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.”

For years, North-to-South defections amounted to just a trickle. Most of those coming out were men in their 30s and 40s, who held positions that made fleeing relatively easy. Generally, they escaped without help.

Just 41 defectors sought asylum in South Korea in 1995, but nearly every year since then the number has risen. As the number has increased, the typical sex and age of defectors have also changed. There are more women and more families, according to Chun Sung-ho, an official at South Korea’s Ministry of Unification.

“It is possible to get people out, but you cannot say it is easy,” said Lee Jeong-yeon, a former North Korean military officer who defected in 1999.

Lee said he worked for three years along the Chinese-North Korean border, where he supervised agents who pretended to be brokers and guides.

Human Rights Watch reported this year that the North Korean Government, reacting to the increasing number of defections, has stiffened penalties for citizens it catches trying to flee. Under North Korean law, attempting to leave the country illegally is still classified as treason.

Until 2004, the Government imposed relatively light punishment on non-elite citizens attempting to get out. But since then, North Korea has imposed sentences of up to five years in prison, dire punishment indeed.

In recent months, North Korea has beefed up electronic surveillance along the border, strung more barbed wire and erected barriers. Last year, China also increased border security.

Once in China, defectors still face danger, particularly on the low-budget route. Those trying to reach haven in South Korean diplomatic facilities in China are on their own for the last few yards, scrambling to run past Chinese policemen and climb walls. Not all of them make it.