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?”
“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 Arrocer
a, 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.
The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail Page 6
