Authors: Oscar Martinez
“
Ay
! No, no, that’s how you get killed, if you try to stand up to them.”
“So there’s probably a lot of bodies out there that nobody’s ever found?”
“A shit-ton.”
I explain to El Calambres what Máximo and Sánchez told me. I tell him that they assured me that the problem was resolved. El Calambres, for the first time, lifts his gaze. We share a lingering glance and then he breaks into smile.
“It’s like this,” he says. “There’s not just one guy working these trails. There are gangs. And not just one gang. Which means there’s never a pause. If somebody falls, someone takes their place right away. It’s a lot of land, and it’s remote, and maybe the law does go chasing the bandits. But the bandits who work it, they know the law too, they keep their eyes open, and they know the land even better than they know the law. The law just can’t cover it. The place is too big. And if the law does run into the bandits, the bandits will shut it down. They have .22 shotguns, AR-15s, 357s. They even have bulletproof vests.”
It’s like the public prosecutor said, La Arrocera is something
else. Bandits are better equipped there than cops. El Calambres assures us that gangs consider migrants as part of their long-term business plan, though sometimes, “thanks to some connections,” they stumble upon other jobs: robbing jewelry stores, cars, businesses. And no gang works alone: they have authorities that are in the game with them.
At my last question, El Calambres shrugs, drops his head, and gazes back at the floor.
“And so, what’s with the rapes then?” I ask. “Just for kicks?”
“Yeah, sort of. It’s kicks for them. Something extra.”
“Sure,” I respond. “It’s easy to rape someone if you know she’s not going to report it.”
“Yeah, well,” he says. “Yeah.”
The bandits leave their houses in the morning just like everybody leaves their houses in the morning, on their way to work. They leave from their neighborhoods, El Relicario, Buenos Aires, El Progreso, Cañaveral, El Espejo. They leave from the ranches and farms, and they station themselves waiting to do their business: rape and robbery. And at the end of the day they haul in their booty and go back home and rest, until the next day of work.
THE RANCHES, THE EXHAUSTION, THE TENSION
As we’re pulling in to Escuintla, a small town of squat houses with row after row of street stands, the photographer Toni Arnau gets into a fight with the driver of the combi. Though the driver knows he’s talking to three broke migrants and a couple of journalists indiscreetly recording everything, he still overcharges us.
“Just five pesitos for the trouble, damn, all I’m saying is just five more pesos!”
That’s what he wants, five more pesos each. It’s unfair, surely, but I have to admit, it sounds like a decent tax compared to what I know other unarmed muggers (a very different type of assailant than then ones who hide outside of towns, deep in La Arrocera’s overgrowth) demand. Some charge 200 pesos for a ride that costs
only ten for a Mexican. Still, we refuse to pay his surcharge and have to get off. We pick up another combi going to Mapastepec but find ourselves with the same problem, and so again, before getting to the next stop, we get off. Now on foot, we spot a man under a bridge who is waiting for another combi and ask him if the train station is very far.
“About three miles that way,” he answers, “but don’t go on this side of the highway, just two weeks ago some migrant got murdered around there.”
We walk on, telling ourselves that if we get attacked, we get attacked. There’s nothing we can do. The suffering that migrants endure on the trail doesn’t heal quickly. Migrants don’t just die, they’re not just maimed or shot or hacked to death. The scars of their journey don’t only mark their bodies, they run deeper than that. Living in such fear leaves something inside them, a trace and a swelling that grabs hold of their thoughts and cycles through their heads over and over. It takes at least a month of travel to reach Mexico’s northern border. A month of hiding in fear, with the uncertainty of not knowing if the next step will be the wrong step, of not knowing if the Migra will turn up, if an attacker will pop out, if a narco-hired rapist will demand his daily fuck.
Few think about the trauma endured by the thousands of Central American women who have been raped here. Who takes care of them? Who works to heal their wounds? Luis Flores, head of the International Organization for Migration, said it well: “The biggest problem isn’t in what we can see, it’s beyond that. The problem lies in a particular understanding of things, in an entire system of logic. Migrants who are women have to play a certain role in front of their attackers, in front of the coyote and even in front of their own group of migrants, and during the whole journey they’re under the pressure of assuming this role: I know it’s going to happen to me, but I can’t help but hope that it doesn’t.”
Migrant women play the role of second-class citizens. And they are an easy target. That was made very clear to us a couple days
ago when we visited the migration offices of Tapachula and spoke with Yolanda Reyes, a twenty-eight-year-old who has lived here illegally since 1999. She made a life for herself in Tapachula and tried to live normally, but, even after so many years, something wouldn’t ease her mind: she was still an undocumented Central American woman. She’d just gotten legal residency the day we met her, after a long process of filing a complaint against her partner, a Chiapan police officer who, in a crazed tantrum, slashed her eleven times (four times in the face) with a machete.
“Whore, you fucking whore, you’re going to learn, you’re just a fucking Central American and you’re not worth a thing!” Those are the words she remembers.
After two hours of walking, our shirts are drenched with sweat, our faces are sunburned, and our legs are sore. We’ve just reached Madre Vieja, a town indistinguishable from all the others we’ve crossed: scrubland, mud, silence. The last time a body was found in this area was eight months ago. I can’t help but wonder when the next will turn up.
We get onto the highway. The train station is still some 400 plus yards ahead. Another two hours of walking. We’ll get there, but we have to go deep into the woods in order to find the path we’re looking for. We rest a moment on the slab of a highway median. We cross the highway, looking every which way like scared animals, then pile into another combi. We’ve successfully sneaked past two checkpoints.
As soon as we get to Mapastepec, we board another combi toward Pijijiapan. We’re bone tired. Again we ask the driver to let us off before the next checkpoint. The driver leaves us in El Progreso. It’s already midday. When we slink back into the woods, walking among nameless mountains, we feel that hellish heat again. No one talks anymore. Not Eduardo, not Marlon, not José. Knowing that once they reach the station and board the train they’ll still have 90 percent of Mexico to cross is enough to make me want to beg them to give up.
We’ve climbed over seven barbed-wire fences and crossed ten cattle ranches and a river. We’re on this road by recommendation of an old man we met during the first three miles of our trek. The man warned us, though, of the danger. He said that we couldn’t blame him if we were attacked. He recommended this route in particular, he said, because it had one clear advantage—it stayed close to the highway, which meant potential help, which meant people would be able to hear our screams. It sounded terrifying. There was another path we could have chosen, but it was longer. We figured we only needed water and shade, and the word
shortcut
rang louder than the threat of attack.
We walk another three hours among these cattle ranches, with no idea if we’re still on track or if we’ve been walking in circles. Just before reaching El Progreso, we pass by another route which, now that we’re exhausted, seems the better bet—to get off at El Mango, a back road which is more direct and devoid of checkpoints, but where, we were told, getting assaulted is a guarantee.
In the end, in a tiny, abandoned shell of a house, we find the two things we need: an old man who promises to be our guide, and a well. The old man says we’re in luck, things are relatively calm now, and yet danger, he knows, is fast approaching. Two weeks ago police caught a man and his son, both of them fulltime assailants, just on the other side of the highway in an area called Santa Sonia. And because of that, the assailant’s relatives, in the mugging and kidnapping business themselves, had decided to cool it for a little while.
“It won’t last long. So let’s move it. We gotta move quick.”
And so we set off, back onto the highway, managing to board a combi en route to Pijijiapan. Then we get off in time to board another en route to Tonalá. We’re told the checkpoint there is highly militarized, but that the officers are only worried about arms and drugs smuggling, and we’re promised they won’t ask for any documents. Plus, we’re tired, we don’t care about this new risk that, only a few miles back, I know we wouldn’t have taken. What’s one more checkpoint? We’ll happily take it,
convinced they won’t detain us, though we know we’re pushing our luck.
We cross. And sure enough, they’re only looking for weapons and drugs.
After forty minutes on the combi we ask to be let off at a crossroads called Durango. It would have been only a twenty-minute ride to Arriaga, but our guide advises us not to risk going through any more checkpoints and so we settle in for another two-hour trek. Our silence is nervous, angry. We know this place. We’ve heard so much about it. We’re right around where that infamous old man, Liévano, would trick migrants off track and lead them right into the hands of their attackers.
Our surroundings change. There’s no longer the thick green overgrowth, but long, meandering paths of loose rock. The place looks apocalyptic. Dry. Wild in its dryness.
We pass the famous dump, the place of rape and violence. A wide and open dump heaving with stuffed plastic bags and multicolored boxes that swirl around in the wind and get stuck on the gates of nearby ranches. It looks like a landscape blasted by bombs.
We trudge on for more than two hours and can feel the blisters on our feet, after almost thirty miles of skirting checkpoints. The iron bridge that marks the entrance to Arriaga suddenly appears at the edge of our horizon—an industrial door to a small, drab city. We’ve been on the go since six in the morning, the threat of being attacked hovering just a breath away from us. The bridge is what we’ve been waiting for.
Curtly, we say goodbye.
Marlon, Eduardo, and José are going to a migrant shelter. We’re going back to Huixtla. This time, in all that immensity that is La Arrocera, there was no attack. Maybe it is calm, maybe the story here in Chiapas has changed course, maybe the prosecutors, police officers, and lawmakers are successfully reaching their goal.
NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS
It’s been four days since our walk through La Arrocera.
I’ve been asking how things are in these parts, if migrants have been making it through unharmed or if bandits are still having their way.
Carlos Bartolo, who runs the migrant shelter in Arriaga, tells me that just today four people who’d been robbed showed up. One of these, Ernesto Vargas, a twenty-four-year-old from a small Salvadoran town called Atiquizaya, was robbed by two men, one who carried a machete and another who held a .38 revolver pointed at his chest. They took everything he had: $25 and 200 pesos.
I call Commander Maximino, who says he’s checking into it. It seems, he tells me, that a group of bandits have moved a few miles to the north, to the border of Oaxaca, where they’ve set up a safe house in the mountains. The group has been robbing not just migrants on foot, but those riding the rails as well. I ask him if he’s spoken with the Oaxacan authorities, if he’s told them what he knows.
“Well,” he answers, “they’re not that interested. They don’t want to touch this stuff. No way we’re going to coordinate with them.”
Another day passes. I call the priest Alejandro Solalinde, who is in charge of the shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca, where the train—The Beast—drops off the migrants who are riding from Arriaga. Solalinde tells me that after eight months without incident, the train that arrived that very morning was attacked. Some bandits armed with pistols and machetes jumped on board at the Oaxaca–Chiapas border and stripped all the travelers.
Again I call the shelter in Arriaga. Three more Salvadorans were robbed in Huixtla, including one woman, a twenty-year-old pregnant Honduran who had been raped in La Arrocera two days ago. She said it was the people she traveled with who raped her. They’d told her they were migrants and convinced her to
walk with them. Then all three of them raped her. When her son aborted between her legs, the bandits killed him with blows. Then they beat the woman until she lost consciousness. When she came to, she was completely alone. As well as she could, still bleeding, she managed to walk to the highway for help.
3
La Bestia:
Oaxaca and Veracruz
So many questions come to mind on top of the train. Why are we hanging on to the roof if the cars are empty? Why so fast? Who will protect us when we’re assaulted? What horror stories do the rest of the stowaways carry? And why do we have to ride this brutal, nocturnal beast?
The roofs of the train cars are where the undocumented Central Americans ride. These are the tracks where the wheels of steel slice through legs, arms, and heads
.
The whistle blows long and loud in the darkness. The Beast is coming. One blow. Two blows. The shrill call of the rails. Time to get moving. Tonight there are a hundred or so of them. They wake, shake off their sleep, heft packs onto their shoulders, grab their water bottles, and start onto the path of death.
Some of the silhouettes stand out against the other, more furtive shadows running next to the train. Thirty or so sharp, strong, looming profiles. These are the warriors. From their hands, like extensions of their bodies, flash their makeshift weapons of defense. These are men willing to take a stand against the bandits. They know that together they’ll have a chance against the rail-pirates waiting for them in the darkness of the jungle.