Getting to 'el norte' has never been a cakewalk. Along with long treks through desert terrain, death-defying river crossings and perilous rides clinging onto trains, there have always been con men and crooked police officers preying on migrants along the way. But Mexican human rights groups that monitor migration say the threats foreigners face as they cross Mexico for the United States have grown significantly in recent months. Organized crime groups have begun taking aim at migrants as major sources of illicit revenue, even as the financial crisis in the United States has reduced the number of people willing to risk the journey. Migrants may typically be poor, but they have usually notified friends or relatives in the United States that they are on their way. To kidnappers, those contacts are golden. 'They beat me and kept beating me until I handed over my telephone numbers,' said the Salvadoran immigrant, interviewed at a center for migrants in Reynosa, just across the border with Texas. In many ways, the man's account was typical. A study by Mexico's National Human Rights Commission released this year found 9,758 migrants who had been kidnapped as they tried to cross the border into the United States between September 2008 and February 2009. The commission noted that migrants were typically terrified to report such crimes out of fear of being deported by Mexican immigration authorities and that the actual number of victims was probably much higher. The stories the commission heard in interviews with victims were alarming. There were frequent rapes of female migrants. Fierce beatings were carried out. As a lesson to other captives, the kidnappers killed some migrants who did not hand over the telephone numbers of their relatives. 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. 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. Complicating the problem, migrants complain that the police are sometimes in league with the kidnappers, rounding up victims and handing them over to kidnappers for a fee. 