Authors: Oscar Martinez
Nothing. No response.
1
A street stand selling deep-fried rolls of corn flour with seasoned beef.
2
“We’re heading up north, kid, you’ll see. There’s work there, good money, lots to do.”
3
The Mara Salvatruchas gang originated in Los Angeles in the 1980s, but it has since become a transnational organized crime gang, with its largest presence in Central America and southern Mexico.
2
Here They Rape, There They Kill: Chiapas
The most dangerous part of the migrant trail through Mexico, where undocumented Central Americans have no protection and where the horrors seem ceaseless and locals seem deaf to screams, is La Arrocera. Over the course of a year of walking these migrant trails, I’ve heard the stories of hundreds of attacks, of people beaten to a pulp, of murder, of women screaming while they were raped in those hills, and, just beyond them, Mexico refused to listen
.
Paola, a twenty-three-year-old transsexual Guatemalan, says that she expected to be attacked while traveling. “I’d been told this always happens to migrants,” she said. Then she told me the story of her rape:
She says that she tried to relax, readying herself to the idea of what was coming. Her shirt had been torn by one of the men standing behind her, all of whom smelled of grass and looked like laborers. They had suddenly come out of the nearby brush with shotguns and machetes. Calm, despite being, as she put it, in doggy position, Paola understood she had only two cards left—her wits and her will.
She listened to the outlaws negotiating behind her. “You can give her a fuck first. I’ll go next.” “Look here,” Paola interrupted, “do what you want, but for your sake I’d put a condom on. I’ve got some over there in my backpack. It’d be for your own good, you know, I’ve got AIDS. It’s just, well, I didn’t expect this sort of problem. I thought you were all macho men, you know, the sort
that only rape women.” Paola spoke matter-of-factly, although she’s identified as a woman now for years and would never answer to her former name.
A short moment of silence passed. Paola imagined them staring at each other, dumbstruck, pop-eyed, but of course she doesn’t know. She had her back to them. She was still on her hands and knees, her head raised high and her eyes steady, with all the dignity she could muster.
“Just get the fuck up, you fucking whore,” one of them said. “And go to hell.”
Paola doesn’t actually have AIDS. What she does confess to acquiring, after five years of prostituting herself in Guatemala and Mexico City, is a life-saving resource around perverted men: the combination of wits and will. Mugged and manhandled, without a cent in her pocket, she went on walking the nameless roads toward El Norte. “But at least I was prepared,” Paola concludes. “Emotionally, I mean,” she adds, referring to being warned about sexual attacks on the migrant trail.
She tells me her story sitting next to a stalled train in Ixtepec, just a few miles north of where she escaped being raped. Tall and dark, she wears heavy makeup, a black, low-cut shirt, and tight cowboy pants. Paola is a true survivor of La Arrocera.
La Arrocera. The place is stained red by the blood of migrants, some say. The place makes you whimper like a dog, others say. But most people just keep silent, only speak to define the place, simply, by name—La Arrocera. One hundred and sixty miles long, La Arrocera is a network of twenty-eight ranches scattered among thick overgrowth that stretches between Tapachula, the first big city one comes to on the migrant trail through Mexico, and the coastal city of Arriaga, which all migrants must reach to catch the train. At the end of this line of ranches lies a large, abandoned rice cellar, which gives the place its name. La Arrocera means, simply, The Rice Cellar.
Paola saw firsthand that something bad happens to nearly
every migrant here. La Arrocera is lawless territory. The forty-five others she traveled with to Ixtepec were all assaulted. Paola, like many migrants, intimately knows the danger of this place. The authorities know it too.
Many of the victims are never found. It’s not uncommon that migrants travel alone, without identification and through areas where they have no contacts. The body of one migrant woman, for example, was found on November 20, 2008, strangled in the Relicario neighborhood of the town of Huixtla. Those who met her before her death, in Tapachula, said she was Guatemalan. They met the man she walked with too. They recognized him by the scorpion tattooed on his hand.
She was raped on the dirt-and-straw floor of a cardboard shack. That’s all we know. At the time of her rape and murder there wasn’t a police force dedicated to these rural areas, and really it’s a sorry sight now that there is—seven men from the nearby towns, standing guard with clubs in hand whenever they have some free time.
The picture of the Guatemalan woman who was killed was published in the small daily newspaper,
El Orbe
, displayed on a half-page with two other pictures of tortured bodies. It shows the woman with wide-open eyes, a gaping mouth full of dried grass, dirt and leaves, and a bloodied scalp with fistfuls of hair torn out.
There’s no open investigation. What’s left of her are the few scraps of stories from people who had met her on the trail. Orlando, who works at Huixtla’s cemetery, has a story. He sticks his tongue out as far as he can to show what she looked like when he was finally able to get her shirt out of her throat. The stories are all that’s left. Stories and a small purple cross, lost in a graveyard full of anonymous bodies. The epitaph reads: “The young mother and her twins died in Nov. 2008.” And her twins, it says.
Who knows why her murderer chose this place. Every day while en route to El Norte I saw, and began to understand, that the bodies left here are innumerable, and that rape is only one of the countless threats a migrant confronts.
THE BELATED WAR
We arrive in hostile times. At the beginning of 2009, the government of the state of Chiapas finally started paying attention to the violence on these trails. The bandits of today were once day laborers and ranch hands, who for years watched lines and lines of Central American migrants sneaking fearfully through, always ready to duck into the scrub. And then one day one of the laborers must have got an idea: the migrants are walking these trails in order to hide from the authorities, so if there were to be an assault, a rape, say, or a robbery, nobody would report it.
Migrants cross the river Suchiate on the southwestern border between Mexico and Guatemala, and from there begin their halting trip on microbuses and
combis
(the local word for public transportation vans). They board buses and then hop off before reaching the migration checkpoints set up along the highway. They duck into the foothills and walk a few miles to bypass the checkpoints, then get back to the road and wait for another combi. They make these mountain bypasses at least five times in the 175 miles until they reach Arriaga, where they can board a cargo train. On the trains they ride cramped and clinging like ticks, all the way to Ixtepec.
For years undocumented migrants have considered robberies and assaults as the inevitable tolls of the road. God’s will be done, they repeated. The coyotes even started to hand out condoms to their female clients, while they recommended the men not resist an attack. For the past decade, in this hidden and forgotten part of Mexico, the stories of husbands, sons, and daughters watching women suffer abuses have been commonplace.
At the beginning of 2009, after more than a decade of petitions from human rights organizations, the Chiapan government finally bowed to the pressure. A visit from the chancellors of Guatemala and El Salvador and a letter signed by more than ten organizations, including the Catholic Church, prevailed on the government to
take the first steps: creating the Prosecutor’s Office for Migrants and convincing Governor Juan Sabines to order police chiefs in Huixtla and Tonalá to start patrolling the most dangerous portions of the migrant trails. In the end, though, they’ve just barely stirred the pot in the banditry free-for-all. Corruption and wickedness seem to float to the surface in every corner of this part of the country. Those in charge of cleaning up the worst areas are finding that there is simply not enough manpower to get the job done.
The local police commander, Máximo, receives us on a typically humid day. This is the most suffocating month in the region. Keeping your shirt dry is nearly impossible. Commander Máximo is responsible for the area stretching from Tonalá to Arriaga, which is the top half of all of La Arrocera. When we sit down he puts in an order for maps, a stack of documents, and lemonade with extra ice.
“All right, fellas,” he says to Toni Arnau (one of
El Faro
’s news photographers) and me, before we’re even able to ask our first question. “As you can see, we’ve attacked the problem at the root, and we’ve come up with a solution. I can tell you that in my zone there will not be one more assault or rape.”
The stack of papers that he slaps on his desktop bears the title: “Operation Friend.” On one of the pages is a photograph of eight men, all under thirty-five years old. Above the photo the caption reads: “Alleged perpetrators of the events on the train, December 23, 2008.” Supposedly these are bandits who have expanded their field of operation, from attacks on the migrant trails to pillaging the trains heading out of Arriaga. During the assault in which these men were captured, a Guatemalan migrant who tried to stand up to them was murdered. The assailants carried both machetes and automatic weapons.
“And how many are still in detention?” Toni asks.
“I’m pretty sure,” Máximo says, “one of them is still locked up.”
Máximo takes out another folder to wash out any bad feeling
we may have. He slaps it down and drums his index finger on the plastic surface of the desk.
“This is the guy we just caught in El Basurero. His job at the big migrant crossing point in Durango was to direct anyone he could off the main path, right into the hands of the assailants. But we took care of him.”
The photograph is of a man named Samuel Liévano, a skinny fifty-seven-year-old rancher who owns a small plot of land right where the path splits and the trail leads back to the main highway. It’s the spot where migrants run past the last federal police checkpoint at the entrance to Arriaga. Liévano, however, guided migrants the other way, toward El Basurero (the Garbage Dump) where the old rail line is and where the bandits lie in wait. El Basurero is an open dump and a notorious site for assaults and rapes. Máximo and his men caught Liévano after the rare event that two Hondurans who were led into an ambush in El Basurero reported the crime at a migrant shelter in Arriaga.
The informants against old man Liévano are two black Honduran men. They get to the shelter, where we’re waiting for them, without a drop of sweat on their foreheads. They’re fishing divers from the sweltering Atlantic coast, well-accustomed to a scorching day of work. Now, after five days waiting for the prosecution to call them, they’re fed up and want to get back home. Elvis Ochoa, an experienced twenty-year-old, says of the trip north, “It’s nothing,” and flashes a Los Angeles gang sign. He’s already lived in the States a few months. Nineteen-year-old Andy Epifanio Castillo, however, is a candid first-timer. He admits he’s had his fill, and doesn’t want to step any farther on Mexican soil. With slumped shoulders, he laments, “I risked my life for one that’s better.” If the boys leave tomorrow, Liévano will go back to his ranch, continuing to direct unknowing migrants into a trap, and proving the words of Máximo to be another superficial attempt at resolving a systemic problem.
The bandits who held up Andy and Elvis, even after hearing that Liévano was in trouble, are supposedly still hanging
around, one with a nine-millimeter, the other with a 22-gauge shotgun.
Leaving the hostel, we try to figure a way to safely see El Basurero. Máximo offers us a ride, but mentions that things will probably turn out different for us—riding in a truck with four policemen carrying Galil rifles—than it usually does for undocumented migrants.
We’re left with one last option. The prosecutor’s office that specializes in migration cases has just started a new round of operations. They call on the public municipal offices of various small towns, and assign officers to go undercover as migrants and then fight back against any assailants, with firepower if necessary.
Only three weeks ago, four undercover policemen stumbled upon a robbery in progress in El Basurero. There were two migrants hiding in the underbrush who came out when they saw the police.
“Keep still, you sons-a-bitches,” one of the policemen yelled.
One of them moved. The policemen unholstered their pistols and when the hidden bandits saw the guns, they started firing and running. The two migrants were trapped in the middle: Wenceslao Peña, thirty-six, and José Zárate, eighteen, both Mexican. One was shot in the neck, the other caught two bullets in the thigh. When the firefight ended, only two men were standing unharmed. Two of the four policemen were shot with a 22-gauge shotgun. All of the wounded are still in the hospital in Tonalá.
In the public prosecutor’s office, three men sit melting in front of a fan. When they notice the half-open door and our heads poking inside, they ask us what we want. After we explain ourselves, one of them, Víctor, steps out to talk with us. He was one of the uninjured officers in the recent gun battle. He has his shirt unbuttoned almost all the way to his waist, his belly taut against the opened fabric and the butt of a nine-millimeter sticking out of his belt.
“What do you really want?” he says in greeting.
“We’ve come straight from seeing the public prosecutor,
Enrique Rojas. We’ve been here a week and are trying to get to know the migrant trails, to experience them as the migrant experiences them. We haven’t gotten very far.”
“I don’t get it,” he says. “What is it exactly you want to do?”