On the Plain of Snakes

by Paul Theroux

  A radical priest originally from Texcoco, Padre Alejandro Solalinde, founded the shelter in 2007, when he recognized that this area, pinched geographically and economically, was the focus of criminal activity against migrants. (And although Father Solalinde has received many awards, he has also received many death threats, so he has from time to time needed to hide to save himself.) The shelter’s mission statement says, “Due to Ixtepec’s strategic and geopolitical importance in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, it has been chosen by many gangs as the center of operations. It is the most desirable location for extracting enormous amounts of money from migrants, by any means possible.” Among the extortionists, the statement continues, are “Municipal, State and Federal Police.”

  The website offers what it calls “Volunteering Opportunities”: “At the shelter Hermanos en el Camino, we are all volunteers! This is your opportunity to support our migrant brothers and have a life-changing experience.”

  And once I convinced the gatekeeper that I was a harmless gringo, merely seeking information, almost the first person I met was an American volunteer, Junet (Junie) Bedayn, from Grass Valley, California, a thin, sweet-faced eighteen-year-old in an ankle-length flower-patterned dress and sandals, her hair covered with a kerchief.

  “Hola, bienvenido,” she said, and realizing I was a fellow American, she slipped into English, laughing a little, and explained how she had gotten there. Hoping to do something productive between high school graduation in Grass Valley and her first semester at Columbia University, she had found the Hermanos en el Camino website and the description of the ways volunteers could help. So instead of waiting on tables at a bistro in Grass Valley, or teaching kids to swim at a camp, or staring at a screen posting images on Instagram, she applied to the albergue and explained her qualifications: an honor student, fluent in Spanish, sympathetic to the plight of migrants, and committed to spending two or three months volunteering at the shelter.

  “You’re eighteen!” I said, remembering that when I was eighteen I was a lifeguard at a public swimming pool in Boston. When I was not covertly reading in my tall lifeguard chair (it was my On the Road and Generation of Vipers summer), I was horsing around with the other lifeguards and locker room attendants, who called me Paulie.

  But Junie Bedayn at that age got herself to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec alone, and defying the popular view that migrants were pests, she was volunteering to work among them and to learn by doing.

  “The tough part was convincing my mother and my aunt that I’d be all right,” she said. Not long before she applied, her father had passed away, so I could easily understand her mother’s anxiety. But Junie had prevailed. She had traveled by bus from Oaxaca, and had fallen seriously ill soon after arriving (“I forgot that you’re not supposed to drink the water”). There were some nuns on the staff, but only two other volunteers. Junie was now essential to the running of the shelter. And this whole outside section of shelter was occupied by young men—lean, grubby, hungry-looking, and idle, many of them having a siesta on straw mats and others eyeing this pretty but practical girl. But being brisk, Junie was unfazed.

  “That’s the dormitory,” she said, of a four-story building at the far side of the compound. She pointed to a wide crack in the wall. “That’s earthquake damage. So a lot of the migrants don’t want to sleep inside—they think it will fall down. They sleep over here,” and she indicated a large concrete slab, where many of them were supine.

  There were eighty men in the shelter, which was a small number. The usual number of migrants was two hundred, and they had housed as many as four hundred at a time, all from Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador. I tried to imagine four hundred homeless, penniless, hungry men lingering here for a week at a time, looking for ways to travel farther north. Many of them would be injured or sick, or traumatized by the journey from Central America and the train trip from Arriaga. I mentioned this.

  “We have two doctors and two nurses in the shelter,” Junie said. “As you can imagine, they’re pretty busy.”

  “Did the Caravan stop here?”

  “They passed by—what?—I guess a few weeks ago,” she said. “We fed all of them.”

  In a low voice, nodding toward the men lying on the mats, I said, “What do these guys do all day?”

  “They listen to music, they play games. Some of them do paintings—see those paintings hung up there?”

  Rectangles of paper daubed with rustic scenes, of white-shirted farmers in rows of green crops, of stiffened cows and goats, and other paintings of groups of dancers, gaily dressed in red, some of them masked. Farms and fiestas.

  “Actually, most of them do some sort of work,” Junie said. “They’re picked up at six-thirty in the morning and they do construction in town. There’s a lot for them to do, what with the earthquake damage. They get three hundred pesos a day, and they come back in the afternoon.”

  “What’s their goal?”

  “Most everyone is headed north,” she said. “Some of them are waiting for Mexican residency.”

  “And they’re all men?” I said.

  “No. We have twelve women and four children at the moment,” she said, and started across the compound to a smaller, fenced-in building that bordered a playground.

  As we approached the chain-link fence, a woman of about thirty in casual clothes—slacks and a blue blouse—saw us and said hello. This was Ana Luz Minerva, who was here volunteering and also collecting material for her doctoral dissertation. She was Spanish speaking and candid.

  “I’m studying children traveling alone from Central America,” she said.

  “Are there many?”

  “Oh, yes. Some as young as eight, going solo.”

  “I don’t get it. Why so young?”

  “Because the gangs in Salvador and Honduras are recruiting children as assassins, and it’s harder and harder for the gangs to find them, so the children are getting younger—the assassins, I mean. The children I’m concerned with are trying to escape.”

  “How do they recruit them?” The word was reclutamiento.

  “The gangs take them and threaten to kill their mothers,” Ana Luz said.

  “That seems pretty persuasive.”

  “And sometimes they do it.”

  “There’s no one to stop them?”

  “In some of the towns there’s vigilante justice—‘cleaning up the streets,’ they call it, killing the gang members, because the police do nothing.”

  As we were speaking under a tree, adjacent to the women’s shelter, a young woman passed by, saying hello.

  “She’s here with her two children,” Ana Luz said. “Often families travel together. The other day we had a woman of twenty-six traveling alone, with four children.”

  “Sometimes women are raped,” Junie said. “One who came here was raped by fourteen men.”

  “She told you that?” I said. “What did she say?”

  “She was kind of resigned to it. She said, ‘It had to happen, for me to get farther on.’”

  Ana Luz said, “For a while the Zetas were kidnapping migrants and forcing them to hand over their telephone numbers, to collect ransom from their families. That’s less of a problem now. Drugs are the main problem.”

  “What sort of drugs?”

  “Marijuana, crack, meth,” Junie said calmly, her innocent, late-teenage face clouded with a flicker of concern. “But users are always kicked out of here. You’ll see them across the street, in that squatter camp.”

  Both Ana Luz and Junie said they had to get back to work—on this sweltering day, at this underfunded shelter on a littered back lane buzzing with blowflies, in a remote town in the Isthmus.

  I said, “I admire you both a lot for what you’re doing. And Junie, your mother should be very proud.”

  “She worries about me,” Junie said. We were walking back through the compound, and the office where a nun—a supervisor—was peering at a computer screen, and twenty men were slouched on their mats, watching us pa
ss by. “But I worry about these people.”

  Outside, in the lane of the barrio, I saw the squatter camp—the druggies, the rejects from the shelter, the tough guys, the tortured-looking youths, about thirty of them. Four of them stood on the roof of the hut, calling out to me, asking for money. They stayed behind a barrier they had made—as aliens in Ixtepec, they had created a fortified camp out of junk wood, plastic sheeting, and wire. The stranded souls stared, sullenly complaining, isolated in their grim encampment. They were lost and vulnerable. I couldn’t blame them for resenting the ease with which I walked to my parked car, preparing to slip away.

  But then an odd thing happened that distracted and silenced them. About fifty feet up the road, a muxe walked out of a hut and through a gateway in a fence of scrap wood. Broad-shouldered and heavyset, apparently a man in a party dress, she came toward me, her plastic sandals scuffing the gravel in the dusty lane. Approaching me, she passed by the crowd of migrant men from Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador, where muxes were unknown but machismo predominated. On this hot afternoon, the muxe—middle-aged, with long black hair, wearing a tight black sparkly dress—ambled past gracefully, almost haughtily, in no particular hurry, while the fascinated migrants stared, gaping in their rags.

  To San Cristóbal

  On an impulse, soon after the visit in Ciudad Ixtepec, I drove back to the main road and headed east to San Cristóbal de las Casas, past the lagoons of Juchitán, and the hot fields of torn and flopped-over grass, for my rendezvous with the Zapatistas. It seemed that ever since the border at Reynosa, 1,400 miles away, I had been traveling on a royal road through a plain of snakes.

  Mexico is rich in many tourist-friendly respects—the traditional hospitality, the varieties of food, the elaborate fiestas, the gusto of the language, the consolations of family and faith. These attractive attributes are well known to the vacationer, and are the pride and boast of the Mexican. But there is more, and some of it is not pretty, and all of it is complicated.

  Set against these conventional satisfactions was the melancholy fact that life in Mexico is dangerous for nearly everyone—the fat cats in Mexico City, frantic about their safety, had armed guards; the poor in their huts and shacks defended themselves with upright shards of glass cemented to the tops of their garden walls, or failing that, heavily barred windows. Living behind fortifications, a high wall or a fence, was a visible pattern of Mexican life. La Vida Mexicana was a vision of battlements. The very rich behind their ramparts made themselves bulletproof, the middle classes were walled in, and even the poorest lived in enclosed compounds, irrationally comforted by wobbly bamboo fences and fierce guard dogs, as I saw in the villages of the Mixteca Alta.

  And though I found Mexicans to be instinctively welcoming, there was a murmur of hesitation behind every first encounter. In a suspicious shadow of their nature—the haunted substratum of darkness in their history, a marker in their DNA of survival and self-preservation—Mexicans had also to regard every stranger as a potential threat. The way forward in any relationship was based on trust, but trust was not taken for granted. It was something you had to earn. Ganar el respeto—to win respect—was a Mexican imperative; more profound was ganar la confianza, to win trust. You might be an informal friend, a casual amigo, but before you were respected and trusted, every nuance of your interactions was evaluated: your mood, your generosity, your openness, your reliability, even your posture, the way you stood or sat. Only then would a Mexican say, Se ganó mi confianza—He won my trust. Then you were a compadre.

  This was why I felt Mexican friendship to be unusually surprising and generous, the chosen friend grateful and relieved, the friendship at times more subtle, durable, and deeper than love. Abrazos is the salutation on most friends’ messages: hugs. Querido, the frequent greeting: dear. Compa, an intimate way of saying compañero.

  I have always extolled the virtues of traveling alone, seeking the solitary path, staying anonymous and meditative in the Zen of the open road—and I still think that silence, exile, and cunning (James Joyce’s words of defense) are useful strategies to any wanderer, especially one who wishes to write.

  But Mexico is full of contradictions for the visitor. You can sit in Cancún nursing a mojito and toying with a taco in utter bliss, needing nothing but a little money and the smile of a waiter sprinting to your table: millions do that. But the gringo on a back road in his own car is another matter, and much resembles the Mexican in his or her lack of protection, and fatal vulnerabilities. Reflecting in Juchitán, I had to admit that I could never have gotten this far in the country, or penetrated it so intimately, without the help of Mexican friends.

  Because in Mexico Mundo, life on the plain of snakes was so uncertain, every venture out of the security of the home could become dramatic and precarious. One of the more bizarre cruelties of the country, found in both its political and criminal cultures—and of course the two often overlap—were sudden disappearances. As I found out from the humanitarian organization Caminos Oaxaca: Acompañamiento a Migrantes, hundreds of migrants disappeared en route to the border; the feistier journalists disappeared; the forty-three students from Ayotzinapa disappeared; virtually every day people went missing in Mexico, kidnapped, abducted, lifted, deleted, never to be heard from again.

  On the days I was on the road in the Isthmus pondering this, two large demonstrations were held, in Mexico City and in Guadalajara, using the disappearance of three film-school students in Jalisco to call attention to what they called “an epidemic,” the disappearance of many others. Their slogan was “We Are Not Three—We Are Many.” Very many, based on official statistics from Mexico’s Secretariat of the Interior: the whereabouts of 15,516 people aged between thirteen and twenty-nine years remain unknown. The number of those younger than eighteen is more than 7,000. The Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group that promotes human rights in the Americas, released a statement in 2017 saying that over 32,000 people have disappeared in Mexico in the last decade. Mexicans told me that however tragic it was to confront the visible certainties of a murder, it was much harder for a family to deal with the agonizing bafflement of a vanishing.

  Most Mexicans I met said urgently to me, “Be careful,” and many went into great detail: places to avoid, how to store my car for the night so it wouldn’t be vandalized or stolen, where to walk, how to observe the protocols of village life: “Always talk to the municipal president, introduce yourself, before you ask a single question of anyone.” (And as I write this, I think: Does any American think to take a Mexican visitor to the US aside and offer such cautions?) Mexicans had ample reasons to be cynical politically. And they often warned me of the police, though I’d now had enough experiences with them to be wary, not only of the well-armed Federales in dark glasses, but also the shambling, potbellied local cops with their hats tipped sideways, glassy-eyed with greed at a roadblock and peering into my car, stroking their mustache and calculating the amount they could reasonably demand to release me.

  Mexican police: whenever I saw a black-and-white squad car parked by the side of a road I was traveling—and this was a frequent sight—I drove past in a state of apprehension, and was unspeakably happy when I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw that it had not pulled out to pursue me.

  The natural protections that Americans take for granted are almost unknown in Mexico. Most Mexicans lived without security, and in general for good reasons; political leadership was uninspiring. I thought of the Mexican woman tourist I had casually met at Monte Albán, who shook her head sadly and said, “Unfortunately we live in Colima”—a small state on the Pacific Coast, the drug route—“and when we travel by car we always have to go in a convoy, because the roads are not secure.”

  When the poor stoical peasant man in San Juan Bautista Coixtlahuaca told me that the meaning of the Mixtec word was “the plain of snakes,” I had a perfect image for the contradictions of Mexican life: its glory, as the plumed serpent, Quetzalcoatl, the supreme, dragon-like de
ity, the god of wind and fire and creation, worshiped by the Aztecs; and the snake as the dangerous lurker.

  “The most important pre-Hispanic deity was Quetzalcoatl,” my writer friend Diego Olavarría told me later. “Many places in Mexico have the serpent in their names: Coatzacoalcos, Coatepec. And ‘Cancún,’ in Maya, means Nest of Serpents.” And he elaborated: “Although our foundational myth, and our coat of arms, suggests that snakes are forces of evil that must be devoured by the virtuous eagles, the truth is more complicated than that. The eagles soar in the sky alone, but we Mexicans share the land with snakes.”

  It seemed to me that insecurity was a dominant theme in Mexican history, which is why people prayed for salvation and for miracles: to the Virgin of Guadalupe, to Saint Jude Thaddeus (San Judas Tadeo), to Santísima Muerte—Holy Death; to Jesús Malverde the narco saint; and to other spirit saviors. And it was why, from time to time, when a real savior appeared dramatically from nowhere to rescue the country, that person was elevated. It was the history of Emiliano Zapata, of Pancho Villa, of Lázaro Cárdenas—revolutionaries and reformers, but more than that, protectors of their people.

  Because, in general, Mexicans lived unprotected. Knowing their vulnerabilities, they had long ago ceased to yearn for anyone to care. The lesson I had learned in Mexico was that, more than almost any other person I had met in my life of travel, the Mexican was diligent in his or her self-sufficiency. This strategy to survive drove them from their villages and slums to cross the border—sometimes to share in the ideals of American life, but perhaps more often to toil as field hands or fruit pickers and to clean hotel rooms, grateful for the work.

  The most recent incarnation of savior revolutionaries, and the most tested, were the Zapatistas. From my first glimpse in the news in 1994 of the masked figure of Subcomandante Marcos leaving the Lacandón jungle and appearing in San Cristóbal de las Casas on horseback, under the banner of the Ejército Zapatista Liberación Nacional, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, I had wanted to meet him and to know more. Like many revolutionaries, he was regarded by some as a pest, by others as a charismatic leader, to still others as the savior and protector that poor and indigenous Mexicans needed. And it was odd: no one knew Subcomandante Marcos’s real name, no one knew where he lived in the jungle, and no one had ever seen his face.