Brokers here are busy selling what they call “planned escapes” from North Korea. Given enough money, the brokers say, they can now get just about anyone out of the dictatorial Stalinist state that human rights activists call the world’s largest prison.

A low-budget escape through China via Thailand to Seoul can cost less than $2,000, according to four brokers here.

North Korea’s underground railroad to the South is busier than ever because the number of border guards and low-level security officials in the North, who are eager to take bribes, has increased exponentially.

With the disintegration of North Korea’s communist economy and the near-collapse of its state-run food distribution system, the country’s non-elite population is in dire need of cash for food and other essentials, experts agree. “More than ever, money talks,” said Chun Ki-won, a Christian pastor and aid worker in Seoul, who has helped 650 people elude Chinese authorities and settle in Seoul.

Religious groups once dominated the defection trade in North Korea, but in recent years defectors themselves, many of them former military and security officers, have begun to take over.

These brokers, based in Seoul, use personal and institutional contacts to hire North Korean guides and bribe officials. The guides make clandestine contact with defectors, then escort them to the Chinese border.

“I didn’t know it could happen so fast,” said a 37-year-old North Korean defector, who paid $12,000 to a broker in Seoul in 2002 to get her 11-year-old son out. “It only took five days for my son to be plucked out and taken across into China,” she said, adding that two weeks later he was in South Korea. “I was dumbfounded when I got a call from officials at Seoul airport.”

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