This is what can happen in the post-industrial world of the 21st Century if you are impoverished, if you are dispossessed, if you are desperate to stay alive.

This week in northeastern Mexico, not all that far from the United States and the dream of a better life,  police were led to a grisly scene at a remote ranch.  The bodies of 72 people were found in a room, dead.  Some were in sitting positions, others stacked like wood.  58 men and 14 women.

No one knows for sure, as yet, but it appears from the account of the lone survivor that the victims were migrants on the move north from Central and South America.  They were murdered, the survivor claims, by a criminal gang that was trying to extort payments from the migrants to smuggle them over the Mexico-U.S. border.  When the people refused to pay — or couldn’t — they were massacred.

The survivor’s testimony has not been confirmed, and may never be.  But according to myriad accounts (based most likely on information provided by anonymous government or law enforcement officials) the gang responsible for the murders is made up of thugs who are moving into the human smuggling business as a way to augment profits from illegal drug trafficking.

Here’s an explanation, offered not-for-attribution, by a U.S. official and quoted in the Times:

United States law enforcement officials have warned that drug trafficking groups have increasingly moved into the lucrative business of human smuggling, extorting fees from migrants for safe passage across the border and sometimes forcing them to carry bundles of drugs. Smugglers are also known to rob, kidnap and sometimes kill migrants on both sides of the border.

Indeed, the murders uncovered yesterday are just the latest in a series of similar incidents that have caused many, both inside and outside Mexico, to wonder whether that nation may be headed for  “failed state” status, a euphemism reserved for those countries in which the rule of law and protections of basic human rights are not only ignored, but flaunted

The broader story, the story we should be concerned about, is understanding how 72 people ended up dead on the floor of a building in the Mexican outback.  How did they get there?  Who brought them?  How much were they being charged to reach the “Promised Land” of America?

Writ large across the globe, the massacre in Mexico serves as a horrific reminder that the trafficking of human beings (call it smuggling if you want) is all about the exploitation of extremely vulnerable people.  Women forced into prostituting their bodies, children kidnapped off the streets of Mumbai or Port-au-Prince, or Guatemalan fathers seeking a job — any job — to support their family back home . . . these are the faceless, unnamed individuals who are largely invisible to the rest of us.

When you read about this incident, and others that are sure to arise, as sure as the sun will rise over the fields of northeastern Mexico, ask yourself:  who are these lost souls and, perhaps, what can I do to help end this form of modern-day slavery?