The Beast (13 page)

The threats and consequences of human trafficking in Mexico are grossly underappreciated. In the entire country there are only three Special Offices for Crimes against Women and the Trafficking of Persons (FEVIMTRA is the acronym in Spanish). And yet according to a 2009 United Nations report on drugs and crime, Mexican authorities’ negligence and lack of acknowledgment of human
trafficking are coupled with both increasing and more widespread incidents. The National Institute of Statistics and Geography affirms that there are an estimated 20,000 boys and girls enslaved or being exploited by sex traffickers throughout Mexico. Though Mexico signed international agreements on the matter in 2003, it wasn’t until September of 2007 that the trafficking of persons was finally considered an official crime and the authorities were asked to combat it. The law, however, didn’t create or equip an agency to properly define trafficking, or explain to authorities how it should be fought. And there are only three offices, in a country with thirty-one states, to address the issue. One of them is in Tapachula.

David Tamayo is the official anti-trafficking prosecutor in Tapachula. Though he responds to my questions, he also does a lot of complaining and dodging, not quite giving me a straight answer.

“How frequently do you receive Central American trafficking cases?” I ask.

“Very few come to us. These types of crimes are almost never reported. Migration and other agencies don’t communicate with us. Or they deport the victims before they can file anything. It’s troubling. All of it goes on under the table. You don’t see it. We’ve only had four official complaints.”

“And how many convictions?”

“The four cases are all still pending.”

“Can I talk with a prosecutor who’s handling a case?”

“No, they’re all confidential.”

“And do you pursue the crimes even when the victims don’t?”

“It’s too politicized. Our job is simply to inform the public of the law and their rights. The police are supposed to actually enforce the law. Sometimes they talk to us, sometimes they don’t. Communication is a huge problem. The cartels have infiltrated the police forces as well.”

“The criminal networks are pretty well organized, then?”

“Organization is one of the cartels’ strongest characteristics.
They’re involved in everything: kidnapping, drug trafficking, human trafficking. We don’t even know which cartel is responsible for what. It’s impossible to identify them.”

This last comment, however, I recognize as a flat lie. A few days before speaking with Tamayo, I had visited Ciudad Hidalgo, the small city on the shores of the Suchiate River that divides Guatemala and Mexico, to talk to someone from the mayor’s office. I told him that I was working on a story about female prostitutes. The official took me to a bar called Las Nenitas (The Babes), ensconced between two dirt alleyways. At about two in the afternoon, there were only two women behind the bar. Tesa, a beautiful Honduran woman, tall and dark, took our orders. She was wearing platform boots, tight pants, and a low-cut shirt. Before arriving, the official had told me that all the women who worked in Las Nenitas were prostitutes. I told Tesa, without mentioning the word trafficking, that I was interested in talking with her. She said she’d be glad to talk, but on another day, and gave me a number to call. She never answered my calls.

When we left the bar that day, the official told me that the owner of Las Nenitas was a well-known Zeta. I asked him how people knew. He told me that it was a small city, and the owner usually left the bar carrying an AR-15 rifle and followed by three armed bodyguards. He explained that in Ciudad Hidalgo the Zetas control all trafficking, sending men to recruit women in Central America and sometimes even kidnapping migrant women riding the buses. They sell the women to truck drivers for a night and then throw them away like unwanted scraps.

“Please,” the official said to me as we parted, “don’t use my name.”

So, regarding Prosecutor Tamayo’s statement about the impossibility of identifying cartels, it must be said that there is a big difference between wanting to know and being able to know. Between trying and being too scared to try.

~

It’s four in the afternoon. Keny gets up from the table and puts on an apron, getting ready to waitress. She’ll work a double today. Later she’ll remove her apron, sandals, and pants, and put on black platforms and a yellow dress with buttons down the side that she’ll rip off after climbing onto stage.

Connie, another
fichera
, crosses paths with Keny and says, “What’s up, old lady?”

Connie doesn’t waitress. She only works the nights, dancing and flirting for chips. She came in because the owner asked her to, to talk to me about her past.

I WON
’
T STAY

Her look says it all. Connie doesn’t trust me.

“What do you want to know?” she asks again. “And where exactly is this going to get published?” She makes sure to keep her guard up. I’ve been warned she’s a fighter.

“I came here,” she says, “with all five of my senses. No one brought me against my will.”

She’s eighteen years old. When she arrived here aged fifteen, she already had everything figured out. Or so she says. She’s quieter than Keny and Erika, but the details she offers are enough to give me a better sense of that tremendous ghost of a problem, the brothels that proliferate in these border towns.

She says that an acquaintance, a fellow Guatemalan who worked as a waiter, promised her a way out. He told her that the first thing she had to do was run away from her barrio. Something she already wanted to do. Her brother had been killed only a month earlier. Three shots. He worked collecting fares on a public bus in Guatemala City. He was sixteen years old and a gang wanted to recruit him. The Mara Salvatruchas—the most dangerous gang in the world, according to the FBI—offered him the job of killing bus drivers that had wronged them. They promised safety in exchange for his participation and death in exchange for his
refusal. If he refused he’d receive three bullets: chest, abdomen, head. He refused.

“That same month,” Connie remembers, “the Mara killed fifteen kids in my barrio, all of them between fourteen and sixteen years old. No one could live in peace.”

While boys and girls were dying or turning up mutilated throughout the barrio, the rest of Connie’s life went on as usual: her father drank every night and harassed her as he had since she’d turned eight, and her mother, as Connie put it, kept busy “getting pregnant again and again.” Connie is the eldest of eight brothers and sisters.

Salvadoran and Honduran consuls explained to me that many Central American women who decide to migrate are running away from this type of precarious situation, in which they live in perpetual fear of a gang or find living at home to be as bad or worse than living on the street. They come from circumstances that encourage the normalization of prostitution, rape, and human trafficking. It’s a reality in which kids die by the dozen, fathers are aggressors, and neighborhoods are war zones.

That’s why Connie, who’s worked in brothels since she was a girl, answers my question by dividing her surroundings into what she finds normal and what she doesn’t.

I ask, what is her worst memory since she arrived?

“At one point,” she says, “I went to go work in Huixtla. I was working at some dive, but migration detained me in Huehuetán. They put me in prison. I was so nervous I got sick. I got depressed. I’d never been in a place like that, with so many people crammed together. I was the only woman in the cell. There were so many men. And I got harassed all the time. The guy in charge of the migration unit told me that if I slept with him, he’d let me go.”

According to a report put out by the Mexican National Commission of Human Rights, it’s not uncommon that a migration official abuses a woman in custody. Who is going to report a human trafficking violation to an agent who has offered you freedom in exchange for sex? And the abuse doesn’t end there. As
a trafficking prosecutor explained to me, the National Institute of Migration often plays a leading role in preventing human trafficking victim testimonies from getting a court hearing.

The Guatemalan consul refused to talk about the topic. But I got Nelson Cuéllar, of the Salvadoran consulate, to sit with me and explain why certain things don’t work here. He says that in his three years as an official in Tapachula, he’s only seen two cases of human trafficking tried in court. In both cases the court ruled in favor of the defendant. For the most part, it seems that prosecuting human trafficking is more a matter of luck than of official and concerted cooperation.

“We’re not told when there’s going to be a migration raid at a brothel,
⁴
” Cuéllar told me. “They just send them back to their countries without letting anyone know. Migration should let us know before deportations take place, so that we can interview them and see if they’ve suffered any abuses. But they send them back as though they’ve just caught any regular migrant walking down the street. And what’s more, it’s not just that they don’t tell us, but they go to great lengths to cover up the whole raid.”

On one of those hot, southern nights we visited a popular “tolerance center” in Tapachula, called Las Huacas. Just before, I’d naively spoken with the municipal secretary of public security, Álvaro Monzón Ramírez, asking him if we could use the police station in front of the row of brothels as a sort of home base throughout the night. I talked to no one else. When I arrived at Las Huacas, only one bar in the street was open. The others had closed for the night, quite unusual for a Thursday. When I asked someone in the middle of locking up a bar what was going on, he told me, “Some municipal cops came by and warned us that there’d be a bust today with officers, migration agents, and reporters.”

The next night I came back to Las Huacas without telling anyone. This time, at about one in the morning, all the Central
American prostitutes stampeded to a black door at the back where they poured out of the bar and into an alleyway. One of them yelled that a migration agent had called the owner of the bar next door to let her know that a raid was coming.

Connie orders a second beer. She looks restless. Though it’s still early evening, new clients are starting to fill up the bar. Through her dancing and prostitution, she’s been able to bring all her family to Mexico. All of them: her two toddlers, her mother, her father, her seven brothers, and even a niece.

Though they’ve just barely crossed the Suchiate, some of the Central American women who bring life to these brothels are their family’s sole breadwinners. That’s why, Connie explains, “so many Guatemalan boys and girls accept the offer to come here and earn good money.”

That’s how they come, as boys and girls. Just recently, on February 13, federal police and members of FEVIMTRA busted into a house in Tapachula. Inside they found eleven Guatemalan children locked up, all of them in one reeking room where they slept on a tarp on the floor. The authorities accused the owner of the house, a forty-one-year-old Mexican, of forcing them, like an army of slaves, to work in the streets for as long as fourteen hours a day, selling balloons, cigarettes, and candies. They also accused him of refusing them water and food and of hitting them if they didn’t sell enough.

It’s time for me to leave Connie. The busiest hours are around the corner, and soon she’ll have to jump into the scene and start flirting with her clients. She’s still young, and on a good night she makes up to 6,000 pesos. On the other hand, Keny, who’s twenty-four and blends into the mass of other prostitutes, makes a third of that on a good night.

Before leaving, Connie turns to look at me and answers a question I never asked, but that she must have been wanting or expecting to hear.

“I don’t really get busy here anymore. I did it at first, but not anymore, I don’t like it. And I don’t plan to stay here. In a few weeks, I’m going to leave. My boyfriend says he’s going to get me out of here once he has enough to provide for me and my family. I don’t want my kids to see me like this.”

Unfortunately, none of that will happen. I know how Connie works the bar. I know that just a few nights ago she locked herself into a room with a man and that she’ll do it again tonight. And unfortunately, when she said what she said, Connie didn’t know that in only a few days her boyfriend would leave town.

The night in Calipso takes off. There are two scenes here. The first, inside the bar, where men yell, dance with
ficheras
, and sit with them perched on their laps. The second, just outside where a neon light splashes over the window view of the dance floor, ten men have lined up, waiting to join the spectacle. As the night wears on, the dance floor empties and the edges of the bar swell with clients, those who want more from the night, waiting to lock themselves in rooms with a
fichera
.

In Calipso, Erika, Keny, and Connie have taken their positions and are making money however they have to, which is what they’ve been doing since they first crossed the border, when, their lives already falling to pieces, they were barely teenagers.

After midnight, Keny, the Salvadoran, gyrates naked on a bar top and, in spite of the twenty-three beers she’s downed, tries to control her movements. For Erika, the Honduran, the thirty beers she’s drunk have loosened her up and she bends over a table, pushing her bare butt into the face of a mustachioed man knocking off his hat. He’s bought her five beers and it’s time to pay him back. Connie, the Guatemalan, dances in a miniskirt and six-inch heels with a pot-bellied man she’ll later have sex with.

Tomorrow, with other names, with other men, the scene will start over in Calipso and dozens of other clubs along the border. The Central American women will shake and dance again as they do every night, as they have done since they were only girls.

1
The Law to Prevent and Punish People Trafficking was passed under Felipe Calderón’s administration, and promises perpetrators prison sentences of up to twenty-seven years and fines of up to 3,375 days’ worth of the minimum wage. Norma Gutierrez, “Mexico: Government Promulgates Law Against Human Trafficking,”
Global Legal Monitor
Library of Congress, December 2, 2007. Accessed online December 11, 2011,
loc.gov
.