The Beast (36 page)

According to the Mexican sitting with us, deported after twenty-two years in the United States, if you climb up one of the barren hills you can jump the fence and cross an empty section of desert where the Border Patrol doesn’t go. He himself crossed there twenty-two years ago. But back then Juárez wasn’t a war zone, and it did not have a wall separating it from El Paso, nor were there thousands of Border Patrol agents guarding its gates. Back then, the Mexican explains, it was an easy four-hour hike to El Paso.

The other two Hondurans at the shelter are determined to get out of town, reach Sonora, and try crossing through the Altar Desert. After Juárez the Altar Desert is the most watched sector of the border, but the difficult topography, including sections only accessible on foot or on horseback, makes it hard for the Border Patrol to catch so few crossers. The Hondurans are only here in Juárez because they too were tricked. A fellow Honduran told them he knew how to get across in Juárez and asked for $200 apiece for fake visas, but once he got the money they never saw him again. When traveling for the first time across this country, before you’ve learned the number one rule—which is not to trust anybody—it’s easy to fall into these kinds of traps.

I ask if they’ve already gotten a feel for what it’s like here in Juárez. Their response tells me that they have: “We’re too scared to go out. Everybody says that there’s a lot of bad guys on the streets, and nobody knows anything about crossing over.” The few Central Americans who have found this shelter, I realize, have all lost their way.

The argument this Honduran makes is that Juárez is simply not the crossing zone it used to be. It’s not a place for migrants anymore. It’s a cartel war zone, which in turn has increased US
border vigilance. One thing leads to another—violence and then vigilance—and the migrants bear the brunt of both.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 6

Today we return. We spent Tuesday and Wednesday outside of the city, getting to know the outlying desert. Life in Juárez continues on in its frightening normalcy. Typical headlines over the past two days: “Three more murdered.” “Businesses complain of police extortion.” “Over 500 reported vehicles burned in 10 months.” “Their business burned.” “Their house a wreck.” “Threatened with being bombed.” “Body hanging from bridge causes outrage.”

We get a call from a Juárez journalist working for
El Diario
. “There’s been another execution,” he says. Edu and I make our way out of the downtown district. At a small farm nestled between two roads, lies a man, shot nineteen times. The journalists, three of whom have just arrived, look for the best shots. Little else seems to matter. This man is another body. One of the photographers summarizes the scene of the crime as he dips into a bag of candy: “A car came and out piled three men and that was that: pum, pum, pum.”

When they drove off, the shooters allegedly yelled: “Thief had it coming to him!”

A group of kids play around the farm while the forensic team wraps up the body. The neighbors spend the evening chatting on the front stoops of their homes. No one is shocked. The narcos have killed again. As common as a car crash.

Last Tuesday, the same day that a decapitated body was found hanging off a bridge, another body was found crucified on the balcony of a shopping mall, with a pig mask over his face and two gunshot wounds in his chest. Last night there were thirteen executions. When the mafia kills, you know it. They leave a signature.

This part of the border is racked by a madness akin to civil
war. In the Chihuahuan papers the SAO lamented, “We weren’t designed to face this scale of threat.”

As Rodolfo Rubio, a researcher for the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, put it while on the phone with me: “It’s not strange at all that the flow [of migrants] has gone down in this area.” In the 1950s, between 12 and 15 percent of all Central American and Mexican migrants chose this area to cross. In 2000 these numbers started plummeting. Now only 2 percent of the undocumented detained by the Mexican Migration are apprehended in Chihuahua, despite being one of Mexico’s largest states and the one that has the most miles of border.

Few migrants arrive having studied the landscape. They play a game of chance, clutching to the roof of a train that will take them to some new and unknown destination. Still, Rubio thinks there’s a vox populi on the migrant route that tells many which course to follow. Not an exact route, but a vague knowledge of where it’s best not to try. It’s the voice of the coyotes, who sprinkle some of their knowledge as they move northward. They know, not from official documents, but from living in the desert, in the hills and along the Rio Bravo, where there’s more surveillance, more Border Patrol cars, horses, motorcycles, agents, and motion sensors.

The interviews Rubio conducted with recently deported Mexicans on the Santa Fe Bridge revealed that most—some 72,000 every year—crossed at another part of the border, but that the US authorities deported them here with the goal of making reentry harder, knowing full well that this is one of the most dangerous spots to cross.

Rubio sums up the difficulties people face: “It’s almost impossible for a migrant without help, with nothing but his will, to pass through Juárez. This land is controlled by organized crime, so much so that it’s only possible to cross if migrants contract narcos to guide them through these areas.”

It’s always the same story on this route. Migrants as well as narcos search for areas far from state control. Some to cross,
others to smuggle. The undocumented migrants will go on walking narco turf without permission. And narcos will go on showing that without payment, no one comes or leaves this place unpunished.

It’s six o’clock in the evening and María stops running every which way, then sits down to talk. Needless to say, her real name isn’t María. She works close to the Santa Fe Bridge, selling half-price bus tickets home to the recently deported. She has an agreement with Grupo Beta to offer these discounted tickets. Much like the scammers and delinquents, she’s been working this corner every day for the past year.

In her words, Juárez and the sum of its circumstances always mean the same thing: fear plus corrupt officials plus US surveillance add up to one maxim. “Be very careful.”

“As soon as you step onto this street you’re being watched,” she says. “By now you guys must be closely monitored.”

I tell her we’ve been here many times, and so far nothing has happened to us.

“Sure,” she responds,” because you haven’t done anything to upset them.”

To upset who?

But this is a dangerous question to answer in Juárez. Upset the scammers? The corrupt police? The cartel minions? The military? The bar owners? The prostitutes who lie to the freshly deported, in order to lead them to some dark corner where someone will assault them? Who isn’t there to upset?

María isn’t exactly sure who we should be afraid of. She’s been running in circles with the deported, and barely has the time to drink a glass of water. She suffers this situation firsthand. “They come to threaten us twice this week,” she says. “I’m not sure if they’re from the mafia or if they’re
polleros
. They don’t like it when we take away their migrants. The first time they threatened us by phone. Then a man in a hoodie came to tell us, in so many words, that we needed to shut down the business.” You either shut
it, you sons of bitches, or we set fire to your business, this was the message to María.

The mafia’s pattern is no longer surprising. They attack when they don’t get paid. They’ve burned a number of businesses on this street. It’s a common problem, but the
polleros
? What are they doing here, if hardly anyone is trying to cross?

“Look,” she explains, “there are lots of
polleros
here who are trying to hook deported migrants, some of them Central Americans, who are going around asking for help. Of course you won’t see them in the streets, they’re inside exchange houses, hotels, and bars. These
polleros
take them to other states to cross.”

Migrants in Juárez, though their numbers are so small, still mean business.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8

We cross over to El Paso, leaving the city to fly to Laredo, Texas, and from there cross over to Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, to see how the undocumented are crossing the Rio Grande. On the plane I read Juárez’s newspaper,
El Diario
. On page 11A there is a letter perfectly expressing the feelings of many in the city. It’s a petition, a desperate plea to those in charge:

Dear Hit Men,

I’m a citizen who is tired of our useless, good-for-nothing politicians. This is why, in all respect, I’m writing you, not wanting to be another statistic. I suggest to you the following: I’m willing to pay you a fair tax and I’m willing to respect your business and not involve myself in it either for good or for bad.

I’m willing to accept you as the authority here. And in return for this respect, I ask of you the following: that you help us not to pay taxes (which we’ll be paying to you) to our useless government. That you respect reporters. That your shoot-outs take place outside of the city, so our children and loved ones can be safe and so that we can walk the streets without fear of being attacked or getting hit by a stray bullet. And that you execute only people who have harmed society.

If politicians can’t manage, you help us and we’ll help you.

1
Originally a derogatory term for members of a lower-class Latino subculture, the term is now used by many as a badge of ethnic pride.

14
Dying in the Rio Grande: Tamaulipas

To cross the Rio Grande you either pay a coyote or you drown. The bloated bodies trapped along the rocky banks, and the flailing attempts of migrants trying to make it upriver, prove how desperate people are to cross. Some of their plans are as rudimentary as dive in and swim. And then we meet Julio César. He’s a Honduran who shows us that patience and sacrifice are the difference between letting the currents decide your fate and taking fate by the horns
.

The Rio Grande spat out two more bodies last week. They were found washed up on the rocks by a fisherman in an area known as El Resbaladero (The Slide). Nobody knows how long ago it was that they drowned. Their bodies are swollen and their flesh soft and pale. Tied around the waist of one of the corpses is a plastic bag that holds a few personal effects and a passport. The drowned man was Honduran. A migrant. He died trying.

The bodies first bobbed up in one of the bends in the river that is a typical crossing spot, just behind the migrant shelter in Nuevo Laredo. If the Hondurans had successfully made it to the opposite bank, they would have reached Laredo.

The Rio Grande runs 900 miles of the 1,900-mile border, but Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, and Laredo, Texas, are the sister cities that people talk about when they talk about swimming this river. The waters are deep and a churning green here. The currents are strong and swirling. And the thick brush on the US side makes it difficult to climb up but easy to hide. The river in these parts acts
as a natural wall. Many who try to cross it turn out swollen, soft, and pale.

In Nuevo Laredo the difference between having knowledge of the river and not having this knowledge is a matter of life and death. It’s the difference between swimming out at a random deep bend, and launching with a raft in a shallow area with just a few swirls. It’s the difference between arriving in the United States, and ending up as a lump of rotting flesh.

It’s a fall November afternoon, five o’clock, and migrants are just starting to pool around the shelter run by Scalabrinian priests. The migrants are returning from their day jobs loading sand onto trucks, putting up drywall, or selling newspapers at traffic lights. Shelter rules only allow people to stay from four in the afternoon until seven in the morning.

There are about sixty of them today. Most from Honduras, plus a few Guatemalans and Salvadorans. The black, skeletal man sitting apart from the rest with his shoulders hunched and his head hidden between his knees is the only Dominican at the shelter. The others suggest I go talk with him. “He tried it yesterday, stupidly, and the river almost took him,” a young Honduran tells me, laughing.

The Dominican’s name is Roberto. He’s thirty-two years old. He has a wife and three kids, aged eight, five, and three, waiting for him—and for money—back on the island. His family is eating nothing but beans. He was a bus driver before leaving his country a month ago, earning some $120 a month. Out of everyone here, he’s traveled the farthest. A group of his friends lent him the money for a plane ticket to Guatemala, where visas aren’t needed for short stays. From there he migrated like many Central Americans: on third-rate buses, on foot, on top of cargo trains, until he arrived in Nuevo Laredo after being assaulted six times, five of them by the Mexican police. His journey almost came to an end yesterday, coughing up mouthfuls of water as he fought the current, briefly made it, and then returned to the Mexican shore, exhausted, the sun setting behind him.

The irony of Roberto’s story is that he decided against migrating to Puerto Rico—the more prosperous neighboring island—because he didn’t want to risk drowning. The Mona Passage, an eighty-mile strait in the Atlantic, divides the two countries. Dominicans cross on small, speedy motorboats, often lugging too much weight on board, and sometimes end up shipwrecked.

“Your plan failed you yesterday?” I ask

“Hell! I didn’t have a plan,” he says, and quickly falls into the story of his attempt.

“I’d been here three days already, and was tired of selling newspapers from seven in the morning till three in the afternoon to earn six pesos [less than fifty cents] a day, and so yesterday I took the plunge. I went down to the river behind the shelter with thirteen other people. It was maybe five in the afternoon. We stood there just watching the other side a while, until I started praying. And then I jumped in to swim. The others followed me. And the current dragged me a few yards. It was tough, but I got to the other side. Then when I looked up I saw one of those police officers turn on a light and shine it on us, and so I jumped back in the water. But I was too tired then and I almost drowned on my way back. I thought I wasn’t going to make it. I swallowed a lot of water.”