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

by Oscar Martinez

  In recent years, public concern has begun to close down some of the bars that prostitute Central American women and girls against their will. Since 2007, when a new law was passed in Mexico against human trafficking, various civil organizations have increased pressure against the bars, making “trafficking,” especially trafficking women, a much more publicized issue.1

  Modern people trafficking, it turns out, is not the image many expect—a scar-faced man tending a cage of women. It’s a complex system of everyday lies and coercion that happens just behind our backs. For this very reason, for its open secretiveness, it’s important to look closely into the shadows, to speak with the victims of trafficking, with the women themselves.

  The three women still laughing in the back of Calipso have offered their testimonies.

  ALONE IN THE WORLD

  Erika (I’ve changed all of the names) wails with laughter. Though she has a thin thread of a voice and occasionally falls into silence, when she laughs, she shrieks, opening her mouth wide and even clapping her hands. She has white skin and reddish, curly hair pulled back by a headband. She’s Honduran, from Tegucigalpa, and thirty years old. A dancer, she has round, thick legs, a thick torso, and a curvaceous body. She is short, cheerful, playful, and a good teaser.

  “All right Daddy, what is it you want? What can we help you with?” Erika sits at my table. She orders a beer. It’s one thirty in the afternoon. She’ll keep drinking—beer after beer, all bought for her by clients—until well after midnight.

  When Erika was fourteen years old she left her country and twin babies behind. “I had to go to El Norte … looking for what we’re all looking for, a better life.” Una vida mejor. She traveled with five other girls around her age. “Things happened to them. What can I say? Bad things. We’d all heard that women on the trail get raped.” El Norte, meaning the United States, may not always be the final destination. Erika preferred to stay in the first state she came to north of the border—Chiapas, Mexico. She settled in Huixtla, known for its prostitutes, those shadows that anyone can see but few openly talk about. She arrived on a Monday or Tuesday, she’s not sure exactly when, and then went to the Hotel Quijote to ask for work.

  “But how is it,” I ask her, “that a pregnant fourteen-year-old has the guts to leave home all by herself?”

  A loud guffaw bellows from a table in the back. Erika turns to look. It’s early yet, and there are only two tables of customers, but men are already dancing with a couple of the prostitutes. A waitress swoops over to the tables with overflowing plates of chicken wings and shredded meat.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she says, “I hate it when my coworkers see me cry.”

  Tears are a defect in this world of stone.

  We step out onto a dirt road that leads to another dive bar. This city is like a dead-end alley. Up ahead there’s another brothel followed by a guesthouse, a euphemism for the row of motel-style rooms where prostitutes take their clients.

  “I never met my family,” Erika tells me. “See, I’m from Honduras but I never had papers. I never had a birth certificate either. I’m like an animal.”

  When she was still a girl she was told that her mother worked in the fields, “whoring like me.” Her mother had given her and her twin sister away as a baby to a woman by the name of María Dolores, who Erika remembers very well. “That old whore had seven kids, and we, my little twin and me, weren’t treated like her kids, we were like her slaves.” She always calls him her “little” twin, though had he not died at the age of six, he’d be thirty years old.

  What was her life like? Like a slave’s, she says. At five years old, her job was to walk the streets, selling fish and firewood. If she came back with something still in her hands because she hadn’t sold everything, María Dolores would whip her with an electrical cable until she had open sores on her back. Then María Dolores would cover those cuts with salt and oblige her “little twin” to lick it off. It was on one of those days, one of those sore-licking days, that her brother died on the floor where they both slept. They said it was parasites, Erika says. She’s convinced that those parasites came from the sores on her back.

  She cries and clenches her teeth. A truck pulls up and parks beside us. Three more clients open the door into Calipso.

  “The day my brother died, I got sick. They took me to the hospital but never came back to pick me up. After that, I lived like a drunk on the streets, sleeping between dumpsters.”

  She lived like that for two years. Selling this, carrying that, begging wherever, sleeping on corners. Eight years later she bumped into María Dolores, who talked her into coming back.

  “I was little,” Erika says. “I didn’t really get it. So I went with her.” The physical abuse wasn’t as bad, but, in general, life was worse. Omar, one of the woman’s sons, was fifteen years old and repeatedly raped her.

  “That’s why I wonder if I’ll ever understand what it is to have normal sex. I got so used to him tying up my legs and arms and having sex with me like that.”

  Sitting on the curb of a dirt road, weeping just outside of Calipso, Erika paints a typical portrait of the Central American migrants whose suffering lights up the nights of these border towns. Many of the women have no previous schooling. They flee from a past of severe family dysfunction, physical and sexual abuse, and they often come to these brothels as girls, little girls, incapable of distinguishing between what is and what should be. They’re fresh powder, ready to be packed into the barrel of a gun.

  “If you’re not from the social reality of our countries, you’re not going to understand,” explained Luis Flores who, as head of the IOMin Tapachula, leads community education projects in the area and case-manages Central American human trafficking victims. Here, he explains, migrant women are turned into a product. “They come having already been raped and abused. They come from dysfunctional families in which it was often their father or uncle who raped them. What many of them won’t tell you is that they knew they’d be raped on this journey, that they feel it’s a sort of tax that must be paid. According to the Guatemalan government, it’s estimated that eight of every ten Central American migrant women suffer some form of sexual abuse in Mexico. It’s six of every ten, according to a study done by Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies. They travel with that lodged in their minds, knowing that they’ll be abused once, twice, three times … Sexual abuse has lost its terror. That’s the vantage point from which to understand human trafficking. At a certain level, they know they’re victims, but they don’t feel that way. Their logic runs like this: yes, this is happening to me, but I took the chance, I knew it would happen.”

  There is, as Flores says, an expression for the transformation of the migrant’s body: cuerpomátic. The body becomes a credit card, a new platinum-edition “bodymatic” which buys you a little safety, a little bit of cash and the assurance that your travel buddies won’t get killed. Your bodymatic, except for what you get charged, buys a more comfortable ride on the train.

  Erika, the girl who was repeatedly raped from age eight to thirteen, gave birth to twins and then, as if her suffering were inevitable, her story goes on.

  “I didn’t understand what pregnancy was. I only felt I was getting fat. That woman accused me of being a whore. I told her it was her son that did it, but she told me I was like my mother, a prostitute, and that just like her I’d ditch my future kids like dogs. She dragged me out of the house naked and walked me five blocks to a nearby park and left me there. And so I had to start completely from scratch.”

  It meant begging again, picking through trash, sleeping on street corners. She gave birth there, on the streets, and then she decided to, as migrants say, “try her luck.” She left her kids with one of María Dolores’s neighbors, and started her trek north to the United States with another five young women. Here’s where, after hearing that the journey would be full of death and humiliation, and after witnessing many of those she’d been traveling with get hurt, she decided to stay. She do
esn’t remember if it was a Monday or a Tuesday when she came to Hotel Quijote.

  Flores describes a typical transition: “Most start out as waitresses. Then they become call girls and finally end up as prostitutes. Usually they get to that point because they’ve been lied to.” An illustrative case study by Rodolfo Casillas delineates the range in ages that traffickers target: “Between ten and thirty-five years old, hardly ever older. And the trafficking problem is exacerbated with underage migrants, specifically those between eleven and sixteen years of age.”2

  At the Hotel Quijote, Erika was propositioned.

  “It goes like this,” she explains. “Some asshole comes in and says, ‘Let’s get out of here. You and me. I can easily get you a job at another bar where you’ll get paid more.’ And then, if you’re not careful, it can get to be a big problem. And all the time a ton of guys tell you that. ‘I’ll get you a place to live, I’ll get you all the papers and documents you need, I’ll get you a job.’ ”

  She doesn’t share any more details. Like most trafficking victims, she tells her story in the third and second person, and it’s hard to tell what pieces of her story are directly autobiographical. It’s as though the horrors of their lives were shared by all, as though what happened to one them has inevitably happened to all of them.

  Erika assures me she didn’t let herself get tricked. “I was no fool.” She says it was by her own volition that she left her post at Quijote and sought out a dive. She says that even as a girl she knew to go straight to the managers and lay out her ground rules: “I said to them I’m not here to work only as a dancer, but I don’t want to be locked up like the others either. I’m not an idiot. I’ll work here every night, finish, and get paid right away.’ See, it’s because I grew up on the street that I at least knew how to look out for myself.”

  I ask about the other girls.

  “They were locked up. Never let out. They ate only once a day. Whatever man took them there said to them, ‘It’s not so bad, you’re gonna be able to work, but you also have to pay.’ Whoever brings you there asks for his cut from the owner of the dive, and that, of course, is taken out of your pay. They sell you. But that never happened to me. Only to the others, because they’re stupid.”

  This rationalization is commonly used as justification—those who let themselves be exploited have only themselves to blame. But, as Flores explains, such passive victims are young girls with no education, who don’t know how to condemn or report anything that happens to them, who are easy to intimidate. If you try to escape, I’ll call Migration and they’ll get hold of you real fast! “It’s a problem of submissiveness,” Flores explains. Of 250 sexually abused migrants surveyed by the IOM, only fifty accepted medical and counseling help. Many didn’t see the point, because they expected it would all happen again; there was still a lot of road left to walk.

  Though solidarity among Central American migrants isn’t unheard of, the world of migration tends to isolate people. The journey is hard; tender moments are rare. Those recruiting fresh bodies to work in the brothels are the same Central American women who, against their will, were tricked into prostitution and now, years later, are offered extra pay to trick other newly arrived girls by making them the same false promises they once heard: you’ll become a waitress, you’ll be well paid.

  Flores has a term for this: spiral logic. “I, a Honduran, a Salvadoran, a Guatemalan, got here when I was fifteen years old and I had to go through it, but now I have my own job which is doing the same thing to other girls who have to get through this before they can do what I’m doing.”

  Erika remembers her first days of prostitution with disgust. She’d close a deal with a man at a dive, and they’d go to a motel for a half hour. The room would fill with the smell of beer and sweat and she’d let herself be used. Sometimes it was like these men felt that they owned her for that half hour, that she was like a house that they’d rented and that they could do inside her whatever they pleased. She remembers that many times the sessions ended with what she’d gotten to know so well as a girl: insults and violence.

  She takes out a small, circular mirror from her purse and looks into her eyes. She puts away the mirror, lights a cigarette, takes a drag, and then looks ahead, her eyes narrowing as though she’s concentrating on returning from her past. She has sixteen years of this under her belt. Her vulnerability quickly fades. The laughing, teasing woman comes back, and she says goodbye to me with a playful slap on my arm. She walks into Calipso swinging her white, wide hips.

  Flores explains that Salvadoran and Honduran women are particularly sought after for this business because, unlike the Mexicans of this indigenous area of Soconusco, Chiapas, or the small, dark-skinned women of Guatemala, their bodies tend to be fleshier and they tend to have lighter skin.

  It’s three in the afternoon and Calipso is filling up. Another batch of men have come in. The jukebox pop music clashes with the mustachioed, big-bellied clientele. Keny, a Salvadoran with small, button-like black eyes, is in the middle of delivering a round of orders to a table when a manager stops her. They talk a moment and then Keny walks toward my table.

  Calipso is, relatively speaking, not a bad place to work. Here pimps don’t decide who the women sleep with. If they feel like closing a deal, they do it on their own. If they only want to serve food and drinks, they can. At other clubs, or on street corners, most Central American sex workers have two pairs of eyes locked on them at all times, watching every move.

  Flores remembers one time, while trying to do interviews, he approached a woman working a corner at the central plaza of Tapachula. He explained that he was putting together interviews for his organization and asked if they could talk. The girl glanced nervously over her shoulder. “I can’t, my boss’ll hit me,” she excused herself, while imitating, with her gestures, a typical negotiation with a customer. Smile, no, no, thank you, goodbye.

  Keny asks for water. She’ll switch to beer later. Today is Friday, and she needs to last through the long night to make it all worth it. The difference between a Friday and a Saturday is that white-collar office workers come in on Fridays, because they have both weekend days off. On Saturdays it’s the laborers who like to end their work week with a Central American girl.

  TWICE BANISHED

  Keny speaks in a whisper. It’s a soothing sound that issues from somewhere deep in her throat, but sometimes the whisper turns hoarse, her voice tiring, pausing as she closes her small black eyes to add emphasis. “I’m here,” she says, speaking slowly, “because I don’t have anyone on the other side.” She lets her eyelids fall shut, straightening her long black hair.

  Her life has been marked by that huge magnet that pulls Central Americans north. When she was just a baby her grandmother left for El Norte. When she was fourteen, her father went north as well. Then her mother followed. When she was fifteen her older sister was pulled by the magnet, and Keny was left living with an aunt and uncle.

  “They didn’t even feed me,” Keny recalls. “They took the money my father sent and they beat me instead of raised me.” Her grandmother, after getting US papers, returned and saw that Keny was living like a martyr. She arranged for her to move in with some of her grandmother’s friends. But the change didn’t help. Keny stayed with the new family until, when she was sixteen, the mother of that family died of a heart attack and the newly widowed husband started beating and molesting her. For help, Keny called her older sister, who had moved to Guatemala City on her way north. Then she too decided to try to follow the family north.

  She moved in with her sister but only for a few months. The sisters didn’t get along. They got in a fight and Keny almost lost a breast when her sister stabbed her with a knife. “She left me mutilated,” Keny explained. “And so I went to the streets. That’s when I started to work in a cantina.”

  She bounced between a number of different bars and cantinas, eventually moving to Puerto Barrios to try dancing at a joint called the Hong Kong. When she first arrived
she was wearing a child’s T-shirt with cartoon dinosaurs on it. The other waitresses, after having their laugh, decided to show her the ropes. They taught her how to dance, how to put on makeup, how to woo men, how to smoke pot and crack, how to snort coke, and how to drink, and drink a lot. “When I left that place,” she said, “I was showing all of my cleavage.” She had left the dinosaur shirt behind.

  One of the older girls from the Hong Kong kept taking trips over the border and into Mexico, coming back with a lot more money than anyone was earning in Puerto Barrios. “They just pay more in Huixtla,” the girl would explain to the newbies, like Keny, who was still only seventeen.

  Keny took the hint. She moved to Cacahuatán, Mexico, and started working at the infamous El Ranchón. For a while El Ranchón was closed after some clients got into drug trouble, but after a change of name, to Ave Fénix, things seem to be back in swing.

  Keny’s been working these joints for seven years now, from Huixtla to Tapachula to Cacahuatán, from bar to bar.

  I ask her if she also works as a prostitute, or just for the chips.

  “I worked a little bit at first,” she says. “I didn’t like it, though, because you had to be with someone that you didn’t feel anything for. You never know who you’re going to run into. Some of them like to hit. A john’s gotten aggressive with me a few times, but when you try to cool them down they start hitting. So now I just stick with dancing, chips, plus drinking.”