The New York Times, by John M. Crewdson

By John M. Crewdson

It was the sweetest and gentlest of desert evenings, pitch-black except for a sliver of new moon and the light from a hundred thousand stars. Nearby, a coyote scampered among the stately organ pipe cactuses, its occasional mournful howl slicing the silence like a jagged knife.

Presently the stillness was broken by a softer sound, a brief, twotoned whistle. For half a minute there was nothing, then an identical whistle was heard from beyond the rise, followed by a flash of light and an answering flash, the signal that the way was clear. Within seconds, shadowy figures emerged from the desert. Smiling and talking softly, they gathered in a circle near the little-used highway.

After a moment, Bernabe Garay stepped forward. A dignified, cheerful man with a fondness for battered hats, ''Don Berna'' had led the others here: by bus, third class, from their cloud-high, stone-poor village in the Sierra Madre; by pickup truck, at danger rates, from the border town of Sonoita to the gap in the barbed wire where, a few hours earlier, at nightfall, they had become illegal aliens; on foot, pressing hard, wary of rattlesnakes and border patrols, to a prearranged pickup point here in the Arizona desert. As it would prove, they had yet to face the greatest obstacles in their journey in search of work in the citrus groves around Phoenix.

Driven North by Poverty

Like uncounted millions of their countrymen before them, like the millions who will follow their well-worn path, they were driven north by the astounding poverty of rural Mexico, where life reduces to the simplest of equations: work or starve. But there was no work for them in Mexico, and so they were here.

As it was, they were among the last men to leave the village for America. The only ones left there now, Don Berna said, ''are those that are older than me.'' Despite his 55 years, Bernabe set the others a rapid pace. They covered the 20 miles from the border in four hours, but they are mountain men from the Mexican village of Ahuacatlan, and for them such a walk is a brisk stroll.

Bus Trip to Border

The first leg of their journey was remarkable only for its monotony. As in years past, the 60 men of Ahuacatlan traveled for two days and nights by third-class bus to the Mexican border town of Sonoita, a favored jumping-off place for those seeking to enter the United States illegally. They expected no problems, but this year the crossing proved more nettlesome than usual.

It was near here that 13 from El Salvador died last July, abandoned without water by some of their Mexican guides.

And so, each autumn, the men go north, and each summer they return, bringing dresses and gifts and, always, money from America. So closely is Ahuacatlan bound to the American economy that the preferred medium of exchange here is not the peso but the dollar.

Tales of Great Adventure

Summers are a happy time in Ahuacatlan. ''But when the money is finished,'' Father Tomas went on, ''the men say, 'Let's go again,' and then the women are not so happy. They come to me and say, 'I have no money, no food, my husband is not here, I don't know what to do.''' Shopkeepers extend credit, and money may be sent home from the United States, but the mails are not reliable and eventually the credit runs out. The winters in Ahuacatlan are long and cold.

When the men come home, they speak of their time in America as a great adventure. But the priest, who hears their confessions, knows the truth. ''Up there,'' he said, ''the problems are very terrible for them.'' But except for the men without families to feed, America is the only choice.

Ahuacatlan means ''land of avocados,'' and its residents agree that avocado trees must have covered these lush hillsides once. But the avocados grow here no longer, and neither does much else. Like Bernabe Garay, many of the men of Ahuacatlan own a few acres of steep mountain land and in the summertime they try to grow some corn and beans. ''A lot of work for no money,'' is what Bernabe says.

Each summer, fewer men return to Ahuacatlan than left the year before, and it is always to Father Tomas that their wives bring the official telegrams for translation. ''They have an accident in the fields,'' he said, ''or by the knife, or by the gun.'' Or there is no word at all: ''They go and we know nothing about them. Their wives go to the authorities, nothing. Some of these women, they want to marry again, but they cannot.'' There is no divorce in Ahuacatlan.

The village is a patriarchy without patriarchs, and it has not learned to cope with the stresses that brings. The children are growing up without fathers, and each year they seem more restless. ''Now they want to go to dances,'' said Father Tomas, arching his eyebrows as if to ask, ''What next?'' There are no fathers to tell them no. Ahuacatlan has a school but the children do not want to study hard. ' 'They dream only to go to the United States,'' Father Tomas said, ' 'to have a good adventure and have money.''

Bass Drum, Church Bells

Nearly everyone over 25 in Ahuacatlan is illiterate, and most residents of all ages are in poor health. ''When the kids are born they are not very healthy in their minds,'' the priest said, ''retarded. Their health is very poor.'' Malnutrition is one reason, but some from Ahuacatlan have learned that they have been exposed, in the lemon groves of Arizona, to a toxic and now illegal pesticide known as DBCP that can affect human reproduction.

Despite the stunning natural beauty, a visitor to Ahuacatlan cannot help wondering why the people cling to its misery. The answer seems to be that the village is all they know. ''They think they are safe here, morally speaking.''

As twilight came to the village, a man appeared in the plaza with a bass drum and beat it loudly to announce that the cantina was open. Muttering, Father Tomas pulled on his white cassock and hurried off to answer with a peal of church bells for evening mass. ''My people drink too much beer,'' he said.

The cock crows early in Ahuacatlan, and though it was not yet dawn Pilar Garay had been up for some time, laying a wood fire beneath the grate in her sparse kitchen. Its fragrant pine smoke mingled with that of a hundred other fires as, across the village, water began to boil for porridge and coffee. The Garays' adobe house, which Bernabe built himself a quarter century ago, has electricity. But water for cooking and washing is still hauled up from the river, as it has been for hundreds of years.

Promptly at 8 o'clock Primitivo Perez, an elderly neighbor, dropped by for his morning ration of Pilar's coffee. Lest anyone think him lazy, Mr. Perez explained that he was retired; like nearly all the old men, most of his working life was spent in the United States.

In another corner of the kitchen, near an ancient, pedal-driven sewing machine, sat 15-year-old Rafael Garay. Rafael had finished the sixth grade, all that the village school has to offer, and now he was biding his time, waiting to join his father and older brothers in the Arizona citrus groves. He was ready to go now, he said, and his eagerness made Pilar smile. Perhaps, she replied, next year.

Rafael is the same age as the two sons of Onorio Garcia, who owns what passes for a hardware store in the plaza. Mr. Garcia's sons also dream of going to America, but as students.

They are attending an expensive private academy in San Luis Potosi, several miles away. One hopes to be a doctor, the other an architect, and Mr. Garcia, who has a battered yellow truck and a wristwatch, is one of the few in Ahuacatlan who has the money to help his sons realize their dreams. Despite his education, Rafael Garay, for example, knows that the only way he will get to America is as a farmhand.

With a husband and three sons working in America, Pilar said, she hoped she would be able to make ends meet. In the old days, Bernabe alone might manage to save only $50 in an entire harvest. With the beginnings of unionization in the Arizona citrus industry, wages have improved, and last season he sent home $1,200. This year, with Reginaldo, 28, Kiko, 23, and 18-year-old Bernabe Jr. working too, they may save as much as $6,000, but nearly a quarter of that must be set aside for next year's journey.

Is she sad that her husband and sons will not be home for Christmas? ''Si,'' Pilar said, ''muy triste.'' But Bernabe has not been home for the last 29 Christmases, except for 1976, when he fell off a ladder in the groves, broke three ribs and came to Ahuacatlan to recuperate.

It was just north of Ajo, Ariz., that Ricardo the smuggler ran out of gas. As his car rolled to a stop, Bernabe and the other passengers burst out and scrambled up the hill to hide in the brush at the side of the highway. The men watched a policeman arrive, they watched as he spoke over his radio, and they watched the Border Patrol cruiser drive up and take Ricardo away. All night they stayed in the bushes, and they were very quiet.

At dawn Kiko Garay made his way carefully down from the hillside and found a telephone. One call to the efficient underground smuggling network, and another ride was on the way.

Ricardo was permitted, as are most illegal aliens, to return to Mexico ''voluntarily,'' a practice that saves the Immigration and Naturalization Service much time and money. Had he been caught with Bernabe and the others, he almost certainly would have spent a minimum of six months in jail for alien smuggling. But this arrest was a minor inconvenience. The next day Ricardo was back in Phoenix and back in business.

When Bernabe and the others reached Phoenix on Wednesday they went to the ranch where they worked last year. The lemons were not yet ready for picking, so they spent that day, and the next, setting up housekeeping, renewing old friendships and playing cards.

It was not until Thursday night, as the desert air began to chill, that Bernabe remembered the blankets that he left the summer before with his friend, Manuel Diaz. He resolved to get them in the morning.

In past years, the Border Patrol raided the citrus ranches every so often, picking up the workers and sending the m back to Mexico. But this year, because of manpower shortages and new regulations, such raids have been very few. Once they reach the ranches the workers are virtually safe from arrest. It is when they venture out that they court danger.

Tried to Retrieve Blankets

And so it was early that Friday morning, when Bernabe and Kiko went round to Manuel Diaz's house to retrieve the blankets. He was not at home, and as they walked away from his house a lime-green Border Patrol van screeched to a halt in front of them. It was at that point that Don Bernabe Garay, father of nine, a man of respect and influence in Ahuacatlan, secretary general of the struggling Arizona Farmworkers Union, became a statistic.

The next hours were unpleasant ones. Bernabe and Kiko were taken first by the Border Patrol to the station in Phoenix, then to a holding cell in Tucson. At 9 that night they were driven to Nogales, Mexico, and let go.

A week after leaving Ahuacatlan, Bernabe was back in Mexico. On Sunday morning, he and Kiko took the bus to Sonoita and set out again in search of Jose the driver. They finally found him and struck another deal, for $30 apiece, and on Sunday the two men retraced their steps along the border, through the desert and back to Phoenix. Nine days after leaving home, $300 poorer and without having earned a penny to send to Pilar, Bernabe returned to the ranch.

At 8 o'clock Monday morning, Bernabe finally went to work. He worked furiously all day, hauling his heavy canvas bag up and down the stepladders propped against the tall lemon trees. By 5:30, he had filled his bag 82 times and picked 3,690 pounds of lemons, an impressive total for a man half his age. He was paid $41, slightly over a penny a pound but far more money than he could have earned in Mexico in a week, if he could have found a job there. Bernabe Garay was a happy man at last.

By John M. Crewdson

A major legal controversy over how the Government has treated thousands of Haitian refugees, which could affect whether they remain in this country or are sent home, is drawing to a close in a Federal courtroom here.

Lawyers for the Haitians contend that there is a pattern of harassment and discrimination. But the Government says that this is not the case and that it has merely attempted to carry out the law. At the trial, which began last year, lawyers representing the Haitians produced what they said was evidence of ''a continuing pattern of illegal and discriminatory conduct'' by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in its efforts to deport Haitians back to their Caribbean home.

The details of the service's ''expedited processing'' of Haitians in 1978 and 1979, which the lawyers say violated many of the rights conferred on aliens by immigration laws and internal immigration service regulations, were assembled in the course of the class action suit brought against the Justice Department.

Before the deportation of Haitians from the United States was halted temporarily a year ago on the order of Federal District Judge James L. King, 179 had been returned home. Judge King's ruling in the case is expected soon, and should he find that the Haitians' treatment has been neither unlawful nor unconstitutional, the Government will be free to resume deportation proceedings against the 30,000 or so Haitians who remain here.

The thousands of pages of records assembled in the case contain a number of serious allegations. Among them are charges that some Haitians were largely denied effective representation by lawyers, that some were the victims of fraud by immigration officers and that some were returned to Haiti against their will without being told of their right to apply for political asylum in the United States.

The practices that characterized the expedited processing, according to a post-trial memorandum submitted by the plaintiffs last month, were ''intentionally directed against Haitian nationals'' alone, and not at citizens of other countries who were seeking refuge or asylum.

The Justice Department has admitted some of the Haitians' charges but rejected the rest, including those involving the denial of the right to counsel. In its rebuttal to the suit, the department has relied heavily on a State Department report asserting that most of those who leave Haiti do so for financial reasons, not political ones.

Chance to Present Evidence

Durward Powell, the immigration service's Southern regional director, has said that the Haitians had been ''given every opportunity to present evidence, oral or otherwise,'' in support of their claim of political asylum.

The principal result of the alleged practices, the Haitians' lawyers allege, was to make into a ''self-fulfilling prophecy'' the belief, reflected in internal immigration service documents, that the Haitians had fled not from political repression but from the abject poverty that characterizes their country, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.

The Haitians are the first large group of refugees entering the United States in recent years who have fled a land ruled by a non-Communist but nonetheless authoritarian government. Until a new refugee law took effect in April, those leaving Communist societies were accorded preferential treatment upon arrival in the United States. Now, no distinction is made. President Carter has promised that the Haitians will be accorded fair and lawful treatment.

Immigration officials have made clear their belief that all but a handful of the Haitians are economic, not political, refugees.

'Fear of Prosecution'

The only basis for political refuge, officials point out, is a ''well-founded fear of persecution'' upon returning home. ''If we're going to let Haitians in because they're hungry,'' said Raymond Morris, the service's director here, ''then how can we stop people from India, Southeast Asia and China from coming in?''

Anyone who enters the United States illegally, as all of the Haitians have, is entitled by law to a formal deportation hearing before he or she can be returned home. Many of the illegal aliens who come to the United States, particularly those from Mexico, often waive their right to a hearing and agree to return voluntarily at Government expense. But if a hearing is requested, an alien is also entitled by law to apply for political asylum, and deportation proceedings normally can continue only if the asylum claim is disallowed.

Technically, the Haitians are asking in their lawsuit that the immigration service be required to reconsider their requests for asylum and their ultimate deportability in cases where adverse decisions have already been rendered. The suit is an unusual one, since the Haitians are the first large group of refugees to come here who are not fleeing what Mr. Powell calls ''sudden and intolerable political changes'' in their home country.

The first Haitian refugees began arriving here in leaky sailboats in the summer of 1972. But it was not until June 1978, when the Bahamas began to expel Haitians who had sought refuge there that their numbers in south Florida increased dramatically. The Bahamian Government cited the rapidly rising unemployment rate in that Caribbean nation in announcing the expulsions.

600 Arrived in June 1978

Six hundred Haitians arrived that month, and each successive month brought hundreds more. The number of arrivals reached record levels in the last six months, something Mr. Morris attributes to ''information getting back to Haiti that we were under a court order not to deport any Haitians.'' There are now an estimated 30,000 Haitians in southern Florida, nearly all of whom would be affected by Judge King's decision.

Unlike the Cuban refugees who have arrived here in far greater numbers over the years, many Haitians at first were imprisoned for months pending deportation, a practice since abandoned as impractical as their numbers grew. As the new arrivals filled jails in the Miami area, the Justice Department began to speed up its efforts to send them home. As one top immigration official wrote in a memorandum to his superiors, ''The most practical deterrent to this problem is expulsion from the United States.''

The immigration service has since stopped incarcerating Haitians pending deportation because, as one official said, ''We can't keep these people secreted away in order to deport them after the judge lifts that ban.''

Regulation Allegedly Ignored

According to documents and testimony, the step-up, undertaken at the direction of Michael Egan, then the No. 3 man the Justice Department, included the suspension of an immigration service regulation requiring that deportation proceedings be halted for any individual who had filed an application for political asylum.

Following that step, it was suggested that the service monitor ''community reaction'' before proceeding. But the reaction was not adverse - almost no one but the Haitians' lawyers took notice -and the expedited processing continued apace.

By July 1978 the immigration service, which previously had handled fewer than a half-dozen Haitian cases a day, increased its load to 55. By September the number had climbed to more than 100 a day, due in part to instructions to immigration judges - who make up an administrative arm of the Justice Department and are not an independent judiciary -from Mario T. Noto, then the Deputy Commissioner of Immigration, to ''triple'' their productivity.

''The importance attached to this program'' at the service's headquarters in Washington ''cannot be overstated,'' wrote Richard Gullage, now the deputy district director here. ''All supervisory personnel are hereby ordered to take whatever action they deem necessary to keep these cases moving through the system.'' One immigration service lawyer testified that he had never seen a comparable number of cases disposed of in so short a time, and that there was no relationship to the increasing numbers of Haitians facing deportation.

'Niceties of Due Process'

In its haste to send the Haitians home, their lawyers charged, the immigration service abandoned its concern for ''the niceties of due process.'' According to court and related records, the service frequently failed to advise Haitians of their right to a lawyer without charge. When the Haitian Refugee Center, a private agency, sent representatives to the Miami immigration office to inform arriving Haitians of the availability of free legal counsel, refugee center lawyers said, a guard was posted to keep the representatives out. One lawyer said Haitians told him they had been warned by immigration officers that ''an attorney will get them in trouble.''

Some documents allegedly were falsified. Immigration records show, for example, that Jean Surpris, who arrived here in 1978, declined the offer of a lawyer. But Mr. Surpris swore in a subsequent affidavit that ''they never asked me 'Do you wish to have a lawyer?' and I never answered 'no' like it says on the form.''

Lawyer Was Requested

Even when such an offer was made and accepted, a lawyer was sometimes not forthcoming, some refugees contend. Urile Pierre said he had wanted a lawyer but was nevertheless recorded as declining. ''I could not understand why they were continuing to ask me questions after I had told them I didn't want to answer before I had a lawyer,'' Mr. Pierre said.

Before last year's court order suspending deportations, 59 Haitians had been given permission to stay in the United States, 179 had been formally deported to Haiti and another 450 were listed as having returned home ''voluntarily.'' But according to a State Department report, more than a score of returnees interviewed by American diplomats in Haiti said that the immigration service had ''given them the option of spending the rest of their lives'' in an American jail or ''voluntarily'' returning home.

The service began scheduling a dozen or more asylum interviews and deportation hearings at the same hour, making it physically impossible for lawyers representing several clients to appear on behalf of each one. Lawyers who did appear often had only 30 minutes to prepare complicated cases, the normal preparation time for which is 20 hours. The proceedings themselves, which formerly averaged 90 minutes, were abbreviated to less than half an hour, further impeding the presentation of the facts required.

Lawyers Tell of Threats

Lawyers said they were ordered to remain silent when they attempted to intercede on behalf of their clients, and were threatened by immigration judges and agency lawyers with disciplinary proceedings if they continued to inform the Haitians of their rights.

The atmosphere at the asylum interviews, the lawyers said, was ''hostile and aggressive.'' One wall of the interview room bore a travel poster that proclaimed ''New Routes to Haiti.'' The interviewers, who often were immigration officers hastily recruited from airport duty and untrained in the evaluation of asylum claims, were described as frequently angry or intimidating. On some occasions, Haitians who angered the officers by invoking their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination were simply thrown in jail, something the immigration service later admitted it had had no authority to do.

As Steve Mander, a former agency lawyer who is now in private practice put it: ''There seems to be an attitude problem which pervades the immigration service. I myself might have been caught up in it at times.'' The Rev. Gerard Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest, puts it differently: ''The immigration doesn't like us. There is a flagrant aspect of racism as far as Haitians are concerned.''

There are also questions about whether the content of the asylum interviews was faithfully recorded. Five-minute answers to such questions as ''What do you think would happen to you if you returned to Haiti?'' were reduced to a single sentence, and the sentences often bore a remarkable similarity. One lawyer, Steven Forester, said that on more than half the written forms he had seen, the question ''Why did you come to the United States?'' was answered with the phrase, ''I came here to find work,'' as if each of the Haitians had used precisely the same words.

The interview reports were crucial to the Haitians' cases, Mr. Forester said, because they were used as evidence in later deportation hearings and also by the State Department in its review of the immigration service in each of the cases.

Several of the Haitians who gave sworn depositions testified that the agents who interviewed them simply fabricated answers to the questions they were asked.

Gracia Carida's form shows, for example, that she answered ''no,'' when asked whether she had been politically active in Haiti, and that she did not want to return because ''It's impossible to make a living in Haiti.'' Actually, ''I said that I could not go back to Haiti because the Government had killed my cousin, that the Government was looking for everyone in my family,'' she said.

One of those listed as having come to the United States ''to work'' was Jean Louis, former member of the Tonton Macoutes, the Haitian Government's unpaid secret police force, who testified that he had had ''an excellent job in Haiti'' that had paid him $87 a month, a relative fortune where the annual per capita income is only $120.

'They'll Kill Me'

He said he had told the immigration service, ''If I go back they'll kill me'' for having defected from the Macoutes. But the immigration examiner, he said, had written that he said he was never politically active and could not return home ''because I owe a lot of money.''

Although Judge King's order halted deportations, it apparently did not keep the service from attempting to send Haitians home as ''voluntary returnees.'' Last August, Fritz Charles arrived in Miami and was directed, he said, by the service to sign a standard form requesting that he be ''permitted to withdraw my application for admission and to return abroad.''

Mr. Charles said he refused, explaining, ''I was a member of the Haitian Navy and they might kill me if I go back.'' At that point, he said, the interpreter, also a Haitian, forged his signature on the paper. ''I never so much as put my hand on it,'' he said later.

Immigration officers were preparing to take Mr. Charles and his common-law wife, Louisanne Innocent, to the airport and put them on a plane to Haiti when Miss Innocent became hysterical. A lawyer witnessed the scene and telephoned Mr. Forester, who telephoned the immigration service. Other Haitians in the group were taken to the airport and sent home, but Mr. Charles and Miss Innocent remained behind.

That incident, Mr. Forester testified later, was ''discovered totally by accident.'' But he questioned whether other ''so-called voluntary returnees'' had also been coerced, since ''the vast majority of such returns remain undetected.''

By John M. Crewdson

“Thirty-eight thousand dollars for a week's work,'' John Rockhill said, leaning against the fender of his lime-green cruiser. ''You can't make that much running dope. What fascinates me about alien smuggling is the money involved.''

Mr. Rockhill, who sports the deep copper tan of the veteran United States Border Patrol agent, was talking about the ring of smugglers who, for $1,200 a head, brought about 30 Salvadoran citizens across the border into the sunbaked Arizona desert two weeks ago and left them there without water. Twelve of the Salvadorans and a man believed to be one of their smugglers perished in the infernal heat; Mr. Rockhill was among the officers who discovered their parched bodies and rescued their companions, who were nearly dead.

But thousands of Mexicans and Central and South Americans are successfully smuggled into this country each day by hundreds of rings trafficking in human contraband.

As nations to the south continue to suffer economic and political troubles, refuge in the United States is becoming one of the most valuable commodities in the world, and the citizens of such countries, foremost among them El Salvador, are increasingly willing to pay what for them are huge sums of money in return for the opportunity to live and work in this country.

More and more, officials say, illegal aliens who once risked walking across the border on their own are turning to smugglers for help with their illicit journeys.

It is common in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from here, to see smugglers, who call themselves ''coyotes,'' negotiating deals for the transport of groups of aliens, whom they refer to as ''pollos,'' or ''chickens.'' The aliens are bought and sold like shares of stock on an exchange. Preceded by spotters in radio-equipped ''scout cars,'' convoys of beer trucks, motor homes, moving vans, horse trailers and vehicles of every description set out from the border each night, most filled to overflowing with aliens who have paid the standard tariffs in advance -$300 for delivery to Denver, $500 to Chicago, $750 or more to Detroit or New York City. Prices from Central and South America are higher still.

A Growing 'Industry'

In 1975 the Immigration and Naturalization Service apprehended 76,000 smuggled aliens; last year it caught 211,000, but officials estimate that two to five times that number may have escaped detection.

As a result of such rapid growth, the organized smuggling of aliens has become what one Federal investigator called ''a major industry'' along both sides of the 2,000-mile Mexican-United States border.

Over the last five years, investigators say, the traffic in smuggled aliens has more than tripled, and it is now so lucrative that it rivals the smuggling of narcotics in profitability.

A big, well-organized ring, and there are a half-dozen of them in the El Paso area alone, can move 500 aliens a week. At $500 each, that is a quarter of a million dollars a week, $12 million a year. Some narcotics syndicates are now branching out, or switching entirely, to the smuggling of illegal aliens, where the financial rewards are more certain and the possibility of stiff jail terms far less.

Some rings specialize, supplying only prostitutes, for example, or restaurant waiters. Investigators say that at least one organized crime organization has lately entered the business, and the immense potential profits have even attracted some more improbable individuals.

Marine Wives Convicted

Last year, for example, a group of wives of marines stationed at Camp Pendleton, Calif., were convicted of transporting Mexican aliens from Tijuana to Los Angeles, having taken them through the marine base to avoid the Border Patrol's checkpoint on Interstate 5 at San Clemente.

An American customs officer and an air traffic controller from San Diego are currently in the Tijuana jail, accused of having worked together to fly illegal aliens across the border in a Government airplane. And a Roman Catholic priest in Texas was found to have been supplying false identity cards to smuggled aliens.

The priest, one official said, ''was looking at it as a humanitarian thing.'' But officials of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, whose 250 anti-smuggling agents are struggling against budgetary and investigative restrictions to slow the inward flow, uniformly reject any suggestion that the smugglers' crime is a victimless one, a humanitarian service to those who, without their assistance, might meet the fate of the Salvadorans in the forbidding badlands of the desert.

The Aliens are the Victims

''There's no such thing as a good smuggler,'' said E.J. Scott, chief of the tiny Border Patrol station at Why, Ariz., near where the Salvadorans died. Other officials agree.

The smuggled aliens, they say, are the ultimate victims, treated with a callous disregard for their well-being and safety, held for long periods in vile, windowless ''drop houses'' along the border that are often no more than shacks, and then loaded with little food or water into trucks so crowded that there is no room to lie down, or even to sit. In Houston last April, a beer truck stopped by the police for a traffic violation was found to have 55 aliens inside. The aliens said they had been without food or water for two days.

Should anything go amiss on the trip, the officials say, the smugglers' first concern is almost always for themselves. Aliens injured in highway accidents are frequently left by the roadside, as happened last October at Truth or Consequences, N.M. In another instance two years ago, two aliens locked in the trunk of a car burned to death when the car caught fire and the smugglers fled, and even the recent incident involving the Salvadorans was not the first of its kind. The bodies of eight aliens were found in the desert near Yuma, Ariz., last year, apparently left there by smugglers to die of thirst.

The smugglers nearly always surrender peacefully when they are apprehended, but on occasion they try to evade their pursuers, sometimes with tragic consequences. Last April, a pickup truck carrying 14 illegal aliens near Laredo, Tex., tried to outrun two Border Patrol agents and two local sheriff's deputies. In the chase, shots were fired at the truck and a 6-year-old girl, an illegal alien, was killed. The two deputies later said they had seen one of the border patrolmen point a shotgun at the truck and heard a report. A Federal grand jury is investigating the matter.

'An Inhumane Situation'

Such incidents are not confined to the border. Earlier this year a boat captain was convicted of manslaughter in Palm Beach, Fla., after he attempted to evade arrest on smuggling charges by throwing a Haitian woman and her five children into the sea. All drowned. ''It's just such an inhumane situation,'' said Elizabeth Rogers, an Assistant United States Attorney here.

Though most of the aliens pay for their passage in advance, officials say, they are sometimes held captive by smugglers until friends or relatives can come up with more money than was agreed upon. Even after arriving at their destinations, they are often forced to pay rent to the smugglers and even told where to shop for food or clothing.

In instances where the owner of a business or factory has paid their transportation, the aliens are held for weeks or months in a kind of economic bondage, forced to work for reduced wages until their employer has been repaid. Sometimes the bondage is real. Last November, Connie Ray Alford, a Truxno, La., chicken farmer, was convicted of peonage after it was discovered that nine Mexican aliens smuggled to his farm from Kerrville, Tex., had been kept chained by their necks until they had worked off the price of their passage.

For those aliens known to the Border Patrol as ''OTM,'' or ''other than Mexican,'' the first contact with a smuggler usually comes in the homeland they are preparing to flee, and the contacts are not difficult to make. Uncounted bogus ''travel agencies'' that put together consignments of illegal entrants exist in Mexico, Central and South America, and they are easy to find. A recent issue of La Prensa Grafica, published in San Salvador, carried an obvious classified advertisement. ''Passengers to Tijuana and Los Angeles,'' it read, ''telephone 25-0643.''

Although some smuggling rings are recognizing the advantages of the largely unguarded Canadian border as a point of illegal entry - the aliens, officials say, are first flown to Montreal - most of the illegal immigrants still pass through Mexico on their journey to the north.

The Staging Areas

The Mexican Government allows residents of Central and South America to enter as tourists, but it gives them visas that prohibit travel farther north than Mexico City. The restriction is easily circumvented, however. The Salvadorans who died in Arizona had such visas in their passports.

After the aliens reach cities along the Mexican side of the border, preparations are made to bring them across. The staging areas are big cities and little towns alike, from giant Tijuana, south of San Diego, to tiny Sonoita, south of Arizona. Almost any day, a visitor to Ciudad Juarez can see the smugglers gathering in the Plaza Monumental to put together their deals.

''They're like peddlers going around,'' said Robert L. Barber, who heads the Border Patrol's anti-smuggling unit here. ''You can see negotiations being made all over the place.'' While the ''coyotes'' deal, the ''chickens'' wait, crammed a dozen to a room in cheap, shabby hotels like the Balcones, a favorite with Salvadorans.

After a group is assembled it is led by a coyote, after dark, across the shallow Rio Grande a few miles outside of town. More often than not the crossing is successful, but even if they are captured the aliens are simply returned to Mexico, free to try again the next night. Some smuggling rings give ''guarantees'' - a second crossing for free if the first one fails. ''It gets them business,'' said Mr. Barber. Other rings try to attract clients by offering false documentation as part of their service, for example birth certificates, Social Security cards, driver's' licenses -whatever is needed to live and work in the United States.

Assistance from a smuggler is not necessary for crossing the river here. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Mexican aliens slip into El Paso each morning on their own to work and then return to their families in Juarez at night. When the aliens hire a smuggler, Mr. Barber says, ''They're really paying to get away from the border'' since travel beyond the border is ''very difficult for someone unfamiliar with our country.'' And aliens who choose to cross at less heavily patrolled but harsher parts of the border, into Arizona, New Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, are far more in need of experienced guides.

Hiding Points

Once safely across, the aliens are hidden in one of the ''wetback motels'' that dot El Paso and the San Diego area, or in private houses rented by the smugglers. The indictment here last month of 14 people charged with operating a medium-sized smuggling ring that took in an estimated $1 million a year identified an apartment on San Jose Road as the ring's ''drop house.''

Most of the 14 members of that ring are related to one another, a common characteristic of such groups and one that makes it difficult for Federal immigration agents to penetrate their operations. Agents sometimes pose as aliens waiting to be smuggled into the United States, but most of their intelligence comes from paid informants, such as hotel clerks and taxi drivers, on both sides of the border.

While the trip northward is being arranged, the agents are content to wait. ''We don't want to get aliens in a hotel,'' Mr. Barber said. ''We want to get the smuggler who's going up the road with them.''

The Immigration and Naturalization Service tries to catch smugglers with their ''loads'' in a variety of ways, not all of them successful. The Border Patrol maintains checkpoints, for example, on most major highways near the border, and suspicious vehicles are stopped and searched. But the checkpoints do not always operate, because of bad weather or a shortage of agents, and the smugglers keep a close watch for those times when they are ''down.''

Another technique involves the use of the Border Patrol's authority, which it acquired last year, to seize vehicles used to transport aliens. William Selzer, the deputy Border Patrol chief in Chula Vista, Calif., south of San Diego, said he believed the impoundments were beginning to slow the alien smuggling traffic in his area.

But if the traffic is slowing, it is still substantial. In the first two weeks of this month, 114 smugglers and 586 smuggled aliens were apprehended in the San Diego area.

By Rented Vehicle or by Train

Bert Marino, who heads the Border Patrol's smuggling unit in Washington, said he suspected that the smugglers, rather than risking their own vehicles, would now begin renting trucks, and at least one ring in the El Paso area that specializes in smuggling Salvadorans has begun buying its clients train tickets to Los Angeles.

The loss of an aging truck or two is a small price for an organization involved in such a lucrative business, even for an average-sized ring that might take in $1 million or $2 million a year. Many rings are far more profitable. Last year the authorities broke up a ring in the area that they said had grossed between $10 million and $25 million a year, and several investigators recalled that the leader of a group of Mexican women known as ''the blondes'' that operated in the San Diego area had forfeited her bail of $250,000.

''The big operations make just as much as the drug smugglers,'' said Mr. Marino, who spent 11 years with the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration before coming to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. ''There are hundreds of rings making money off of this, and there are scores of them making big, big money.''

Mr. Selzer, the deputy Border Patrol chief, estimated that a quarter of the active narcotics rings in his area were now also smuggling aliens, or ''co-mingling the loads'' as he put it.

The financial attractions of alien smuggling are many. For one thing, smuggling fees are paid in advance and even if the aliens are arrested the smugglers have their money in hand. The smugglers of narcotics must first purchase the drugs, and a profit cannot be realized until the drugs have entered the country and been sold to a distributor.

In addition, most courts have treated alien smugglers, especially first offenders, far more leniently than drug smugglers. ''We get a lot of probated sentences,'' Mr. Barber said. Mr. Marino added that sentences average only 19 months in felony alien smuggling cases, for which the maximum penalty is five years in prison. ''That leaves a lot to be desired,'' he said.

More smugglers are being arrested than ever before. Last year, some 18,500 smugglers, employed by about 300 rings, were apprehended, compared with 15,000 three years ago. About 6,000 of them were prosecuted, and about 2,000 ultimately convicted.

But the impact on the alien traffic is far from clear. Investigators say that those who are caught and convicted are largely lower- and middle-level operatives, guides, drivers, ''arrangers'' and those who run the drop houses. In many instances the leaders of the rings, who may live abroad, seem beyond grasp. Many of the rings have their headquarters in Mexico and, while the Mexican immigration authorities have provided some cooperation in tracking smugglers down, their efforts have been sporadic and directed mainly at the smuggling of non-Mexicans through their country.

''The people they catch are not the people who are making the money off these deals,'' said Terry Amdur, a Los Angeles lawyer who has defended a number of accused alien smugglers. Those who run the rings may be sophisticated criminals -''They're getting more sophisticated all the time,'' Mr. Marino said - but the coyotes who work for them fit a far different description: young men in their early 20's, most of them Mexicans who have been to the United States to work illegally and who have found that they can use their knowledge of the country and its customs to make far more money than a menial job will provide.

''They don't seem to be bad people,'' Mr. Amdur said. But Mr. Barber disagreed, recalling that he once seized a truck in Chicago in which aliens had been stashed with only a sand-filled tin can for a toilet and scant food to sustain them on their long journey from the Texas border, ''a few pounds of bologna, a loaf of bread, a few jugs of water.''

Mr. Marino agreed: ''It's a human tragedy we're dealing with, the individual who got to Chicago with his fingers frozen because he was left in a truck for 30 hours.''

By John M. Crewdson

BROWNSVILLE, Tex., Aug. 3 - Looking very small and very frightened, 10-year-old Sylvia Alvarado was led from her tiny cinderblock cell to talk with a visitor about the events that had brought her to the Cameron County juvenile detention center here.

Her odyssey began June 16, Sylvia said through an interpreter, when she left her home in El Salvador in hopes of making her way to Virginia, where she thought her mother lived. Sylvia and her grandmother crossed Guatemala and Mexico by bus, arriving at the border a week ago. There they joined other Salvadorans and hired a man who said he would smuggle them into the United States. Outside Kingsville, Tex., 60 miles north of here, the Border Patrol caught up with the group. ''I got scared,'' Sylvia said, her huge brown eyes welling with tears.

''She's very sad,'' said Juanita Alfaro, a probation officer at the center. ''She says she doesn't like it here. She's never been in a place like this before. Her family's never been separated before. She wants to go home.''

But Sylvia cannot go home, at least not now. In its efforts to stem the smuggling of illegal aliens into this country, the Justice Department each year jails thousands of aliens, including hundreds of children who, like Sylvia, have not been charged with a crime.

Sylvia's grandmother is being held as a material witness at the county jail in case the Government needs her to testify against the man charged with bringing her and Sylvia into the United States. Although Federal prosecutors frequently use juveniles as witnesses, Sylvia will not appear at the smuggler's trials. She is locked up, immigration officials said, because there is nowhere else for her to go.

Those held represent fewer than 10 percent of the 200,000 or so illegal aliens known to be smuggled into the United States each year. According to the United States Marshals Service, which has control of all Federal prisoners, in the 12 months ending next Sept. 30 about 15,000 aliens will have been jailed as witnesses, some 900 of them juveniles.

The witnesses, most of them from Mexico but an increasing number from troubled Central American countries like El Salvador, are held in a variety of facilities from Federal alien detention centers to county work farms and tiny border jails. In most instances relatives traveling together are separated while incarcerated. But even when they are not, the experience can be a frightening one. ''These people come from lands where being in jail is tantamount to a death sentence,'' said a lawyer with the Federal Public Defender's Service, which represents both the smugglers and the aliens.

Infants in Foster Homes

The witnesses are not charged; entering the United States without permission is a misdemeanor, but the Government almost always permits illegal aliens to return home without penalty. Nevertheless, except for mothers with infants, who are usually placed in foster homes, they are generally treated like ordinary offenders.

''They're subject to a lot of harassment by the general jail population,'' said Robert La Roche, the United States Marshal in Sacramento, ''and a lot of them are young and naive.''

Last month, a group of women from El Salvador, held in an Arizona jail with what one Federal official called ''hard-core'' female inmates, were subjected to a brutal homosexual attack. ''It was real traumatic for them,'' the official said.

The jailing of Mexicans without charges has incurred considerable displeasure in Mexico, where newspaper editorials have charged human rights violations. Last year, the Mexican Government protested the jailing for 79 days of 20 Mexicans found in a Dallas-area ''drop house'' where they had been hidden by smugglers.

Mexico asked that the Justice Department, based on its standard witness fee of $30 a day, pay the aliens a total of $47,400 in compensation. The department refused, but officials say they are not insensitive to the plight of the witnesses.

Unable to Meet Bond

''The department has been very, very concerned about the holding of witnesses,'' said Lupe Salinas, a special assistant to Attorney General Benjamin R. Civiletti, ''especially when, within hours, the accused smuggler is able to get out on bail.''

Most of the aliens, Mr. Salinas said, were unable to meet their material witness bond, which can range from $1,000 to $10,000, because ''they've given up their last few hundred dollars to the smugglers, and they're broke.'' He said the Justice Department had begun studying the matter ''to see if any more just solution can be reached'' after the Mexican Government expressed its concern to Mr. Civiletti last May.

The alien witnesses frequently endure stays in jail as long as two months for nothing, since many of those charged with having smuggled them eventually forgo a trial and plead guilty. According to Federal prosecutors, however, the guilty pleas are often made a day or two before the scheduled trial.

It is the incarceration of juveniles that has most distressed Hispanic rights groups. Last February, Herman Baca, who heads the San Diego-based Committee on Chicano Rights, sent a telegram to the White House calling the practice ''inhuman and barbaric'' and contending that when children were released the authorities ''simply tossed them into Mexico without making any effort to insure that the children are reunited with their parents.''

One such case involved a 14-year-old Mexico City boy arrested in Chicago last year by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. According to Herb Cooper, a Federal public defender in El Paso, the boy was returned not to his home but to Juarez, on the Mexican border, where he knew no one and was forced to survive by ''garbagecan scrounging, living on rooftops and whatever.''

Case of Haitian Recalled

The problem is not confined to Hispanic aliens. Last year an eightyear-old Haitian girl was discovered, barefoot and ill, in a Palm Beach, Fla. jail cell by lawyers representing Haitian refugees there. According to Gerard Jean-Juste, a Catholic priest who runs the Haitian Refugee Center in Miami, the girl had been locked up for two weeks, separated from her parents who had no idea where she was.

The Haitian girl is the youngest known to have been imprisoned. But Rudy Diaz, a Federal public defender in Los Angeles, said that ''there have been nine and 10-year-old kids in juvenile hall here,'' and children as young as 14 have been held at the big Immigration and Naturalization Service detention center in El Paso. In smaller border towns children as young as 13 are sometimes held in regular county jails for what one Federal official said was ''the lack of any other place to put them.''

Because many smugglers are arrested far from Federal facilities, the Marshals Service is forced to house witnesses in some 90 local jails around the country.

A few attempts are being made to reduce the long stays in jail, but they have not been wholly successful. In Arizona, Federal prosecutors are now recording the testimony of witnesses on videotape that can be replayed at trial. But the average stay for material witnesses in Arizona is still a month, and the use of videotape has been rejected by prosecutors in other states as cumbersome.

Work Release Suggested

J.A. Canales, the United States Attorney in Houston, has called the imprisonment of witnesses ''deplorable,'' and that of children ''especially saddening.'' But the Justice Department, the Marshals Service and the immigration service insist that most of the witnesses would be likely to flee if they were released on bond or placed in halfway houses.

Al Velarde, an immigration counselor for the United States Catholic Conference in El Paso, said that the church had urged the Justice Department to adopt a kind of work-release program for witnesses waiting to testify.

''The reason these guys wanted to come up here in the first place was to work,'' Mr. Velarde said, adding that if they were permitted to hold jobs for limited periods, ''you wouldn't have hostile witnesses, which you sometimes have after a guy's been incarcerated for four or five months.''

He said that jailed witnesses, unable to work, left their families back home ''many times on the brink of starvation.'' One pilot project involving juvenile witnesses is under way in San Diego, and James R. Laffoon, the United States Marshal there, said it had produced almost no runaways. Under the program, which has been in operation for a year, witnesses between the ages of 13 and 18 are placed in foster homes supervised by a Catholic Welfare Agency. The Marshals Service is now hoping to set up a similar program in Florida.

'They Get Depressed'

But juvenile witnesses in San Diego are still held at the Federal jail for as long as three days for processing, and P.D. Bowser, Mr. Laffoon's chief deputy, acknowledged that those juveniles deemed likely to run away were not placed in the foster home program.

''Some of these 16-year-old kids from the other side of the border are pretty sophisticated,'' Mr. Bowser said. ''If we were to place them in a foster home where there were no restraints, most of them would split.''

Almost everywhere else, children are held in facilities similar to the Cameron County Detention Center here, a modern institution run by sensitive professionals that is, nevertheless, still a jail.

''They don't even know where they are in the United States,'' said Joan Macrum, the center's director. ''They get depressed. They'll cry, they'll isolate themselves from the rest of the group for long hours.'' The American children locked up with them, Miss Macrum said, ''like to antagonize them, call them wetbacks, that kind of thing. We're very concerned about these kids.''

By John M. Crewdson

Uncounted thousands of Spanish-speaking aliens who flee to this country each year to escape the crushing poverty of their homelands are being virtually enslaved, bought and sold on sophisticated underground labor exchanges. They are trucked around the country in consignments by self-described labor contractors who deliver them to farmers and growers for hundreds of dollars a head.

Exactly how many find themselves bound to employers who take advantage of their illegal status, their naivete and their cultural alienation is not known.

But dozens of Immigration and Naturalization Service officials, migrant aid lawyers, prosecutors, social workers, farm union organizers and others who work closely with migrant laborers said in interviews that they believed the practice, while not common, was probably a growing one involving thousands of migrants from the tomato fields of Arkansas to the apple orchards of Virginia, from the cotton fields of North Texas to the orange groves of Florida.

Rising Tide of Immigration

''You're not talking about something isolated,'' said William Burk, an assistant Border Patrol chief in Del Rio, Tex. Humberto Moreno, a senior official of the immigration service, agreed. ''There's a significant amount of that going on,'' he said.

Five years ago the immigration service caught 76,000 aliens who had been smuggled into the United States by ''coyotes,'' as the smugglers call themselves; last year it apprehended 211,000. And as the organized smuggling of illegal aliens increases, officials say, so does the possibility that an alien will find himself forced to work for little or nothing.

As a result, the immigration service and the Justice Department, which until recently were mainly concerned with keeping illegal aliens out of this country, are now broadening their focus to include the smugglers, the labor contractors and the growers who prey on the aliens once they are here. Earlier this month the Justice Department brought its first peonage case in nearly a year, against the owner of a seafood processing plant near Houston.

Efforts by Federal Agencies

The Justice Department's civil rights division has assigned a lawyer to coordinate cases of involuntary servitude with the immigration service and the Department of Labor, which enforces Federal law governing the hiring and transporting of migrant farmworkers. Moreover, the immigration service recently began instructing its antismuggling agents in the intricacies of the Reconstruction-era slavery laws, which prohibit involuntary servitude and peonage, or the forcing of a laborer to work off his debt to the employer.

''We're telling them to 'think peonage,' '' said Mr. Moreno, who heads the antismuggling section of the immigration service. That the authorities have no certain figures on such cases does not surprise some who know the problem well. ''This country does a better job of counting its migratory birds than its migratory workers,'' said Gary Bryant, a lawyer with Migrant Legal Action in Washington.

Formal complaints about involuntary servitude are relatively few. Last year the Justice Department conducted 21 investigations into possible violations of the antislavery laws, and there have only been nine such inquiries so far this year. In both years, most involved blacks in Eastern states, not migrant Hispanic workers.

Dearth of Willing Witnesses

Daniel F. Rinzel, chief of the criminal section of the Justice Department's civil rights division, said his office received relatively few complaints of ''illegal aliens held against their will.''

The Government's principal difficulty in finding and trying such offenses, said Bruce Berger, who left two weeks ago as the Justice Department's ''involuntary servitude'' coordinator to go into private practice, ''is in finding people who are willing to come forward.''

''Most times the victims are very afraid,'' he said. ''We're aware of the problem, and I don't think we've found any satisfactory way of dealing with it.''

Vincent Beckman, a lawyer with Michigan Migrant Legal Services, agreed. ''Usually, the people are just so intimidated they don't do anything about it,'' he said.

Even when potential witnesses overcome their reluctance, Federal investigators said, there may be a host of other obstacles to a successful peonage prosection. Frequently illiterate and often intimidated by the American legal process, illegal aliens do not make the best courtroom witnesses, investigators say. Jailed by the Government as ''material witnesses,'' they may grow hostile by the time a trial begins.

Frustrations of Investigators

The clandestine nature of involuntary servitude may make it difficult to gather independent evidence, as can the determined anonymity of the coyotes and labor contractors who often enforce it. An alien may not even be aware that the sort of indentured service that might be tolerated in rural Mexico qualifies in this country as a violation of the peonage or involuntary servitude laws. Most frustrating of all, some of the larger growers may have the political connections to get an investigation squelched, some investigators say.

In this context, several Border Patrol agents mentioned a South Texas grower whom one described as ''a big operator'' and ''a pretty rough customer.'' He added, ''He was shooting at aliens, holding their money, anything he could to keep them from running off. We tried every way we could think of to get at him under the peonage statutes, but he was very well connected politically.''

Existence is hard enough for the illegal aliens who toil in the fields from sunup to sundown, picking lemons in Arizona, lettuce in California or melons in south Texas for a few dollars a day, cooking over open fires, sleeping in the fields at night and watching, always, for the green-uniformed agents of La Migra, the United States Border Patrol.

But for those who unwittingly stumble into the underworld of the slave traders, life can be infinitely worse. Shackled with inflated debts they can never repay, they may find themselves locked up by night and guarded by day, beaten or threatened with harm or even death if they try to escape, their children held hostage to insure their continued servitude. Sometimes the workers held in bondage are little more than children themselves.

Under Federal law, involuntary servitude occurs whenever a worker is compelled, by whatever means, to work at a job he does not want. If he is forced to work off a debt to his employer, the offense becomes peonage. The size of the debt does not matter, and it also makes no difference whether the peon initially agreed to take the job, or whether he was paid.

And, according to recent court decisions, the law takes no account of the means of compulsion. Physically restraining a worker, harming him or threatening to harm him may be sufficient grounds for a charge of involuntary servitude, as might the withholding of his pay or the holding of his relatives as hostages. Even if a worker failed to take advantage of opportunities to run away because he feared the consequences, servitude might be considered to exist.

Allegations From Files

Court records, immigration service files and other sources are filled with descriptions of such abuse. In Bartow, Fla., two Mexican girls, aged 12 and 15, are allegedly held prisoner by a labor contractor who hires them out as field workers to neighboring farmers. Federal agents burst into the contractor's house and take the girls away. The girls file a civil lawsuit against the contractor.

In Colorado, a frantic Mexican mother seeks help from the authorities, saying a rancher holds her 13-month-old child hostage to insure her return to a $40-a-week job tending the rancher's cows and pigs. The authorities storm the ranch and recover the child unharmed.

Another typical case is that of Jose Corona, a young Mexican who worked in 1978 and 1979 for Ted Cisnero, an orange grower in La Belle, Fla., 20 miles north of here. In an affidavit, Mr. Corona said he received no wages for the first month he worked for Mr. Cisnero, his salary going only for food and to repay the $200 ''transportation fee'' Mr. Cisnero had given the coyote.

''Mr. Cisnero and his sons constantly warned and threatened me and other members of the crew not to try to leave his employ or his camp,'' Mr. Corona said in an affidavit. ''They threatened us with death or the possibility of being sent back to Mexico. On several occasions Mr. Cisnero or his sons pointed guns at members of the crew, warning them not to try to escape.''

When the workers were taken into town to buy food once a week, he said, they were closely watched by one of the Cisneros, who ''would often force many of the younger members of the crew to buy them 'gifts' while they were shopping.'' Mr. Cisnero promised to send his workers' salaries directly to their families in Mexico, Mr. Corona said, but when one worker discovered that his family was not receiving any money and asked what had happened to it, the only reply he received was a beating.

Along with two other workers, Mr. Corona, who said he was finally ''able to escape from Mr. Cisnero's camp'' in December 1978, is suing Mr. Cisnero, alleging that his conduct violated the Federal peonage statutes. The Justice Department is also investigating the allegations.

Mr. Cisnero could not be reached for comment. His telephone has been disconnected, and lawyers for Florida Rural Legal Assistance, who are handling Mr. Corona's lawsuit, said Mr. Cisnero had not yet retained an attorney.

The Justice Department's first successful peonage prosecution involving illegal Mexican aliens was recorded only last November. Connie Ray Alford, a 41-year-old Truxno, La., chicken farmer, pleaded guilty to chaining two of his workers, Isaul Mata and his brother Fidel, in a chicken coop at his Welcome Home Ranch to keep them from running away. According to court records, the Mata brothers, like their nine co-workers, had incurred debts of $250 each for their transportation from Mexico to Louisiana that had not been worked off. Mr. Alford was convicted and given five years' probation and incarcerated for three months.

The Mata brothers and their co-workers are suing Mr. Alford for $3 million, charging that they were held captive for four months, menaced with guns and forced to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for substandard wages.

Peonage Moves With Migrants

Peonage, though it exists on farms and ranches of the Southwest, is relatively uncommon there because of the proximity to the Mexican border. California, Arizona and Texas are flooded with illegal alien workers, and ''there just isn't that much excess demand for labor here,'' said Lupe Sanchez of the Arizona Farmworkers Union.

Rather, it is in the citrus and winter vegetable belts of Florida and the potato fields of Idaho and on the tobacco farms of Virginia and North Carolina that farmworkers are at a premium, so much so that the coyotes who smuggle them north or east can easily command fees of $500 a worker.

A principal route of the underground alien-smuggling railway, investigators say, is between Arizona and Florida. They say the system operates this way:

Workers earning perhaps $15 a day in the lemon groves around Phoenix are easily lured eastward by a coyote with the promise of wages of $500 or more a week picking oranges or tomatoes. The smuggler, through a series of late-night calls between public telephones, has already received a Florida farmer's order for a specified number of workers. When the workers are delivered, the farmer pays the coyote between $300 and $500 a head.

But when the worker arrives he is told by the farmer that he is not free to leave until he has repaid that sum from his wages, and as he works the debt grows larger with charges for room, board, clothing, cigarettes and alcohol, all sold by the grower at what Rob Williams, who heads the Florida Rural Legal Services office here, calls ''really inflated prices.''

Earnings Go to Pay Debts

The worker is given perhaps $5 a week for pocket money, with the rest of his ''earnings'' credited against what he owes. The arrangement is legal.

It is only when the worker tries to leave that he may run into trouble and find himself threatened with physical harm or exposure to immigration agents by the farmer because of the unpaid debt. ''They make sure that anybody who's planning to run away doesn't,'' Mr. Williams said. ''That's the way the system works. It really is peonage.'' And that is when the Federal laws can be brought into play, though they seldom are.

Of the 25,000 or so agricultural workers who come to Florida at the peak of the winter harvest season, Mr. Williams estimates, perhaps 2,000 are ''trapped in camps where they can't leave.''

''A lot of people try,'' he said, ''especially when they find the working conditions not to their liking, and that brings in the nastier elements of violence.''

When the harvest ends, the worker, if he is lucky, is set free, often with only a few dollars to show for weeks of labor. If he is not so lucky he is sold by the farmer to another farmer for several hundred dollars, and the process begins again.

Federal officials say one of the largest smuggling operations is run by two Florida men who operate a tomato farm. They are under investigation by the immigration service and the Justice Department, and a Federal grand jury is hearing evidence in the case.

Until recently, the vast majority of farmworkers in the South and Southeast were black. But the makeup of the farm labor force is changing rapidly all along the Eastern Seaboard.

Hispanic Increase in Carolina

In North Carolina, according to William Geimer, the former director of a Farmworkers Legal Services office there, the percentage of Hispanic workers has increased in the last two years to the point where they now number one worker in five.

In south-central Florida the change is evident everywhere, as on a recent morning here in Immokalee, where clusters of young Mexican men sat talking and drinking beer along the sidewalks of the town's tiny main street. Surrounded by Mexican restaurants and bakeries, by public notices in Spanish and by local markets stocked with tortillas, chorizo and canned beans, they might as easily have been passing the time in a dusty little village along the Mexican border 1,500 miles away.

As more Mexicans and other Hispanic workers find their way east, cases of suspected peonage are coming to light. After the Alford prosecution, Federal agents in Louisiana were flooded with unsolicited tips about other alien workers held in similar situations. A. Martin Stroud 3d, the assistant United States Attorney who prosecuted the case, said then that investigators were ''tracking down other leads'' involving farmers ''all over northern Louisiana.'' But in a recent interview in his Shreveport office, Mr. Stroud said the investigation had been curtailed, primarily because of a shortage of immigration service funds.

The Alford case ''revolted'' him, Mr. Stroud said, but he also understood the economics that created such situations. ''Where else do you get farm labor?'' he asked, adding, ''You take 30 workers at $250 a head, that's an expensive proposition. The farmer's got to hold them to get his money back. What's he going to do if they start to run off - sue them?''

Law Cites Threat of Force

And the workers, he said, were generally ''easy prey'' because ''they don't understand our society, they don't understand our customs.''

Few farmers resort to chains and shackles to prevent their workers from running away, as Mr. Alford pleaded guilty to doing. But violations of the peonage and involuntary servitude statutes require only the threat of force. Immigration officers told of instances in which farmers had armed guards patrolling their fields to keep workers from leaving.

In the cattle and cotton country of the Texas Panhandle, according to Trini Gamez of the Texas Rural Legal Assistance agency, workers are sometimes simply locked up at night. ''They're not allowed to come to town, and the boss will bring them food and so on,'' she said, telling of a sugar beet farmer who held his workers in a large barn.

''The men had their cots in there,'' she said. ''At night the door was locked. They couldn't leave the place at all.'' But she said that Legal Aid lawyers had been unable to investigate because of regulations prohibiting them from soliciting cases, and because the workers involved were not free to come forward and complain to the authorities.

The threat to turn an alien worker into the immigration service if he attempts to leave is most common, officials said. Federal courts have long held that such a threat does not constitute a sufficient ground for a charge of forced labor, although recent decisions may have opened the way for a test case.

Some employers resort to withholding a worker's pay until the harvest is complete or threatening to have him charged with some real or imagined crime in the event he runs away. Federal investigators are looking into a recent incident in Tucson in which Arthur M. Burris Jr., a 28-year-old truck driver and part-time rancher, was arrested and charged by the state with false imprisonment.

Allegation of Chaining

Mr. Burris was charged with chaining a 20-year-old alien worker to a tree overnight without food or water. Pima County Sheriff's deputies said Mr. Burris told them he had suspected the worker, Manuel Hernandez, of stealing some tools, a theft that a friend of Mr. Burris later confessed. But Mr. Hernandez told the authorities that, although Mr. Burris had promised to pay him $7 a day when he was hired Aug. 21, he had not received any money.

Not all of the Hispanic newcomers who find themselves in forced labor situations are necessarily illegal aliens. Two farm labor contractors are being sued by more than two dozen Puerto Rican workers, some as young as 16, who are alleging that they were forced to work up to 90 hours a week on farms in Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, in some cases for as little as one cent a week in net pay. They were threatened with harm, they say, and even death, if they tried to leave.

Often, officials say, the aliens are enslaved long before they reach the farms and ranches. Because they are a precious commodity to the smugglers, they are forcibly held in decrepit ''drophouses'' until someone is found who will pay their ransom. ''Generally, it's relatives or a farmer who come up with the money,'' said Leon D. Ring, the chief Border Patrol agent in Livermore, Calif., near San Francisco.

Last March, 28 Mexicans were found by immigration service officers in a ramshackle Houston house, its windows boarded up, where they had been held under armed guard by smugglers for two weeks. Officers say they have found as many as 50 aliens held captive in tiny one-@ or two-room shacks for long periods with no mattresses or sanitary facilities and very little food. The immigration service recently acquired a videotape, made in an undercover surveillance, showing aliens being roughly unloaded from a truck and, with kicks and punches from their coyotes, herded into a drophouse in east Los Angeles.

Immigration service files are filled with such descriptions of cruelty as these: In Los Angeles, a tearful Honduran woman tells the police that her daughters, 15 and 16, are being held by a smuggler demanding $700 for having guided the family across the border. The smuggler is threatening to strip the girls of their clothing and abandon them in the desert if he is not paid, she says. The police and Federal officers rescue the girls and arrest a suspect.

Smuggling Charge Called Easier

In a Mexican border town, a Peruvian woman arranges with a smuggler to bring her and her 3-year-old grandson to the United States for $500. At the border the child disappears. When he is recovered seven weeks later by the immigration service, the boy says he has been ''beaten by a man very often'' and ''forced to beg money in the streets.''

Another reason the relatively small number of prosecutions for peonage and involuntary servitude does not provide an adequate picture of the scope of such offenses, officials say, is that it is often easier to prosecute on the more easily proved offense, such as smuggling or harboring illegal aliens.

Durward (Woody) Woosley pleaded guilty to alien smuggling in San Antonio in 1978. According to Federal investigators and investigative files that are part of the court record, from January to August that year Mr. Woosley bought and sold more than 5,000 alien workers, paying recruiters $30 a head to bring them north from the Mexican border, then shipping them out to growers in the east for up to $500 apiece.

''Farmers in Arkansas were buying an alien from Woosley for $400 and withholding wages until the $400 was paid off,'' said Hugh Williams, who recently retired as the Border Patrol chief in Del Rio, Tex. ''Then they would sell the alien to somebody else for $400. The alien never saw any cash. In effect, each farmer was getting free labor. There were cases where we found Mexicans who were at their third or fourth farm and hadn't made a penny the whole time they were in the U.S. - peonage, that's really what it was.''