The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail

by Oscar Martinez

  “I saw her,” he remembers, “just as she was going down, with her eyes open so wide.”

  And then he was able to hear one last scream, quickly stifled by the impact of her body hitting the ground. In the distance, he saw something roll.

  “Like a ball with hair. Her head, I guess.”

  Throughout Central America and Mexico, as in the neighborhoods populated in the United States by migrants who manage to reach it, after years of widespread and untreated, silently endured trauma, there must be entire communities that could be converted into mental health clinics, or even asylums.

  The migrants are not just pushovers and victims. Martínez shows how rugged and capable they often are—these working men, stone masons, construction workers, mechanics, peasant farmers—and how bravely they often fight back, protecting their companions and their women from being forced off the train and herded into the forest. “This is the law of The Beast that Saúl knows so well. There are only three options: give up, kill, or die.”

  On one of his rides atop the train, Martínez witnesses and grippingly describes a series of battles between the migrants and their attackers, who pursue them in white pick-up trucks. He notes in conclusion: “After the attack on the train, where there were more than a hundred armed assaults, at least three murders, three injuries, and three kidnappings, there was not a single mention of the incident in the press. Neither the police nor the army showed up, and nobody filed a single report.”

  Out of indifference, moral mediocrity and fear, the Central American migrants’ plight has gone mostly unnoticed in Mexico and the United States. Now and then an especially large massacre, like that of seventy-three migrants in Tamaulipas in 2011, brings some media focus, but it passes all too quickly. Catholic Church leaders such as the priest Alejandro Solalinde in Oaxaca have been at the forefront of efforts to force Mexican authorities to provide better protection for migrants. Of the many silences that overlay this story, one of the most profound is that of the United States, where the tragedy of the migrants is what news editors call a “nonstory,” one to which Washington could not be more indifferent. Throughout the 1970s and 80s the United States fanned the civil wars of Central America, supporting repressive governments, devastating those countries, and helping to create cultures of violence, all in the name of defeating communism—with a promise to nurture just, democratic societies once peace was attained. There was no nurturing, no rebuilding, and even after the wars were over, there was no peace. The United States mostly turned its back, and now it spurns the offspring who flee what it created in Central America.

  Óscar Martínez travels the length of the now nearly impregnable northern border, which has become a walled war zone where the US carries out a nightly battle against the Mexican cartels that use ever more ingenious methods to deliver their drugs across it. Here the cartels consider the migrants a nuisance, forcing them to search for ever more remote and dangerous slivers of land where they might be able to pass. Here too, they face kidnappings, assaults, betrayals and rapes. In the book’s final chapter, set in Nuevo Laredo, Martínez follows a Honduran migrant named Julio César. It is nearly impossible to cross in Nuevo Laredo, where the strong currents of the Río Bravo regularly drown the desperate migrants who try to swim it. But Julio César studies the river with the meticulous patience of a frontier tracker, walking far outside the city until he discovers a remote spot where the waters are shallower and an island divides and weakens the current. He will wait several months, until April, in the dry season, when the river will be even lower, to attempt his crossing. Julio César incarnates many of the book’s lessons: patience, courage, attentiveness, getting as close to the subject of concern as one can, “the difference between knowing and not knowing.” Those are the book’s closing words. In some ways they encapsulate the methods Óscar Martínez followed in his own crossing over into the hidden and terrifying lives of the Central American migrants.

  1

  On the Road: Oaxaca

  There are those who migrate to El Norte because of poverty. There are those who migrate to reunite with family members. And there are those, like the Alfaro brothers, who don’t migrate. They flee. Recently, close to the brothers’ home in a small Salvadoran city, bodies started hitting the streets. The bodies fell closer and closer to the brothers’ home. And then one day the brothers received the threat. The story that follows is the escape of Auner, Pitbull, and El Chele, three migrants who never wanted to come to the United States.

  “I’m running,” Auner says, his head ducked down, not meeting my eyes, “so I don’t get killed.”

  The first time I asked him, though, he told me he was migrating to try his luck. He said he was only looking for a better life, una vida mejor, which is a common saying on the migrant trails. But here in southern Mexico, now that Auner and I are alone, with the train tracks next to us and a cigarette resting between his lips, now that we’re apart from his two younger brothers who are playing cards in the migrant shelter’s common room, he admits that the better word to describe his journey is not migration, but escape.

  “And will you come back?” I ask him.

  “No,” he says, still looking at the ground. “Never.”

  “So you’re giving up your country?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ll never return?”

  “No … Only if anything happens to my wife or daughter.”

  “And then you’ll come back?”

  “Just to kill them.”

  “Just to kill who?”

  “I don’t even know.”

  Auner knows nothing of the men he runs from. Back home, he left behind a slew of unsolved murders. Now, blindly, he runs and hides. He feels he has no time to reflect. No time to stop and think what connection he and his brothers might have with those bodies on the streets.

  Auner left El Salvador, along with his wife and two-year-old daughter, two months ago. Since then he’s guided his two brothers with patience and caution. At only twenty years old, he tries hard to keep his fear in check so as not to make a false step. He doesn’t want to fall into the hands of migration authorities, doesn’t want to get deported and sent back to El Salvador, which would mean starting again from scratch. Because no matter what they’re put through or how long it takes, they must escape, he says, they must get north. To El Norte. “Get pushed back a little, okay,” Auner says, “it might happen, but we’ll only use it to gain momentum.”

  Without a word, Auner gets up, ending our conversation. We walk down the dusty sidewalk, back toward the migrant shelter. We’re in the small city of Ixtepec, in the state of Oaxaca, the first stepping-stone of my journey with them. At the shelter, a place made up of palm-roof huts and half-built laundry rooms, Auner huddles next to El Chele and Pitbull, his younger brothers. El Chele has a boyish face, light skin, and a head of curly hair. Pitbull has the hardened face of an ex-con and the calloused hands of a laborer. Auner is the quiet one.

  A humid heat wraps around us, so thick I feel I could push it away. The brothers are talking about the next step in their escape. There’s a decision that needs to be made: stay on the train like stowaways, or take the buses through indigenous mountain towns with the hope that they can avoid checkpoints.

  A journey through the mountains would take them through the thick green Oaxaca jungle, well off the migrant train trails. But it’s a route studded with checkpoints and migration authorities, and usually only taken with the help of a guide, or coyote. Auner first heard of the trail thanks to Alejandro Solalinde, the priest who founded and runs this migrant shelter. Solalinde is a man who understands the value in giving an extra option, even one so dangerous, to those who flee.

  In contrast, the voyage by train would have Auner and his brothers clinging like ticks onto its roof struts for at least six hours en route to Medias Aguas, Veracruz, the home turf of Los Zetas. They’d then have to hide in ditches on the outskirts of the town, waiting for the next train, ready at any moment to sprint for th
eir lives.

  The infamous gang known as Los Zetas was formed in 1999 by the narco-trafficker Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, founder of the powerful Gulf Cartel, arrested in 2003, and a US prisoner since 2007. Cárdenas originally created Los Zetas to act as his organization’s armed wing, composed of thirty-one elite Mexican army deserters—some of whom had trained at the US-led School of the Americas—but the group expanded and evolved, becoming increasingly, violently autonomous. By 2001, the group had already added to its brutal money-making repertoire the mass kidnappings of undocumented migrants for ransom money. By 2007 it had broken away to form an independent cartel. In 2009 the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) called the Zetas, simply, “Mexico’s most organized and dangerous group of assassins.”

  The answer to the Alfaro brothers’ question might seem obvious to someone not familiar with the rules of the migrant trail. Mexican cartel violence has become increasingly notorious through media portrayal, Mexican and US government denunciations, and the cartels’ own use of a gallows-style display of their mutilated murder victims. But the risks of traveling through the mountains, so as to avoid Los Zetas, aren’t inconsiderable. Of every ten migrants from Central America, six are apprehended and mugged by Mexican migration authorities—a potential catastrophe for these guys who pocket, as if they were jewels, the $50 their father sends from the United States every four days. They use this treasure to buy their once-a-day ration of tortillas and beans, which they eat quickly, hidden in thickets, before continuing their escape. And getting caught by the Mexican authorities doesn’t just mean returning home with their heads down and their pockets empty. Their return could cost them their lives, as could riding atop the train, which continuously throws migrants off its back, dismembering or maiming so many.

  Just today I learned that a boy named José lost his head under that train. José was the youngest of three Salvadorans I traveled with two months ago. We skirted highways and ducked from authorities as we ventured through another of the high-traffic points along the migrant trail, La Arrocera. His decapitation, I’m told, was a clean cut. Steel against steel. It happened close to Puebla, some three hundred miles north of where we are now.

  Though the dream is easy, the voyage is incredibly dangerous. Sometimes it’s simply the exhaustion that kills you. Sometimes it’s just one slow moment of slipping into sleep, and your head is gone from your body.

  José was shaken off by one of those train shudders that so easily dislodge you when you’re worn out. Marlon, who was traveling with José at the time, was the one who broke the news to me. He confessed José was fleeing too. But unlike Auner, José knew exactly what he was fleeing from. He escaped from the gangs that closed down his bakery. They were imposing an unpayable extortion tax: $55 a week or he’d be killed. The entire company went to ground, then fled. Now one of them has already returned to El Salvador in a black bag.

  The Alfaro brothers, Auner, Pitbull, and El Chele, will decide what they’re going to do tonight. And they know that they need to make the right choice. Otherwise they’re going to meet in front of them—their bodies hitting the street—what they meant to leave behind.

  THE FIRST BODY

  “Hey bitch!” Pitbull heard someone call behind him. He knew the call was for him.

  And when he turned he saw the muzzle of a nine-millimeter pistol sticking in his face. That’s when he dove. Before he even hit the ground he heard the shots. Two bullets pierced the face and back of Pitbull’s friend, Juan Carlos Rojas, a known gang member. A piece of Juan Carlos’s brain landed on Pitbull’s imitation Polo shirt, which he had bought in a slot machine hall in Chalchuapa, El Salvador, to impress the ladies. It was a sunny February day in 2008.

  Pitbull felt, in that moment, nothing but blind rage. It came up from his stomach and shot through his whole body. He lost control. He turned into an animal.

  Pitbull looked down for a moment at Juan Carlos, who was covered in gore and plainly dead, and then he took off running, screaming incoherently at the assassin and his accomplice, who were trying to escape. But the one who’d fired the shot looked dazed. He was hunched over and heaving. Pitbull, either not caring or unaware that the man still carried the nine-millimeter, saw him as nothing but prey. The prey, a drunk who was about fifty years old, stopped again, pointed his pistol at Pitbull and said, between gasps, “Stand still, you dumb fuck, so I can aim at you!”

  There was nothing to be done. Froth rose in Pitbull’s stomach, in his throat. When his prey was only a few steps away he jumped at him, his hands out like claws. The old man’s nine-millimeter fell to the ground.

  They say around these parts that rage is cured more easily with a clean fist. But Pitbull just started whaling on the man’s face.

  When two cops finally showed up, they pulled off the still raging Pitbull. Then they helped up the half-conscious old drunk. His accomplice had quietly slunk away. Being in a country like El Salvador, the cops drew all the obvious conclusions: a young man in the middle of a crime scene—a gangster for sure. The kid was the first they questioned.

  “Which gang are you in?”

  “None, you fuck,” spat Pitbull, with typical grace.

  “You’re with the 18’s like your friend they killed, aren’t you?”

  The officer already knew about Juan Carlos, knew that he was part of the infamous 18’s. In the smattering of towns that make up this single city, Chalchuapa, even with 73,000 people, the cops know most of the gang members by clan, by name, by nickname, and even by rank.

  “You deaf or fucked up?” Pitbull said. He was calmer now, had slipped back into his youthful tough-guy jargon. The cop, on the point of getting violent, took a step toward Pitbull, but the police sub-inspector showed up, just in time, easing the tension.

  “Listen, kid,” he said to Pitbull, “they already told me you were looking for revenge. Tell me now. You want to come to court and testify so we can close this case?”

  “You’re in the game too,” Pitbull responded, refusing to go testify.

  Pitbull was seventeen years old. Already he was itching for adventure, for sharpening his edges. And this he did. A few days later, dressed as a police officer, he went to downtown Chalchuapa looking for the murderer’s accomplice who had gotten away. All day he searched through alleyways and makeshift street shops. He told me he even found it pleasurable, another adventure.

  “It was ballsy to walk around in a cop’s uniform,” Pitbull told me. “Too bad we found the old fuck the easy way.”

  In the end, Pitbull went to the station to identify both the assassin and his accomplice. Pitbull and the murderers, standing face to face.

  “These are the two shits who killed Juan Carlos,” he said to an officer as he pointed them out.

  But the assassins also got a good look at Pitbull that day. And in the relative calm of the moment, they were even able to remember that they’d seen him before, that they knew who he was. The Chalchuapa slums are a small world. The assassins recognized that Pitbull was the son of Silvia Yolanda Alvanez Alfaro, the woman who owned the shop next to the pupusería1 and on the other side of the Conal factory. They knew that this kid with a shaved head and a silver earring was Jonathan Adonay Alfaro Alváñez. He was a brickworker, farmworker, carpenter, plumber. A jack-of-all-trades. He was Johnny. He was Pitbull. Of course they knew him.

  PITBULL THE TOUGH GUY

  “You must have had some idea,” I say to Pitbull. We’re sitting on the rails of the Ixtepec train line, drinking soda and smoking cigarettes.

  After Auner told me why they were on the migrant trail, I asked—feeling as if I were asking a father for a date with his daughter—if I could speak to his two younger brothers. Auner gave me the go-ahead. I started with Pitbull. Silently we slipped out of the commotion of Father Solalinde’s migrant shelter and sat down among towering shrubs. I wanted a shielded place so that he’d feel safe, so he’d feel safe enough to remember.

  “No, man,” Pitbull says. “I have no fucking clue who th
ose bitches are. I was just cruising the game rooms with my friend. He told me he had to grab something at the bar. Then, real calm, he came out. We started walking and then the two old fucks just jumped out and popped him.”

  “And you don’t think it’s them threatening to kill you now?”

  “I don’t have a clue which sons-of-bitches are threatening us.”

  Nothing. Not even a clue. Pitbull flees, but he doesn’t know from whom. If he were a character in a movie, of course, Pitbull would have snooped around, hit up his barrio contacts, tried to put a name to the assassins, maybe put on the police uniform again. But Pitbull lives in the real world. He’s just an eighteen-year-old kid steeped in the violence of one of the most dangerous countries on the continent.

  What’s more, not even the police reports contain many details. When they killed Juan Carlos—January or February, he doesn’t exactly remember—nine other men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five were killed, just in Chalchuapa. And Pitbull doesn’t even know if Juan Carlos was his friend’s real name.

  “That’s what he called himself,” Pitbull says. “But he was in a gang and he had problems in some of the other barrios. I heard people call him a lot of different names.”

  William, José, Miguel, Carlos, Ronal, Unidentified, any of these could have been Juan Carlos. All of these young men were murdered in Chalchuapa in the same month. And even if one were to know the facts of the murder, I have a hunch that, like the facts of so many other migrant murder cases, the details would be so scarce they’d simply disappear. Evaporate. It’d be as if nothing had ever happened.