“Dust, mine drainage, sonic pollution, contaminated water does not stop reaching a community because it does not belong to the municipality that has received mining with open arms,” researchers wrote in a 2012 impact report on the project.

El Pedernal, researchers said, was “marked by signs of mining works, (but) what has sustained the community has been the remittances from the economic exiles of El Pedernal; the youth and the labor force that has had to migrate.”

The project was taken over by another mining company, Goldcorp, and operated until 2009. On July 2, the site of the mine was mostly fenced off from the public.

“A final inspection was conducted by the Energy and Mines Ministry in 2021 and reported no adverse issues,” said Maria Carolina Lucaroni, a spokesperson for Newmont mining, which merged with Goldcorp in 2019. “We continue to meet our post-closure commitments and obligations and will do so until they are completed.”

Without the mine or other major industry, Luis Rubi, the current mayor of El Porvenir, said the valley depends on the remittances provided by residents who leave for the U.S. or other countries such as Spain and send earnings back home.

Rubi said even the lowest-paying jobs stateside provide enough to buy a parcel of land and build a home in Honduras. He declined to speculate about whether any residents earned money from drug sales.

“They can create a safety net so they can live with their family in different conditions here,” he said. “That is my outlook. The idea is that we go there and work legally and do the jobs that Americans don’t want to do.”

One day last November, Rubi, wearing a white 10-gallon hat, pulled a pickup into the El Porvenir town square with about a dozen preteens in the truck bed, all dressed in soccer uniforms.

“They are the champions of the world!” Rubi called out the window.

After jumping out of Rubi’s truck, the soccer players rushed visiting American journalists to test their English and giggle at their Spanish. One announced that his mother was in Oakland. One had a family member in San Francisco, another in Nashville.

Migration from Central America’s Northern Triangle of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to the U.S. has steadily increased over the past few decades and surged in recent years.

For the 12 months ended in September 2022, U.S. immigration officials encountered more than half a million people from this region at the Southwest land border, including 213,023 Hondurans, according to data published by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The figure amounts to about 2% of the country’s population of 10 million.

Cris Ramón, incoming senior policy adviser for UnidosUS, an immigration policy project, said the pipeline from the Siria Valley to San Francisco’s drug trade is an economic pattern that’s also found in legal job markets, particularly for immigrant groups: People follow people.

“It just so happens that we’re now dealing with illicit drugs,” he said. “And that’s where it’s hugely problematic.”

A teacher in El Porvenir, who asked not to be identified, said every household in the area has at least one family member working abroad and sending money back. The teacher estimated that 85% of them find legal work and the rest resort to drugs or other crimes.

The teacher said many young villagers leave for the U.S. unprepared for its workforce. They have little education, don’t speak English and have few skill sets suitable for American job markets.

“What’s happening? Unhealthy migration is happening, and that’s really hurting us,” the teacher said. “As a small business owner, it’s going to be difficult to find somebody to work for me. How do I compete with the salary in the States?”

The teacher said their goal is to better prepare their students to succeed in the U.S. It’s not always easy, the teacher said, when drug money is the fastest way up the economic ladder.

By the time boys are 13 or 14, the teacher said, they start talking about making their own journey to the U.S.

The teen boys “are trying to see the girls, the girls are only paying attention to the guys with the cars, and the guys with the cars are the ones who have gone to the States.”

“If you show someone immature something shiny,” the teacher said, “they’re going to want it.”

The teacher said the most common career in the valley lately is construction, paid by money sent home from abroad. As a result, the municipality feels like a boomtown and ghost town at the same time.

One Thursday last November, the town center’s streets and benches were mostly empty at midday, its fountain dry; it was unclear whether the nearby restaurants and clothing stores were closed temporarily or for good. Yet construction was everywhere: a new church, new home additions, new roads. El Porvenir’s hardware store was the busiest spot in town.

“You shouldn’t go asking questions about El Pedernal,” a customer at the hardware store told The Chronicle’s journalists.

While there were always a few big houses in the area, El Pedernal’s real estate boom took off during the pandemic, one San Francisco dealer said. Increased fentanyl sales, the closure of the U.S.-Mexico border, which made it more difficult to smuggle in contraband, and ensuing price hikes amounted to higher profits for the Honduran dealers in San Francisco.

Proceeds from drug sales have improved the financial outlook for some villagers not involved in the trade. Construction work pays $35 a day, four times what a farmer makes, and new businesses have launched. A teacher in El Pedernal has become a full-time metal artist, creating the customized replicas of Bay Area sports team logos that adorn many of the new homes. His biggest seller is the “SF” of the 49ers. He said he has built 15 of them and used the profits to pay for his child’s schooling.

“I have seen from, probably the ’90s this remittance architecture, which was very obvious and they have this very clear design and usually is related with aspirations of the immigrants to the United States,” said Estrada, the Honduran author, who was shown photos of the El Pedernal homes. “But this is not that. It looks more like a typical Narco house. The one you see in places like … Colombia (where) you see the kind of architecture totally over the top of the community. That’s very clear.”

Various factors make it impossible to determine the number of Honduran dealers working on San Francisco’s streets. Many cycle discreetly between their home country and the U.S. And even when they’re arrested, data on the country of origin of those people is either not made public or kept inconsistently, if at all, by law enforcement officials.

To reach its estimate that more than 200 Honduran migrants have been charged with drug dealing since 2022, The Chronicle relied on ICE detainer requests, jail booking logs and court records.

As of late May, San Francisco courts had a total of 996 people facing drug dealing charges. In 2021, then-D.A. Boudin said a “significant percentage of people selling drugs in San Francisco, perhaps as many as half, are here from Honduras.” D.A. Jenkins said recently: “I can only say from my perspective when I was handling these cases, back in 2015 to 2018. I would say it was more maybe 50-50. It was certainly a decent percentage. But it was by no means any majority. … I certainly think those demographics have changed since then.”

A public defender said that of her 20 to 30 clients in drug dealing cases, almost all are of Honduran ancestry.

None of those figures accounts for Hondurans who are in the drug trade but not the judicial system. The Honduran dealer who has been in the Bay Area since 2004 estimated that 1,000 migrants from Honduras are working the different levels of the San Francisco drug markets at any given time, with most of them from the Siria Valley. The Chronicle could not confirm that number.

The Chronicle examined data from about 3,400 local and federal criminal drug cases in San Francisco from 2018 to 2022, and reviewed court documents from the 500 federal cases that had more complete information. The vast majority of the data did not indicate a country of origin for the defendant. Of the 130 defendants who could be confirmed as Hondurans, only 60 showed a specific city, town or region. Of those, 51 were from the Francisco Morazan region, which includes the valley, with high concentrations in the villages of El Pedernal and Orica.

A priest in the region said it’s common knowledge that many of the young residents who immigrate to the States will return with drug money. But any money is celebrated, he added, using a Spanish phrase to describe someone’s ascent from pawn to king: “La gente lo ve como que ya lo coronó.”

Risking it all as human cargo

The rough contours of the journey from Honduras to the U.S. have been common knowledge to the villagers in and around the Siria Valley for decades.

Those who have money get to the U.S. with private drivers, two dealers said. They hire a coyote to drive them the entire route from Honduras, hoping their documents are not checked by U.S. border officials. Or the coyote will drive a dealer to the U.S.-Mexico border. The dealer will cross on foot and get picked up by a driver in the U.S. The trips can cost as much as $18,000.

Those without money, other dealers said, ride buses, trudge through deserts and jump on a moving cargo train in southern Mexico near the border with Guatemala. In Mexico, they are often extorted by cops and robbed by gangs before getting to the border, dealers said.

El Pedernal native Leydis Cruz, who is serving a three-year sentence in the federal prison in Dublin for her role in a family-run fentanyl dealing business, said that 17 years ago she rode a cargo train and was one of the few female riders who was not raped.

The migrants often rely on advice from those who have already reached American soil: Don’t carry U.S. phone numbers, lest the gangs find them and think there’s someone with American dollars who would pay a ransom. On the cargo train, ominously nicknamed “the Beast,” it is better to scrunch between the cars than ride on top, where low-hanging branches have dislodged stowaways, leading to them being  dismembered.

“I tied myself with a belt (to the train) because people would fall off and they would be mutilated,” Cruz said.

At the U.S.-Mexico border, migrants enter cartel-controlled territory. The cartels have established two lines for entry, a dealer said. One line is for the “chickens,” who agree to pay about $2,000 for a coyote to smuggle them across. The other requires serving as a “mule,” carrying a stash of drugs for 100 miles across the desert.

One dealer recalled these options when he attempted to cross into the U.S. about seven years ago. “Do you want to work?” the dealer said a man asked him. “It’s hard to pay a coyote. It’s expensive right now.”

“So I say, ‘Yes, what do I have to do?’ And he says, ‘Well look, we’re going to give you a backpack. That backpack, we want it in Phoenix. That’s your ticket. If you lose it, you’re going to be (killed) in the desert. And if you get it through, you’re going to get paid.’ ”

The trek, the man said, included 11 days of walking in the desert spanning Mexico and Arizona, carrying a backpack that weighed about 80 pounds.

Throughout the journey there are lookouts, or puntos, with binoculars, scanning for U.S. authorities in helicopters. If one is spotted, the puntos will radio the mule, which is their cue to stake the backpack into the ground and then run at least a kilometer away.

A successful passage earns a mule $1,000 to $3,000 and a contact with the cartel that can lead to a dealing job.

“When you’re coming from the border, they (help with crossing). (They say), ‘Oh, you do a favor for me, let me give you my number,’” one dealer said. “Because in Honduras, we’re famous for (drug dealing). (They say), ‘Oh, are you going to Portland, Utah, Denver or San Francisco? Let me give you my number.’ ”

One dealer said his slog through the desert on his second attempted border crossing was motivated by the promise of $1,000 at the end of his route in Arizona. That money was supposed to fund the final leg of his journey to San Francisco. He was given no address for his destination but told to get to the Tenderloin. Other Hondurans would be there.

But somewhere between Tucson and Phoenix, the smugglers he was meeting took his bags and left him penniless in the desert.

The dealer said he and his traveling companions found a farmworker who gave them a little money. Soon, though, they were abducted by unidentified kidnappers and held for $2,500 ransom. The dealer didn’t have any money, but figured out the address of where he was being held by using his phone.

He texted a friend, who rescued him by wrestling a gun from the kidnapper, the dealer said. The friend then offered to get the dealer to the Bay Area for $1,000. The dealer’s father, who was in Honduras, wired him the money after securing a loan, using his land as collateral.

The dealer said he could barely walk when he was dropped off at Ninth and Mission streets in San Francisco. He was making his way to a doughnut shop when, from across the street, he recognized someone from Orica, his hometown. The man was selling crystal meth, but took a break to buy the new arrival a sandwich and a soda.

“Come with me,” the acquaintance said. “You can take a shower and get yourself together.”