THE BORDER REPORT

An old Sonoran narco-trafficking family that made money in every possible way off this border was quietly taken down by the United States this week. The Mota family ran a shuttle service for U.S. citizens traveling to Puerto Peñasco; some of the familymembers were also running cocaine, weed and meth into Phoenix and have smuggled migrants into Arizona for years, federal records show. Mota’s Place Shuttle, which filed as a corporation through the Arizona Corporation Commission in May 2006, was one of the few shuttle companies offering U.S. residents service from Phoenix to Lukeville and Rocky Point. The Avondale and Rocky Point-based company held the exclusive contracts to run tourists from the Mayan Palace resort and other luxury hotels up to Phoenix. As you can imagine, with the way Rocky Point has been growing, shuttling tourists alone was a lucrative business. It was a tight little family business; businessmen contacted by The Border Report said Mota’s Shuttle ran ten trips a day. At even half-full, the 15-passenger vans were pulling in about $2.5 million a year. But something fishy was transpiring and the pieces are starting to come together. You see, back in 2003, American law enforcement officials tipped off the Mexicans that Mota’s Place Shuttle owners José Enrique y Gustavo Mota Cienfuegos were running illegal immigrants into the United States. Gustavo Mota is listed as the statutory agent of the company. According to information the U.S. Feds gave to the Mexicans, more than $500,000 were confiscated from the migrant smuggling operation in the U.S. between January and April 2003. The Mota brothers were part of a much-vaunted raid the Mexicans performed in the northern Sonora border towns in May 2003. Twenty-seven smugglers in Altar, Caborca , Sasabe, Agua Prieta and Nogales were arrested along with 581 exotics: Guatemalans, Hondurans and the like. The Mota brothers were two of the most prized captures that the Mex-Feds announced. But the Mota brothers must not have been held for too long, they’ve been shuttling Americans back and forth between Rocky Point and Phoenix since the coastal resort city exploded in growth back in 2004. Rocky Point and the Sonoran coastal highway project is the most ambitious real estate venture going on in Mexico. The Motas were in the thick of the business. Gustavo’s brother, Enrique Mota, had a different past. According to an intelligence report from the Center for Investigations and National Security, Mexican CIA, Kiki Mota, was the go-to man for the Enriquez Parra brothers - Los Numeros. According to the CISEN report, it was a Los Numeros hitman who slipped across the border into Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument during a 2002 Sonoran state police chase and got into a shoot-out with Mexican cops across the line. Park ranger Kris Eggle responded to the gunfire and was gunned down. A narco-corrido describes Los Numeros better: Poncho venía de Jalisco,
Los otros tres de Sonora,
El Nueve, el Siete y el Diez,
y el Chapo mandan ahorra. (Poncho came from Jalisco, The others came from Sonora, The Nine, the Seven and the Ten, and Chapo, they now reign.) Except they don’t. Los Numeros are finished now, supplanted by Francisco Hernandez Garcia, El Dos Mil, the narco responsible for the Cananea attack last May. Daniel Iréne (El Siete) was gunned down in Tijuana in Januray 2005. Raul (El Nueve) was tortured and beaten with a claw-hammer then thrown out of an airplane in Navojoa the following October. Idelfonso (El Diez) was snatched by Mexican feds in November 2007. Wilfrido is alive but I don’t know where he is. The family ties run deep. Sources close to the Mota family say that Kiki Mota’s daughter, Sofia Rubi Mariscales Mota, was part of a transaction between Kiki and Raul Enriquez Parra. In effect, she became Raul’s wife to satisfy an arreglo. She was arrested by Gilbert Police in December 2005 with $107,000 stashed in her Nissan Pathfinder, U.S. District Court records show. Last January, she was popped again, this time coming through the Tijuana port of entry. That curious American law enforcement tactic, the confiscation of funds as punishment, was enacted. “It is the belief of the Government that a sentence of probation, one year of supervised release as well as a fine of $30,000.00 would be an appropriate sentence,” argued assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Logan in a motion filed in Phoenix federal court. Now, I’m told, Mota’s Place Shuttle was shut down after FBI, DEA and local police seized the offices in Lukeville, then went after the family in Phoenix. I’d expect to hear something official coming out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office this week.