He’s referring to the two main railways, the one that borders the Atlantic coast and the one that goes upcountry, closer to the Pacific.
The pollero is nervous. He smiles, purses his lips, smiles again. He doesn’t stop moving his hands and feet. A lot of polleros are addicted to cocaine, amphetamines, or caffeine pills that they use to stay awake through the night.
“What about the police?”
“They’re all connected! That time they got me there were police watching and they didn’t do a thing. After that I’ll never work for anyone. That’s why I don’t guide people anymore. Because if they see me again, I know I’m dead.”
COATZACOALCOS
Having arrived on the same train that brought Arturo and José from Tenosique, about twenty-five undocumented migrants are inside the church hostel. Most of them are resting on cots. Some of them are washing clothes. A few are sitting with their gaze fixed on nothing. They look worn out. At ten in the morning there were fifteen people picked up by Migration who are now on their way to being deported.
We’re in an industrial zone, one of those places that seem half factory and half town, not quite what you would call a city. There’s one main drag, a partly dirt road, that’s flanked on both sides by industrial warehouses. There are almost 300,000 people living here, mostly in narrow rows of wood-and-tarp shacks that run alongside the train tracks.
The word Coatzacoalcos comes from the Nahuatl, an indigenous language of Mexico, and means The Snake Den.
After an entire night riding the train, the newly arrived migrants do what they do at every stopping point: they ask and they listen. And what they hear today, news from a Honduran man, convinces them all to register their names at the hostel. “This morning,” the Honduran tells the crowd, “fifteen people were held up at gunpoint in front of a house just down the way.”
It’s typical. Eduardo Ortiz, from NCHR, explains: “At least ten people a day give themselves up to Migration authorities here.”
After a night of shootings, kidnappings, murder, white trucks and car chases, the migrants realize that they’ve arrived at what may be the worst leg of the journey. And yet from Coatzacoalcos they still have to get through Tierra Blanca, Orizaba, and Lechería.
A group huddles in the bunkroom to talk about the kidnappings. Some of them have tales to tell and others are just listening, imagining what may be in store. The Honduran is talking to Pedro, who’s also Honduran and is resting in his bunk. The first man talks of a friend who was kidnapped. Pedro looks visibly distressed, and then goes on to tell his own story.
He says that it all started here in Coatzacoalcos, in a house along the tracks. The ambush was well-orchestrated, he explains. He says he’ll have to keep on heading north; he doesn’t have any other option. He insists that anybody who has family in the United States should never admit it. To anybody. Ever.
“There was this woman named Mother,” Pedro says. “She was the coyote. She charged 2,500 dollars to get you across the border. Everything seemed good, all the way to Reynosa. But that’s where they kidnapped me. They threatened me with a pistol and smacked me around. I’m pretty sure they were Zetas. They took the 800 dollars I had on me and got 2,500 from my wife. Then, after a month and eighteen days, they finally let me go. And the police,” Pedro concludes, “were working with them.” He lies back on his cot and settles into silence.
There are some places where the fear is so thick you breathe it. For a migrant, Coatzacoalcos is one of those places. The stories tumble over each other:
“They kidnapped me on my last try.”
“I escaped from a kidnapping yesterday.”
“Three months ago I saw two women being grabbed.”
Just this morning, among a group of ten migrants waiting in the shelter, seven of them had stories of either being kidnapped or knowing someone who had been kidnapped.
I tell Ortiz, of NCHR, that right in front of us there are loads of kidnapping victims; that people are getting kidnapped blocks from his office, right where the train rails snake through town. But he’s not surprised. Kidnappings are his daily bread.
“The scope of the criminal gangs,” he explains, “has increased by about 200 percent. We have many reports saying that their modus operandi is the same here as in Tierra Blanca. Each kidnapper covers about fifteen ransoms. Which makes me think that the money wiring companies must know [based on the number of wires a single person receives] who they’re dealing with. We have trustworthy reports that municipal police have detained migrants and handed them over to the kidnappers.”
“I have three testimonies,” I tell him, “where someone who was kidnapped claims that another from his group who managed to escape came back after having been beaten, saying that he went to the local police to report the crime. And the police, instead of investigating, sent him straight back to the kidnappers.”
“Yes,” Ortiz responds, “it’s not that we don’t know about these cases. We know that the migrants get delivered. We haven’t heard about exactly this type of situation, but we know that the police are involved, that there is co-participation. We’ve had meetings with the Municipal President of Tierra Blanca, along with the of Salvadorean and Honduran Consulates in Veracruz, and an INM [National Institute of Migration] delegation. Usually the officials claim that what’s going on is not going on, and get uncomfortable when we start talking about kidnappings. Actually, only a month after they denied the abundance of kidnappings, the army stepped in and rescued twenty-eight victims. In the last few months everything has been happening in the light of day, with or without the presence of authorities. There are migrants who have told us: ‘The army patrols were passing by. They turned and saw that we were being held on the ground at gunpoint. And they kept on going.’
“It’s no joke. There are cases of one hundred people being held in a single house. All the neighbors know what’s going on, but nobody says anything. Nothing happens and nothing is going to keep happening to those who are passing through, because nobody claims to hear anything.”
Erving Ortiz (no relation to Eduardo), the Salvadoran consul, denounced this past August of 2008 that there are “about forty undocumented migrants kidnapped every week” in the state of Veracruz. He made the claim after the army rescued the twenty-eight victims in Coatzacoalcos. And this time the most influential newspapers in the country, Reforma and El Universal, picked up the story.
I try for the tenth time to contact Alfredo Osorio, the municipal president of Tierra Blanca, but he doesn’t answer my call. His secretary, Rafael Pérez, after promising me a few minutes on the phone, doesn’t pick up either. In the mayor’s office another secretary answers, and tells me that both Pérez and Osorio will be away all week. I call the press secretary at INM and they feed me more of the same, that they’re looking for the right person to answer my questions. I reach another of Osorio’s secretaries who tells me that the best person to talk with at INM (though I never learn this person’s name) is out of the office and will be for another few days. When pressed they say that they don’t know when he’ll be returning.
Meanwhile, just down the street from these same offices, the kidnappings continue. It’s so well-known, I figure, that there’s no way that if I finally did get an official on the phone they’d be able to answer me without a resounding yes. And with that yes they would be admitting that migrants are being systematically kidnapped just outside of their offices. Which is why, I figure, they don’t pick up their phones.
On April 4, 2008, the head of INM, Cecilia Romero, along with the secretary of the interior, Juan Camilo Mouriño,2 received a forty-page document titled “Kidnappings and Organized Crime.” The document contained a detailed account of what was occurring nationwide, along with three personal testimonies of victims. It was sent out by Leticia Gutiérrez, director of the Pastoral Dimension of Human Mobility, a Catholic organization that runs thirty-five migrant shelters across the country, including in the cities of Tierra Blanca, Coatzacoalcos, and Reynosa
. But neither Romero nor Mouriño ever responded.
The upspoken question becomes evident. How is it possible that the kidnappings are still happening when the local governments, the countries of origin, the media, the Mexican government, and the US government all know exactly what’s going on?
The NCHR continues to document cases and, about once a year, publishes recommendations and files official complaints calling for action. And the data are specific: these government agents, of this agency, on this date, in front of these witnesses, committed this violation of human rights. But it’s almost impossible to file complaints of omission—that, for example, a government patrol passed the scene of an in-process kidnapping without lifting a finger. And the smattering of migrants who, out of legitimate fear, are willing to stick around to file a complaint cannot help prove what the government did not do.
What Consul Ortiz says is clear: everybody knows, nobody acts, and the kidnappings continue.
TIERRA BLANCA
In Veracruz floods are slowing the trains. Only a few migrants are on route to Tierra Blanca. The sky is clear now, and the air very hot.
I see two men about a hundred yards from me. They look young. One, about twenty years old, is lying in a hammock outside a store. The other looks about fifteen and is sitting on a trunk beside his friend. Edu Ponces and I walk down the tracks. The landscape is empty. The lot we’re on is enormous, and there isn’t a single train. When there’s only a gap of fifty yards between us I turn to walk toward the two men. The youngest—very dark, extremely short—stretches his legs out. When I’m thirty yards away I try to meet their gaze. They both open their eyes wide and freeze. I open my mouth to say something. Then they jump and start running.
“Hey,” I say, “I’m a journalist!”
They stop.
“What happened? Did I scare you?”
“It’s just, things are really hot here.”
Five minutes later a youth of about eighteen, ragged and smelling of wood glue, comes up to us. He’d been sitting at a nearby corner alongside two drunks, watching us. The drunks, while smoking a joint, stretch out on the ground to gaze at the sky.
“Hey, you’re a pollero,” one of the supine men says to me as he relights his joint.
“No,” I say. “No, I’m not.”
“Yeah, you are, I’ve seen you around.”
“I said I’m not.”
“Oh yeah, you’re a pollero, and I’m going to call the Zetas boss so he can come pick you up.”
I feel a fit of anger come over me. I grab hard onto the man’s arm and pull him away with me down the tracks, gaining some distance from the rest of the group. All I wanted was to talk to the two migrants in peace. The guy yells at me to let him go. He says he was only kidding. Edu asks me to let him go too, and I do, but then the guy says again that he’ll call the local Zetas chief. Edu and I turn to leave, walking in the direction opposite the rails. It’s better not to find out if he’d actually have made that call.
We stop at a stand near the rails to buy a juice. It’s obvious we’re not from here. The vendor wants to know what we’re doing. We explain. He seems kind. He was born in Tierra Blanca and had previously migrated to the United States. Without preamble, as if I were asking about the weather, I ask if there are Zetas in Tierra Blanca. “You know,” he says, “there are things I can’t talk about. You guys are passing through, but I live here and I don’t want anyone asking, ‘Who said that about us?’ If they hear something about someone, they can control even where he walks. They can bring him down.” Without meaning to, he said much more than we’d expected. And we feel it’s time for us to leave the tracks.
Just one person in Tierra Blanca gives us permission to use his name, along with his testimony of the abductions. It’s Miguel Ángel, the deacon in charge of the parish and the small house that serves as a migrant shelter. He echoes what others have said in Coatzacoalcos, but with more detail, and exhibiting greater fear. It happens, he says, it always happens. It happens in broad daylight to dozens of migrants. It’s so common that there isn’t even much to say. The question answers itself.
After talking to Miguel Ángel, we finally find someone who’s been recommended to us a number of times: Osiel (not his real name). The rule Osiel gives us is clear: everything is off the record. That’s how everyone, or at least everyone who lives here, talks on Zetas turf.
We meet in a garbage dump full of old dishes and keepsakes from first communions and funerals. At this point it’s hard to get any new information, even if it’s all off the record. “I can tell you this at least,” Osiel says: “everyone knows the boss of all bosses. People call him Chito, and he lives there on the hill. He’s the one behind the kidnappings, but no one would give him away.”
A warning we had gotten back in Coatzacoalcos comes to mind: “If you go there asking about the kidnappings, Los Zetas will know in eight minutes. If you talk to any of the town’s authorities, they’ll know in three.”
“WE WON’T PASS THROUGH HERE ANYMORE”
In 2006 it was common to hear stories of terrified migrants complaining about the train raids in southern Mexico. During these migration checks (about two a week on each route, almost always at night), when migration authorities, federal police, or the military flashed on their headlights, the train would screech to a halt and everybody would start running. It was a free-for-all. The train raids typically took place in sites where on either side of the tracks there were steep embankments, making escape dangerous or impossible.
In both 2006 and 2007 there was an uptick in the incident reports of crimes committed not by bandits but by the authorities themselves: military, police, and even migration officers. Between May 2006 and April 2007, the investigator Rodolfo Casillas of the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO, an international institute with a branch in Mexico City) surveyed 1,700 undocumented Central Americans in Mexico. Among those interviewed, Casillas registered 2,506 human rights violations. The NCHR in Mexico also documented three cases in which common prisons were used to detain Central Americans charged with nothing more than a migration violation.
One female migrant who was thus imprisoned, as documented in Casillas’s report, was sexually abused by two other inmates in her cell. A Salvadoran migrant held in a Mexican prison nearly died of pneumonia after spending an entire night handcuffed to a cell bar. Two other cases detail migrants being tortured by government officials. There was a case of a minor who was beaten and urinated on in a migration detention center after he had tried to escape. There was also the documented case of an entire group of migrants forced by military officers to walk barefoot for miles, while two migrant Guatemalan men were forced to carry all of their shoes. Every time one of the men dropped a shoe, they were hit by the guards.
Since those years, 2006–7, the number of complaints by migrants against government officials has decreased, and yet at the same time the number of complaints about members of organized crime groups has risen. The voices of migrant shelter workers and human rights activists were heard, resulting in a decrease in migration checks on dangerous sections of tracks where amputations were common. However, this single success—decreased train raids—has been overshadowed by the stalemate in the government’s fight against organized crime.
Even the Mexican attorney general has publically recognized that kidnappings have passed from a “sporadic” to a “systemic” problem. Of course he is only referring to the kidnapping of Mexican citizens, who very rarely report these crimes not only for fear of the kidnappers, but also for fear “of the local authorities who are connected with and protect the groups that they should be combating.”
If not even a Mexican citizen, who votes and pays taxes, is willing to report a crime, what is the likelihood that an undocumented migrant will?
In 2008 the number of assaults maintained a steady pace. Assault became an expected toll for those traveling without papers across Mexico to the United States. And it was in this year that kidnap
pings—victims and reported incidents popping up all over the country—started to get more attention.
On September 30 in Ixtepec, Oaxaca, quite far from what is considered the most perilous leg of the journey, I meet Gustavo and Arturo. They are sixteen and eighteen years old respectively, both from El Cimarrón, Puerto Barrios, a Caribbean port town in Guatemala. When I meet the boys they are already on their way home.
Earlier, while riding the train north around four in the morning outside of Orizaba Los Zetas kidnapped the boys. “Okay motherfuckers,” someone yelled at them, “if you run we’ll shoot!” Seven armed men took them away. They were locked up for three days, beaten, and repeatedly threatened in a closed room. Their ransom was set at $500.
“They beat us,” explains Arturo, “and said that if we didn’t give them our family’s phone number they’d cut out one of our kidneys.” His kidnappers, he told me, held up a horse branding iron heated with a blowtorch and threatened to brand him with a Z. Arturo recognized a chubby guy who had befriended him back in Arriaga, and to whom he’d mentioned that he had family members in the United States. The kidnappers told the boys that the day before they were seized, they had released thirty other migrants.
“Overhearing their conversation, it seemed that they were a new group joining forces with the Zetas,” Arturo said. The kidnapping business had been going well. New agents were in demand.
One night, the boys saw a few of the kidnappers return to the safe house bloodied and bruised. One of them explained: “There were about a hundred migrants, armed with rocks, machetes, and sticks, who beat the shit out of us. But that’s not going to happen again. As soon as our own guns come in we’ll give that shit right back to them.”
When Arturo and Gustavo’s ransom was paid, the kidnappers demanded more money. Gustavo pleaded with them: “But we already paid! Let us go and we swear we’ll never pass through here again. We’re going home.”
The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail Page 12
