Authors: Oscar Martinez
“Go with you on one of your operations.”
Víctor throws a quick glance at one of his colleagues, who stands with his rifle strap across his chest. They exchange knowing, lopsided smiles.
“No,” Víctor says, lengthening the vowel. “That’s impossible. It’s very dangerous, even for us, even though we’re armed. There’s a gunfight on every corner here. These robbers don’t think twice before firing. We always go in armed, and we still need protection from a second group of agents that follows us a couple of miles behind.”
We spell out our arguments again, insisting, but with each motion we make, another trickle of sweat drips from our faces and Víctor ticks off another counter-argument.
“It’s even worse in La Arrocera,” he says. “There the bandits are organized and carry AR-15s. We only go in when we’ve thoroughly detailed an operation first.”
By the time we leave we realize that our only option left is to improvise. It’s unusual for someone to want to nose around these parts. By and large, the victims here are only written about once they are dead. Journalists and human rights organizations condemn and take the stories they hear in migrant shelters to court, but the only people who really know what goes on in La Arrocera are the migrants and the bandits themselves.
These mountains, there’s no better way to say it, have their own laws.
A year ago, chancellors from Guatemala and El Salvador toured through this region. They staged a whole spectacle: thirty federal police agents with two teams of state police on horseback sweeping ahead, other patrols waiting for them a couple miles up the highway. It was a whole army of uniforms. Honduras is currently preparing its official guided tour under the same
conditions. The headlines that come out of these visits are a farce. “IN CHIAPAS THE HUMAN RIGHTS OF MIGRANTS ARE GUARANTEED” appeared in three of the local papers.
Commander Roberto Sánchez, known as Commander Maza, receives us outside of Huixtla. The heat hasn’t let up. It’s just stopped raining, and the water has sprung back from the ground as an infernal fog.
Sánchez helps us as well as he can, but the conversation is brief and jumps between nicknames, recent deaths, and impunity. Chayote, he says, a famous local bandit who was detained four months ago, was released because his victims kept on their northern march instead of testifying. Chayote, we learn, actually turned himself in, opting to spend a few years in prison rather than get stoned by defensive migrants under one of the bridges in La Arrocera. And then there’s El Calambres, a member of one of the older gangs, who was detained in Tonalá, but the plaintiffs in the case—not surprisingly—also wanted to keep heading north. It’s normal. In Chiapas most denunciations filed by migrants are against the police. A migrant putting himself in police custody is about the same as a soldier asking for a sip of water at enemy headquarters.
Tomorrow we’ll go to the police station responsible for patrolling this sector for the past three months. And we’ll remain locked into this paradox, easily traveling around the dangerous Arrocera without even a whiff of the fear that migrants breathe daily.
ON FOOT WITH MIGRANTS
We get to the station at six in the morning. The police like to make their rounds early, before the sun starts to burn. Inside the station, which is set up in an old ranch house, we’re greeted with a surprise. Three Salvadorans had come knocking the night before, asking if they could rest there. They’d wanted to catch their breath and
be alert before getting to their next hurdle: sneaking past the first checkpoint in Huixtla.
The men are stretching and yawning, having just woken from a four-hour nap.
Eduardo, we learn, is a twenty-eight-year-old baker who’s fleeing the Mara Salvatruchas. Marlon is a twenty-year-old distributor who loyally sticks with Eduardo, his boss. José, twenty-six, is described by Eduardo and Marlon as their extra pair of hands. The officers who let them stay the night now plead with them not to leave until the sun is high, because, they explain, not even they dare walk La Arrocera in the dark. I get the feeling they are only being so kind because we are present.
The three Salvadorans join us on our excursion. As we step out of the station we see a one-room cement house with a thatch roof, and a middle-aged man, barefoot and without a shirt, standing on its stoop, holding his daughter’s hand. He waves to us and the officers wave back. It’s a casual, everyday gesture.
“And them?” I ask the officer next to me. “They’re your friends?”
“Spies,” he answers dryly. “They work with the bandits. They’re the ones who push the migrants off trail and to the spot where the gangs wait to attack them. Every time we do our rounds, they’re out here, watching us.”
We walk single file down the rocky path that, though still noticeably ravaged by Hurricane Stan which struck in 2005, serves the migrants as a life-saving guide through this jungle that seems like something out of Vietnam. The lush green of the plants blankets us, the ground is an obstacle course, and the puddles we’re hopping over are like miniature swamps. To our right, only a few paces behind the tangles of vegetation that tower over the side of our path, there’s the stable, called El Hueyate, which migrants often use for a night’s stay. And if you look carefully, you can see, behind the scrub brush, like a secret gateway to a parallel universe, narrow tracks marked off by cairns that lead to hidden ranches and other abandoned stables.
“It was right here,” one of the officers says, pointing out a cement structure as we’re crossing a small bridge. All these officers speak in a matter-of-fact tone.
It was here last year that an officer, one of his colleagues, was killed. A bandit broke his skull with a machete. A newly sharpened machete is, for these outlaws, more weapon than tool. They use it to break up soil, sure, but mostly to attack, or to defend themselves. The officers say the bandits always have a machete, their most loyal companion, in hand, as if it were a natural extension of their arms.
We hear dogs bark, and we look around, but we only catch glimpses of flashing eyes peeking through the cracks of nearby gates and sheds and houses. People want to know who we are and what we’re doing.
“They’ve got us surrounded,” the officer says, shaking his head, and then slams us with another of his loosely explained accounts of our surroundings. “What I told you about the bones,” he says, “happened here. And over there, that’s where we found El Chayote’s body.”
Vultures continuously circle the area, looking for dead cattle and dead people. Bones here aren’t a metaphor for what’s past, but for what’s coming. The bones the officer was referring to were a perfectly intact skeleton they found here a few months ago. And El Chayote was an infamous Arrocera bandit. His body was found right around here as well. We would have been able to see it from where we’re now standing: a big bruise in the middle of his forehead and his face caved in as if he were made of soft clay. El Chayote was found pelted by rocks. While the machete is the most common weapon for small-time bandits, rocks are a migrants’ defense.
We’re walking among the dead. Life’s value seems reduced, continuously dangled like bait on a fishing line. Killing, dying, raping, or getting raped—the dimensions of these horrors are diminished to points of geography. Here on this rock, they rape. There by that bush, they kill.
“They separate the women from the group and take them over there to rape them,” an officer points to a cluster of squat banana trees. “And, well, this is also where we head back to camp. This is where our patrol round ends.”
We’ve barely walked a half hour. I can’t stop shaking my head. What we’ve walked is a fraction of what a migrant walks, and we’ve only reached the beginnings of their journey.
People call this point La Cuña (the Wedge). It’s a narrow path that meets up with the highway, just north of El Hueyate, to the right of a mango tree where they rape, to the left of a heap of dirt where coyotes from Huixtla lead migrants straight into the jaws of the bandits they secretly work for.
As the officer goes on describing the brutal facts of the land, the three Salvadorans watch silently, furrowing their brows. It seems they’re wondering what they should do next. “We’re looking for this one guy,” the officer says. “We think he’s hiding out here. They call him La Rana (the Frog). He’s got a big scar on his face. We know he works around here, but we just can’t find him, you know? I know they give him a warning every time we’re around here, before we can even smell him. They watch us so closely.”
Just as he finishes his last sentence, I shake his hand and, without much explanation, tell him I’m going on with Eduardo, José and Marlon to Arriaga, where we’ll catch the next train. The officers shoot me a worried look. I imagine they think of that colleague of theirs who was recently murdered. I imagine that, for them, a dead migrant is commonplace, but a couple of dead journalists is another matter. No one wants those kinds of bodies—the ones that come with names—found in their jurisdiction.
The trails are so rocky and dense with vegetation that within minutes we lose sight of the officers. Now, and just now, our real journey begins. We walk through the thick of the jungle for another three miles until we get to a small road that takes us back to the highway. Eduardo runs ahead to stop a combi on its way to Escuintla, the nearest town.
After our guided tour through La Arrocera it’s clear to me that
every attempt to eradicate violence in this area has been haphazard and unsuccessful. La Rana is still on the prowl, the rest of the bandits are a little ahead or a little behind, watching, waiting, and the dead bodies are always still fresh in memory.
What helped me understand this area was my conversation with El Calambres (The Cramp). His real name is Higinio Pérez Argüello. He’s twenty-six years old and known for being the head bandit and assailant of migrants in La Arrocera. For the past three months he’s been in jail in Huixtla, where he let me visit him and listen to his story as long as I followed his only rule: to retell everything in third person, to always say
them
, never
us
.
A CHAT WITH EL CALAMBRES
He was initially charged for rape, arms smuggling, and assault. He was accused of having raped a migrant, but, not surprisingly, the accuser disappeared. The other two charges stuck. And now he’s waiting out his prison sentence.
The prison director offers his office for the interview and says that Higinio will probably talk. His reasoning is disturbing, but also not surprising: “He’s going to talk because it’s not like he’s accused of a serious crime. We don’t have anyone accused of serious crimes here. They’re accused of murder, rape, or robbery. Never of drug trafficking.”
And indeed, Higinio, also known as El Calambres, talks.
El Calambres is thin, with sharp features and veiny arms. He wears an oversized shirt which, coupled with his rural mannerisms, gives him the look of a gangster. He’s five foot five and has long sharp fingernails, slanted eyes and a thin, lopsided mustache. Six chains hang around his neck, all crucifixes and rosaries. After he’s been led into the office, he sits, crosses his arms, locks his gaze on the floor, and starts to talk.
“Yeah, I know the trail through La Arrocera,” he says. “I used to live in a ranch around there. They would always be fucking with anyone passing by.”
“Who would be fucking with them?”
“The people who lived and worked there. I’ve seen the gangs that come through. Now there’s just one of them around. They came up from Tapachula to do their business. El Chino runs the operation. The other boss is El Harry. They’ve been around a while now, doing their thing, hunting illegals.”
“And why do they only hunt the undocumented?”
“Because they know those people aren’t going to stick around and cause trouble. If they mess with someone who’s from here, though, they know they’re going to have problems, and those problems are going to stick around. The others are just passing through.”
I know from word of mouth that El Chino is still working. Everyone knows him by his nickname, and considers him one of the biggest bandits of La Arrocera. El Harry is even more legendary. He’s one of the first who capitalized on the impunity in this area, one of the first who started with the robberies and rapes. They caught El Harry once, put him in prison in Tapachula for an assault, but then he paid the 50,000-peso bond and started roaming again.
But before he was ever caught he had the chance to hook up with El Chochero (the Old Man) and El Diablo (the Devil). Those two are now behind bars in El Amate, the largest detention center in Chiapas. The state has almost no control over the prison. From inside, El Chochero and El Diablo continue to run their narco operations, putting taxes on new inmates and keeping guards out of their cells. Back in 1995 they were working with El Harry, riding motorbikes and wreaking havoc on migrants who didn’t take the trains and decided to walk the mountains instead. El Chochero proved he had talent, rising in the ranks until he went to prison and was put in charge of one of the prison crews, Crew Green. Now he oversees the prison’s underground tax system, and even assigns new inmates their cells. He’s become, as they say in prison slang, the new chief general. It took two days of fighting to wrest the position from the last chief general, the drug baron
Herminio Castro Rangel. It’s these short-lived, explosive prison wars that decide who runs El Amate.
“Wait,” I say to El Calambres. “I don’t understand. How much can you make assaulting migrants?”
“Depends on how much the migrants are carrying. Some carry ten pesos, others carry five or even eight thousand pesos. See,” he says, “they’re not just fucking with them in the hills here. They start fucking with them way down south so that by the time they get here some of them are already broke.”
“And how’s business? If I were to grab a machete and just try my luck?”
“Nooo, it’s all under control. Each group has its turf. Nobody can operate on somebody else’s turf. If you just show up, you’ll get shot.”
“And if you stand up to the gangs, is that a way to get shot?”