MIAMI, United States. – The Three Men from Florida accused of human trafficking for the transfer of Cuban migrants to the United States are accused, each, of six charges and face a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, three years of supervised release and fines of 250,000 dollars if they are found guilty, reported the EFE news agency.
A Miami grand jury last week indicted Didier Pérez Pérez, Lester Leyniel Soca Díaz and Yoandy Alonso for transporting Cuban citizens to the United States through Monroe County (which includes the Florida Keys) in exchange for money.
They then held the Cuban rafters hostage in a Hialeah home and asked their relatives to pay $15,000 to free them.
“The migrants were threatened, they were even told that they would be left in the middle of the ocean if they did not pay their smuggling debts. The Police rescued the captured migrants and disrupted the foreign transport network, accompanying a friend of a victim to the hostage exchange point, “according to the note published by the Department of Justice.
According to EFE, which had access to the accusation, the events for which the traffickers are accused extend from August to the beginning of September. Other people, both known and unknown, participated in them for the United States justice system.
The court document mentions two victims (identified only as victim 1 and victim 2), who were held and who their captors threatened to “injure” or “kill.”
According to the Justice Department, the case is part of an investigation by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF), whose primary mission is to identify and dismantle drug trafficking and money laundering groups. , as well as other higher-level transnational criminal organizations that threaten American citizens.
In particular, this case falls under the Operation Sisyphus Task Force, a multi-agency partnership established by the OCDEFT Transnational Organized Crime Priority Program.
Every week, dozens of Cuban rafters They approach the coast of Florida, where they are generally intercepted by Coast Guard agents and then deported to the Island. However, many of them have perished at sea before reaching land.
Cuba is experiencing a massive exodus that has surpassed the Mariel crisis and the rafters’ crisis of 1994. Since October 1, 2021, the beginning of the current fiscal year, only the crews of the US Coast Guard travel by sea. They have intercepted 5,689 Cubans, a figure that exceeds the number of migrants from the island intercepted each fiscal year from 2017 to 2021.
According to the agency, the statistics have behaved as follows: 5,396 Cubans intercepted in fiscal year 2016; 1,468 in 2017; 259 in 2018; 313 in 2019; 49 in 2020 and 838 in 2021.
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