Assailants hop on the train whenever it stops, to hide among the migrants. Sometimes the conductor, in previously made agreement with the assailants, slows the train down enough so that they can jump right on. On this car, the men suddenly raise all of the sticks and rods they’ve been carrying for protection. An indigenous Guatemalan raises a branch as if it were a shotgun and peers out into the darkness, as if taking aim. His silhouette, he hopes, will confuse potential attackers. Those who need to get off make sure to do so in a well-lit place, so that if they’re assaulted others will see and maybe help.
We sense some sort of a fuss, a stirring. It’s moving toward us, but is still distant. Then, behind us, we see movement, a flashlight turning on and off, winking ever closer.
The surest sign that there’s a mass assault on a train, a migrant once told me, is when a flashlight moves over the tops of the boxcars. One time, when I was on this same route, I saw, in the distance, the splashing of light over the train. It came nearer and nearer, but then disappeared. I imagine this was when the assailants would duck down in some crevice to count their loot. Then, the small circle of light would blink on again and hover toward us. We saved ourselves thanks to the ingenuity of a Salvadoran who told our photographer to turn on all his lights, including his portable reflector and shine it toward the assailants. He did so. And the small circle of light stopped. It stayed put for a few minutes and then, when the train slowed, we saw the assailants hop off and lose themselves among the trees.
Train assailants, except in the kidnapping of women, which are orchestrated by highly organized gangs, are petty criminals—ranchers who live near the tracks. They’re townsmen, hardly armed, with only .38 calibers and machetes. But they’re also ruthless, knowing that if a struggle breaks out it will be kill or get killed. Push or get pushed off the train, onto the tracks.
A watch team is quickly put together. A Guatemalan man stands guard at the back of the car, while another is in charge of lookout at the front. Saúl, that nimble nineteen-year-old who until now has seemed so confident on top of The Beast, hides his face under the hood of his sweatshirt. “To look more ghetto,” he explains. At the back of the train we still see a flashing of lights, but it’s too far away to know what it’s about.
Saúl lights a cigarette and loudly repeats, “Fuck it, if it’s a robber, let him come. We’ll give it to him!” It’s Saúl’s fifth try at getting back into the United States after being deported a month and a half ago. There, he was part of the 18th Street Gang. He got involved in some petty assault crimes, which is what put him in jail before he got deported.
Five failed attempts. Each time caught by Mexican migration officials. He’s spent thousands of miles atop The Beast. He’s got one mantra, which he repeats often: “You gotta respect this animal. If you’ve seen what I’ve seen, you know you gotta respect.” Despite being the young, tough guy he is, he can’t go back to his country because the other big Latin American gang, the Mara Salvatruchas, has taken over the neighborhood where he was born. Saúl says he knows exactly where he stands: the steel boxcars are like the backdrop of a nightmare.
“It never stops being horrifying,” he says, “never.”
The image he can’t get out of his head is of an eighteen-year-old Honduran girl he traveled with a few months ago, during his first try at getting across. A nervous uproar washed down the train, because everyone thought a migration bust was going on just a few boxcars ahead, and she fell. She fell.
“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.”
Alejandro Solalinde, the priest who opened the migrant shelter in Ixtepec, is the reason those migration raids have diminished in southern Mexico. Leading protests before the National Institute of Migration, he argued that if raids must continue, at least they shouldn’t be conducted at night. The darkness, he explained, is too dangerous: there’s the constant roar of the train, the metallic chink-chink and those shrill squeals that sound like faraway screams, and all of the sudden, from every side, come blinding lights and migration officers. The lights and the train and the human screams: Get down! Get down! Get down! And then the train comes to a stop and shadows dive over the tracks where the steel wheels wait to slice through a body. This is unreasonable, Solalinde argued, you have to find a better way. Too many are getting crushed in those stampedes.
A blind crowd running, a blind crowd jumping, a blind crowd pushing.
Since Solalinde’s complaints, surprisingly, the night raids have ceased. A little ahead, however, after passing Mexico City and crossing Lechería, we’ll no longer be in the priest’s territory, and the nightly raids will pick up again.
The flashing lights are nearing us. When they get two cars closer, we’ll be able to see what it’s all about. Saúl lights another cigarette.
“Let’s make a pact,” he says, “that we won’t let them get us. A .38 has six bullets but those are shot off in a second. If we dodge those, then there’s only the law of the train left.”
This is the law of The Beast that Saúl knows so well. There are only three options: give up, kill, or die.
“A month ago,” Saúl says, “three guys got on the train between Arriaga and Ixtepec. All of them were young. Armed. Two of them had a machete and one a .38. The thing was that this time we just weren’t going to take it. The one with the gun walked past this one Honduran man, starting his rounds, taking our money, and it was so dumb, he should’ve stayed put in the front corner of the car where he could see us all, kept his gun aimed at us and then sent one of the guys with machetes to pick up the money. But he didn’t. And so the way it all went down is that the Honduran grabbed his legs, and the rest of us got up and surrounded the other robbers with machetes.”
There it was. The law of the train.
“First we beat the shit out of them. Then the Honduran asked another guy to help him out, and so the two of them got hold of the one with the gun. The Honduran got his arms and the other his legs, and they flipped him between two cars. The train cut him in two. They did the same to one of the others. When they were going for the third, one Salvadoran guy said we should leave him be so that he could spread the word that it’s best not to mess with our kind. They threw him over the side of the train but there was some sort of ledge there. Anyway, I think he died too.”
How many bodies must be out there, in the land surrounding these tracks?
Father Solalinde put it well: this land is a cemetery for the nameless.
The lights are close enough so that those standing guard can guess what it’s about: “Hey,” one of our sentinels says, “put away any weapons, it’s just some of the train crew wanting to charge us.”
Three crew members come to our car. The migrants cover their faces however they can, they turn their backs and avert their eyes to the sides of the train.
“Alrighty, boys,” one crew member says, “it’s my hunch there’s a checkpoint up ahead, in Matías Romero, and we can either stop there or dodge it, but let’s first see how you’re going to treat us.”
The train crew hops from boxcar to boxcar, acting like they’re doing their duty, as if charging passengers their fare. No one in our car responds or gives them a dime.
“Cheap sons of bitches!” one crew member groans out. “Up ahead you guys’re gonna get fucked.”
My journalist team and I don’t identify ourselves. Most train crews around these parts hate journalists. Eduardo Soteras hides his camera in his jacket but carefully peeks the lens out so that he can capture the extortion that, no doubt, those in the cars up ahead will face as well.
All the guys in this car are experienced train hoppers. They know that if there’s a checkpoint it’s not up to the driver to stop or not. The train has to stop. It can’t evade military pers
onnel or federal police officers.
The train changes lanes. A jerky domino effect. We hold tight, clinging to the roof struts beneath us as the train turns. The journey goes on.
It’s so cold it feels like someone is whipping us with glass. The cold slicing through our sweaters, cutting through our skin. Yet some migrants are able to sleep. They tie themselves to the train however they can, looping their belts or a piece of rope around the roof struts. The top of this boxcar, overflowing with people silhouetted by the moon, looks like a refugee camp. Dozing, numb, hugging themselves, hugging each other.
The law of the train reigns again. Things are bad, but they can get much worse. Saúl puts on thin cloth gloves and asks another of his rhetorical questions.
“You think this is cold?”
It’s needless to respond. We pass through a freezing wind and everyone starts shaking.
“This is nothing,” he goes on. “I’ve seen people’s fingers freeze, seen people slip off the train because the roof got so icy.”
Soon Saúl and the others will have to endure that ice. After Medias Aguas they’ll go through Tierra Blanca, after which they’ll pass Orizaba and its volcano and rattle on through what’s called “la Cordillera de Hielo,” the Ice Range. They’ll endure at least ten hours and up to two days on top of the train, as it labors across snow-capped mountains until reaching Lechería. It gets to be about 20 degrees Fahrenheit on that mountain range. And to make the trip more terrifying, The Beast plunges through thirty-one tunnels that are so dark you can’t even see your hands.
“Now that’s cold,” Saúl says.
A half hour passes, and the glow of nearby streetlights wakes those who were dozing. We’ve reached the train station of Matías Romero, the halfway point between Ixtepec and Medias Aguas. Again it’s time to be vigilant. The train slows to a stop, making it easy for assailants to hop on. Those traveling on the caboose ledges also straighten up with worry. At this point, only the quickest and most cunning could escape a migration bust. There’s a tall fence on either side of us, row upon row of boxcars circling us. To escape would mean diving into an obstacle course.
All of the sudden, we hear a violent scream.
“Yeah! Gotcha, asshole!”
It’s Mauricio, a forty-two-year-old Guatemalan ex-military man who’s on his tenth try at getting back to his life as a cement mason in Houston after he was deported three years ago. He’s screaming at the same gangster who, I recall, was smoking pot the entire evening we spent at Solalinde’s shelter in Ixtepec. He was already high by the time we scrambled on top of The Beast that night.
The reason for Mauricio’s anger is simple: back at the shelter, the gangster stole a pair of pants that he’d left out to dry. Mauricio swore revenge. Throughout the night, he eyed the gangster who sat a few boxcars back.
The gangster had just walked up to our car and, not yet seeing Mauricio, tried to convince a Salvadoran man that he, his wife, and twelve-year-old daughter should go back to the caboose to sit with him and his friends. He said he’d offer him and his family protection if there were a migration bust. Why would this gangster want to take this family under his wing? How many friends is he with?
Everyone responds to Mauricio’s scream as if it were a war cry. A shower of rocks pelts the gangster, who runs away terrified while the other migrants convince the Salvadoran man that he would’ve regretted accepting that offer.
Then, moments before the train is about to take off and start the next chapter of our journey, the warriors deliberate. They decide on confrontation. Mauricio, Saúl, a Guatemalan carrying a two-yard-long iron rod, and three Hondurans will go to the caboose and give the gangster and his friends two options: get off or get thrown off.
The expedition readies itself. Rocks, whittled sticks, junkyard poles, and cheers: “We’re going to smash his nose!” But with that, The Beast jerks and blows its whistle, reminding everyone that on this road, any control over what happens or doesn’t happen belongs to The Beast alone. The train speeds up. Again the domino effect: tac, tac, tac. Everyone is forced to cling to their spot. The journey goes on.
The next stop will be Medias Aguas. It’s a two-hour trip through multiple checkpoints along La Cementera and Matías Romero. Dawn is breaking.
The first sun beams from behind nearby hills and melts away any last shreds of darkness. The cold, though, is still unbearable, the struts we’re sitting on slippery and frozen. Our faces are numb and rigid. Our fingers are so tired they can barely grip the cold metal. Around us is hill upon hill of dried shrub. Here and there a leafless tree looms. The hills are flooded by fog, an impenetrable gray thickness that stretches to the farthest corners of our view. After eight hours of the intense cold, we’re beyond tired and our clothes are soaked by the permeating fog.
By the time we get to Medias Aguas it’s late morning. We reach the grand station, the station of stations where the Atlantic route and the Central route, the one we’re on now, merge. They won’t separate again until Lechería, three long stops ahead.
The train wails its whistle, waking everyone from their stupor. People try to shake off their exhaustion and quickly get their bags to scramble off the sides of the train before it comes to a complete stop. Most mass kidnappings happen in these moments, when the victim-laden trains come into mid-sized cities, like this one, which are dominated by organized gangs. We have to jump ship as soon as possible.
There’s no migrant shelter here like in Ixtepec, and there won’t be another at the next three stations either. Everyone looks for a patch of grass to rest on or the shade of a tree to protect them from the sun. The dirt road running parallel to the train tracks fills with Central American beggars asking for any little thing to eat. Then, with a little something or absolutely nothing in their bellies, they’ll doze with eyes half-closed until The Beast calls to them again, and the journey to the United States resumes.
4
The Invisible Slaves: Chiapas
The strangest thing is that I got used to it. My fear turned to helplessness, then to rage, and then, finally, to acceptance. The sordid lives of the women who live together in southern Mexico’s brothels were just as horrifying as the lives they lived before they came to the brothels. With these women, everyday words take on new meanings. The word sex means rape. The word family refers to a fellow victim. And a body is little more than a ticket from one hell to another hell. It’s called “The Trade”: thousands of female Central American migrants, far from their American Dreams, trapped in prostitution rings in Southern Mexico.
Three women are laughing furiously at the back table. In a gallery of metal, asbestos, and wire fencing, at the last white plastic table, the women, thinking back on the previous night, are roaring with laughter. The reason for their excitement isn’t quite clear. Standing some steps away from them, the only sentence I can make out is: “The old drunk was tripping over himself.” And then the guffaws ring out again. I couldn’t have imagined then that these same women, while explaining how they got here, would later be crying over their recent pasts.
It turns out they’re laughing about a client: some dipso who was trying to dance the night before, trying to pinch whatever body part he could get a hold of, jerking and jiggling in the middle of the bar until, finally, he fell flat on the face.
The women, chuckling along at the table, are waiting for the night to begin. They’ll soon start taking turns climbing onto stage to strip naked in front of a crowd of drunk and howling men.
This cantina (locally known as a botanero) is enormous: some fifty yards long and twenty wide, with thirty-five scattered white tables and a plain cement floor and counter. From the back of the bar come the buckets of beers and the botanas: small plates of beef, soups, and chicken wings.
The twenty-five women who work here are just arriving, coming in from the dirt road outside. These women are known as ficheras, waitresses who work for fichas, or little plastic tokens they collect, one for each beer, chat-up session, or dance a
customer pays them for. At the end of the night, usually as dawn is breaking, the waitresses cash in the chips they’ve earned. Each beer bought for the girls costs the customer 65 pesos worth in fichas, or about six dollars.
The bar, which I’ll call Calipso, is one of the ten or so strip clubs that light up the night in this part of the city. This border region, on the Mexican side of the Mexico–Guatemala border, is known as the “zone of tolerance.” What is tolerated is prostitution. There are whole strings of similar bars, with the same process and the same sort of clientele in the small towns and cities that run along this border. Tapachula, Tecún Umán, Cacahuatán, Huixtla, Tuxtla Chico, Ciudad Hidalgo … all small towns smelling of alcohol and tobacco, sweat and imitation perfume, and cheap sex. And in all of these bars, just like in Calipso, you’d be hard pressed to find a single Mexican woman. The bars are brimming with Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans. Here, “the market,” as the women are referred to, is exclusively Central American.
The owners run the bars tightly, even hermetically. Most of them have dorms attached where the women are cloistered after the nights dancing and working clients for chips. They do have to pay rent. The prostitutes in this region often refer to working one of the bars with the self-reflexive term, me ocupé, meaning, literally, I occupied myself, I employed myself. They speak as if they were two, as if one of their selves managed the other, as if the body that had sex with the men was a puppet that they themselves only temporarily occupied or employed.
I came to Calipso by way of a series of contacts. One NGO worker, who preferred to be left unnamed, directed me to Luis Flores, a representative of the International Organization of Migration (IOM), who sent me to Rosemberg López, the director of A Friendly Hand, an organization that works for the prevention of HIV, who sent me to the owner of Calipso, who he knew because the owner allowed him to come and give HIV awareness talks to the women who work there. López had to press hard to be given access to Calipso’s dancers, access which he wasn’t allowed in any other bar along the border. Most of the bars didn’t let him through the door. Some of the owners have even threatened to lynch journalists who’ve tried to film and interview their female workers. But the Calipso proprietor not only let López in, she told her employees to be open with him, assuring them that he wasn’t an undercover cop.
The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail Page 8
