“They said that if they did not receive payment, they would take away my kidney afterward and throw me into the river so the big lizards would eat me,” a Honduran man who was kidnapped in Tabasco State told commission investigators.

Image A Honduran studied a map of Mexico, where foreigners are being kidnapped on their way to the United States. Credit... Carlos Jasso/Associated Press

He said he had been kidnapped along with 60 or so others, all Central Americans. The men who took them said they were coyotes, or human smugglers, and promised to feed them and help them cross into the United States. Instead, the men forced the captives over 30 days to call relatives in the United States and extract thousands of dollars from them in order to be released.

The amounts demanded ranged from $1,500 to $10,000, sizable sums on top of the several thousand dollars that the migrants had already paid smugglers to make the crossing.

One victim, a Honduran man kidnapped in Nuevo Laredo at the Texas border, told investigators that he was close to reaching the United States when he fell for a swindle. Two women approached and offered him a day job for about $10, money that he desperately needed.

But there was no job awaiting him at the house where he was taken. Instead, he and a half dozen other migrants were beaten over the course of two weeks and frequently photographed. The captors demanded the e-mail addresses of relatives and sent the desperate-looking photos in order to extract ransoms, he said.

The man said his relatives paid what the kidnappers had demanded, so he and others who had come up with the ransom money were blindfolded one evening and taken to the bank of a river. Dumped alongside them was the body of a Salvadoran migrant whom the captors had killed. The kidnappers fired several rounds at the ground and demanded that everyone jump into the river, the man said. The group never made it across, though, and was later picked up by the Mexican authorities.

Human rights workers say Mexican migrants are not singled out by kidnappers as often as foreigners, mostly Central Americans, but also Ecuadoreans, Brazilians, Chileans and Peruvians. The foreigners are more vulnerable, less familiar with their surroundings and less likely to report what happened to them to the authorities, advocates say.