The Beast (14 page)

2
Rodolfo Casillas,
Trafficking Migrant Women and Minors at the Mexican Southern Border: An Exploration into an Unknown Reality
(Mexico City: FLACSO, 2005).

3
A phonic rendering into Spanish from
table
, for table dancers.

4
The term he used was
Centro de Tolerancia
, the common euphemism for brothels in Central America: literally, Tolerance Center.

5
Kidnappings Don’t Matter: Veracruz, Tabasco, Oaxaca

It’s this tremendous problem that brings us back to the beginning. The reports we did in these three states changed the coming year for us. We realized that no longer were assaults and rapes concealed, confined to isolated corners of the country. We realized that the problem was going beyond migrants mutilated by the train. We realized that machetes had given way to assault rifles, that remote mountaintops had given way to safe houses, that your everyday delinquent had joined Los Zetas, that robbery had turned into assaults and abductions. The scale had changed, but the authorities were the same, and the migrants kept coming without anyone but robbers and kidnappers even glancing in their direction
.

It was raining in Tenosique, the small border city in Tabasco, when El Puma and his four gunmen walked up and down the rails demanding money from all the stowaway migrants. It was the last Friday of October. The torrential rain had stalled the trains and some 300 undocumented migrants piled into the muddy shoulders of the tracks.

El Puma is a thirty-five-year-old Honduran with a nine-millimeter in his belt and a
cuerno de chivo
(goat horn), the Mexican nickname for an AK-47, hanging off his shoulder. His crew, all Honduran and each with a machete and a
cuerno de chivo
, surrounded him. El Puma’s turf stretches over the entirety of jungle-shrouded Tenosique, nestled between Petén, in Guatemala,
and the Chiapan jungle, the Lacandona. People who know him say, baldly, “He works for Los Zetas.”

You have to pay him to get onto the train. Those who don’t pay don’t go. Those who resist get to meet him, his crew, his machetes, and his
cuerno de chivo
.

Most of the migrants paid. Those who didn’t have the money went around to beg for it. Then El Puma radioed the driver of the next train to hit the brakes in Tenosique so he could catch up with him and give him his cut. The migrants piled on top of the wagons or on their lower balconies. Four
polleros
¹
rode atop the middle train car, tightly surrounded by a score of clients. Most of the migrants were Honduran, along with a few Guatemalans and Salvadorans. You could count the Nicaraguans on one hand. Everyone besides the group riding the middle car traveled on their own, without a
pollero
.

It kept raining. The train crept forward, leaving Tenosique behind and digging into the thick of the jungle that was only seldom interrupted by cattle ranches. There was still no sign of a town or highway.

After arriving to Pénjamo, one of the many ranches in this part of the country, the trip got a lot harder. José, a twenty-nine-year-old Salvadoran, was the first to notice the eight men taking advantage of how slowly the train was creeping. They clambered on. “No worries,” they said to José’s group, “we’re headed to El Norte.” But José’s forebodings were confirmed when he saw that after they’d rested a few minutes, four of them took out nine-millimeter pistols, four more unwrapped machetes, and they all put on ski masks.

“See ya,” they said and left the Salvadorans in peace, jumping onto the next car. When the masked men got to the car that Arturo, a forty-two-year-old Nicaraguan cook, was riding, their group had already kidnapped two women. One of them stood out to Arturo
because of her white skin. He said he can still remember her face. He thought she was cute. The other woman he couldn’t see well.

The first to be murdered was a Honduran man who traveled with Arturo. He sat perched on one of the train’s hanging balconies. From the roof one of the masked men reached down and pressed a gun to his head. He handed over one hundred pesos, but the gunman didn’t believe that that was all he had, and he hopped down to Arturo’s balcony to inspect. More money was found in his sock. The failed trick cost the man his life. “You’re done, you son of a bitch,” the assailant said, and shot him through the neck.

The next car was the
polleros’
. There was a prolonged silence, followed by gunshots. Some fifteen minutes of sporadic gunshots. The
polleros
were fighting back. They had forked out the money, but refused to hand over a woman. One masked man fell off the slowing train. And even though he looked dead when he rolled off the uneven rails, his pals quickly jumped off to help. No one knows what happened to the woman Arturo thought so pretty. In the end the
polleros
won the battle, forcing the thugs off the train.

Revenge came, however, in the city of Palenque, about thirty miles north of Pénjamo. Five of the assailants came back for the
polleros’
migrant woman. They killed another Honduran, again in Arturo’s car, hacking through his stomach with a machete and throwing him off the train. But they had to shield themselves from the
polleros’
fire. This battle as well the
polleros
won.

The assailants, though, hadn’t given up yet. By nightfall they’d caught up. They moved quickly, speeding ahead of the train that, a half hour after the second shooting, stopped in an area known as La Aceitera. The dark of night was interrupted by the glow of town lights. The train picked up its new cargo. The sound of steel against steel piercing into the windy night. All the migrants stood, looking every which way. Something was about to happen, we could feel it. Then gunshots. The
polleros
were forced to give up their car and finally left the woman in the hands of the masked men. They dragged her down and into the nearby forest. But their new loot left the assailants falsely self-assured, and they turned
their backs on the train. The
polleros
wanted revenge. They hopped off the train, shot another assailant dead, got the woman back and got onto the train before it took off. Then, minutes later, once the crime scene was out of sight, the
polleros
and their twenty
pollos
abandoned the train to look for another way north. It was obvious those assailants would come back for more.

And they did. In Chontalpan, about twenty miles north of La Aceitera, three white vans surrounded the rails: one in front of the train, another keeping up beside us, the third behind. Without any
polleros
to put up a fight, the rest of the migrants ditched the train.

“It was Los Zetas,” Arturo says.

“It was Los Zetas,” José says.

It was Los Zetas.

The train emptied. Hundreds of people ran into the pastures to hide, pursued by some fifteen armed men. During the stampede at least one migrant went down, shot dead. Many were hurt. Three women were held at gunpoint in one of the vans.

Mission accomplished, the vans left. The train started chugging. The remaining migrants climbed back on, resuming their journey toward Coatzacoalcos and Tierra Blanca, both cities in the state of Veracruz, Zetas home territory. A place of mass kidnappings. The worst was still to come.

LOS ZETAS
’
OTHER BUSINESS

The history of the beleaguered train that left from Tenosique could be a manual for anyone who wants to understand the current plight of migrants in Mexico. The manual tells the story of why this region has become the worst leg of an already extremely dangerous journey.

The defenders of migrants who live in these parts pray that somebody does something to improve the situation. They gesticulate, ask us to turn off our recorders and put away the cameras, and then they describe what everybody here knows: that every day Los Zeta and their allies kidnap tens of undocumented Central
Americans, in the broad light of day, and that the migrants are kept in safe houses which everybody, including the authorities, knows about.

The business logic of the kidnappers is sound: it’s more profitable to kidnap forty people, each of whom will pay between $300 and $1,500 in ransom money, than it is to extort a local business owner who might alert the press or the police. The national authorities, including a unit of the National Commission of Human Rights (NCHR) that is investigating migration, admit the gravity of the problem.

These are the kidnappings that don’t matter. These are the victims who don’t report the crimes they suffer. The Mexican government registered 650 kidnappings in the year 2008, for example. But this number reflected only reported cases. Time spent on the actual migrant routes proves that such numbers are a gross understatement. It would not be an exaggeration to say that in any stop along the migrant trail, in just a single month, there are as many kidnappings as the official national figure for the year. In the first six months of 2009, the NCHR visited Veracruz to record testimonies of kidnapped migrants and logged as many as 10,000 cases, claiming that if they had had more personnel the figure would be twice or three times as high.

There is, simply put, nobody to assure the safety of migrants in Mexico. Sometimes a week or more will pass before a migrant on the trail will have the chance or the money to call a family member. Migrants try to travel the paths with the fewest authorities and, for fear of deportation, almost never report a crime. A migrant passing through Mexico is like a wounded cat slinking through a dog kennel: he wants to get out as quickly and quietly as he can.

After the attack on the train, where there were more than a hundred armed assaults, at least three murders, three injuries, and three kidnappings, there was not a single mention of the incident in the press. Neither the police nor the army showed up, and nobody filed a single report.

~

Tenosique is the launching point. Then migrants run the gauntlet of Coatzacoalcos, Medias Aguas, Tierra Blanca, Orizaba, and Lechería. Then the last tolls, the border cities themselves, Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo. These are the stops along the kidnapping route. All of them, except Lechería, which is outside of Mexico City, are on the Atlantic coast, and all of them, according to the crime map of the Antinarcotics Division of Mexico, are dominated by Los Zetas.

From the capital city to the migrant hostels in the south, there is no doubt that people know what’s going on. Mauricio Farah of the NCHR explains: “The migrant situation is complex and alarming. The number of kidnappings is booming. And they’re happening, even to large groups of migrants, in broad daylight. The kidnappers show up with guns and simply take people away. The Mexican government is supposed to be responsible for the safety and the lives of those who are in its territory. It’s incredible that this is continuing to happen.”

NCHR has often reminded the state of what is happening, but the authorities continue to deny or simply not respond to official complaints. The word “kidnapping” has lost its weight in Mexico. The tangle of normalized, constant violence is complex and confusing, and now even the
polleros
have to submit to its rules.

THE
POLLERO
TAX

Though hundreds of thousands of Central Americans pour into Mexico each year—Mexico’s National Institute of Migration estimates 250,000 annually—those who walk this road know each other: Los Zetas know the
polleros
, the
polleros
know the assailants, the assailants know who works at migrant shelters, and those who work at the migrant shelter know the municipal authorities.

Ismael—a fictional name—is a local and has worked at the nearby migrant shelter for two years now. Previously he had a gig that forced him to get to know the inner workings of organized crime.

He looks for a table apart from the others and points with his chin, “Let’s talk over there. It’s just that so many of the informants for these kidnapping groups pose as migrants, and often they’re Central Americans themselves. They listen in on migrants’ conversations and then find a good moment to ask them if they have family on the other side, if they have anyone to pay for the
pollero
on the border. If the migrants answer no, they tell their boss to look out for so-and-so who won’t have anyone looking after them. Easy prey.”

We sit.

“What else can I tell you?” he asks.

“I’ve got eight testimonies of kidnappings that happened in eight different places. Each of the victims said that the kidnappers identified themselves as Zetas. You think it was really them?”

“Not necessarily. It goes like this: no one can say they’re a Zeta without permission. A lot of them, though, are just local delinquents who work for Los Zetas, who make sure that the
polleros
pay their dues,” he tells me, his face not breaking from its steady glare.

I’ve known him for a few months now, and the only parts of his face I’ve ever seen move are his lips. The constant roar of the shelter doesn’t turn his head. A group of migrants are showering, others are washing their clothes, some are playing soccer while the nearby trains squeal, their cars shifting from side to side. Ismael looks on with his steady gaze as though absorbing everything. At times, without pausing from what he’s saying, he moves his eyes, following an undocumented migrant move across the shelter. He comes off as stoic, and yet he’s willing to talk, to describe the inner workings of orchestrated kidnappings. He’s been surrounded by abductors, as well as their victims, for two years now nonstop. He’s even dodged the bullets of a few assailants who tried to kill him after he chased their car, trying to save a kidnapped Nicaraguan woman.