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

by Oscar Martinez

  And the kidnappers relented. But they didn’t even bother to release them at night: they simply marched them at pistol point to the central train station. It was four in the afternoon. Gustavo and Arturo recall that as they were being marched through the streets, the windows and doors of the houses along their way slammed shut one after the other.

  1 People smugglers, like coyotes. The name means poulterer; their clients are the pollos or pollitos, chickens or chicks.

  2 Mouriño died in November 2008 in a plane crash, widely suspected to be the work of the Sinaloa Cartel.

  6

  We Are Los Zetas: Tabasco

  After a year of hearing their name everywhere, we decided to find them. But where? Where do you find Los Zetas? We decided on Tenosique, the small town in Tabasco that marks the beginning of the route they control. What we found surprised us. We found them in a group of girls selling sodas, in a police officer, in a journalist, in some petty delinquents riding the rails. We found them everywhere, in a town riddled with fear.

  After seeing this place in action for a week, I tell him, I guess that his life must be very complicated. Hell, I have no idea how he’s even still alive.

  The undercover agent smiles proudly as he looks me in the eyes. He remains silent a moment. He turns to glance toward the door, though he knows we’re alone in this small, aquarium-like café. We could be seen through the huge windows lining every wall, if it weren’t for the large mango tree blocking us from view.

  “I’m alive thanks to smarts,” he finally responds. “I don’t go places in a brand-new car. I don’t walk around with a pistol showing, and I don’t show my face at any events unless it’s necessary.”

  By “event” he can only mean the murder of an officer, the scene of a shoot-out between military personnel and drug traffickers, or an armed bust at some hamlet hidden among those crime-reaped fields where the bosses, Los Zetas, carrying out their famous “kidnapper express,” have a group of Central Americans locked up.

  “But sometimes it must be impossible to do that,” I insist. “You must live on your tiptoes! You never know who’s who. It’s impossible to be sure if the man selling tacos is only selling tacos or if he’s selling them to be able to keep watch.”

  The agent knows. He lives under these rules. His eyes are constantly scanning, noticing whether that car passed twice or if that man is watching us out of the corners of his eyes. That’s why he only accepted to meet me after I’d given him the word from someone he’s very close to. It was a long slog, getting a hold of that state administrator who knew another administrator in Tabasco who happens to be one of the few people this agent trusts. And even then, he didn’t start talking until he’d carefully scrutinized my credentials. He looked at my picture and then at me, then back at my picture, then back at me. Anonymity is the only way he can keep on. His game is to be no one, to look like anyone else from among the flocks living in terror; to lower his gaze, never taking it off the hot sidewalks of the towns surrounding Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco. He agreed to see me on condition that I wouldn’t report where he works or who he works for.

  He smiles again, finding it funny, watching my face flicker with the recognition that he works in the heart of enemy territory. All the time. With dozens of eyes looking for him.

  “That’s why it’s necessary to move slowly,” he says, “very slowly, and to be careful, when the time comes, in asking any questions.” He finishes his coffee in one gulp and changes topic. “In the end, did you guys go to the ranch I told you about? Were you able to get the pictures you wanted?”

  “Yeah, we went. And he took all the ones he could. The scene gave us goosebumps.”

  THE CEMETERY RANCH

  The rain makes La Victoria ranch seem like a film set. It looks staged, the perfect backdrop for a kidnapping—as if a bad guy with an eye patch, an overcoat, and a large pistol were about to step through the door.

  When we arrive, three policemen are showing the place to two agents from the Public Prosecutor’s Office, who post a CLOSED sign on the front gate. The main residence is just beyond the gate, a few feet away from the rail lines. The house, whose green paint is faded and chipped by time, looks typically Dixie-American, with a wraparound porch where in another context owners might be whiling away the afternoon.

  This is the basic, gloomy shell of the house. Above the front door hangs a cow skull with wide horns. Inside the front hallway lie hundreds of crushed beer cans, and to the rear of the house are scattered sardine, tuna, and bean cans. Through a front window you can see that the floor in the front room is covered in stains and scattered sawdust. The whole house smells wet and fetid, like there is some indiscernible leak somewhere. A back room is littered with discarded clothes, more crushed cans, scraps of wood. But this is all perceived from the outside. The public prosecutors won’t let us set foot inside the house. Toni Arnau, the photographer I’m traveling with, after stubborn insistence, is permitted to take a few photos by peeking in through the front door.

  Last Thursday, fifty-two undocumented Central American migrants were released after being kidnapped and kept crammed in the house for days. They were held by the commander of an estaca (Zeta terminology for squadron) who is said to run this small town of Gregorio Méndez.

  Two of the migrants who were traveling on top of the train passing through Gregorio closely escaped the fate of the fifty-two others when the conductor, Marcos Estrada Tejero, suspiciously decided to stop the train close to the ranch and fifteen armed men approached. Two days later, the two men ran into an army commander on patrol and told him what had happened. Soon twelve soldiers along with twelve state policemen from Tabasco and thirty state policemen from Chiapas suited up in search of the kidnapped migrants. The train conductor, who was located while driving another train outside of Veracruz, was arrested and accused of working with the same branch of Los Zetas later caught near La Victoria. One of Los Zetas’ chiefs, a Honduran named Frank Hándal Polanco, was arrested as well, but was seen leaving the police station in a taxi only an hour after his apprehension. There were eight others arrested in the joint military-state police operation, while at least seven, still armed with AR-15 assault rifles, escaped into the nearby mountains. On the ranch itself the officers found and confiscated nine-millimeter pistols and M-16 rifles.

  “The worst part is how they were treated,” one of the soldiers tells me. “They were in a state of shock. And all of them had bruises on their lower backs. A strip of purple.” I didn’t yet understand why.

  By the time authorities found the ranch, the migrants knew that they’d met the famous storybook wolves: Los Zetas. They already knew by heart the chilling threat the kidnappers used to introduce themselves: “We are Los Zetas! Don’t move or we’ll kill you!”

  In these small towns, there’s no need of an ID, or any other kind of credential, to prove Zeta membership. If someone says they’re a Zeta, they’re a Zeta. If they say they’re a Zeta and they’re not a Zeta, it won’t be too long before they’re dead.

  At La Victoria ranch, the kidnappers put on a show. They arranged the victims into five groups, lined them up to face the wall and forced them to their knees. Then they started paddling them in the small of their backs. It’s a method of military torture used in Mexico, and it’s one of the identifying marks of Los Zetas. The verb to paddle, tablear, is well known in the overlapping world of both Los Zetas and undocumented migrants passing through Mexico.

  Any attempt to break Los Zetas’ rules is punished by death. Two of the kidnapped migrants learned this when, making the best of an unusually inattentive guard, they escaped from the ranch. The men ran for the mountains: an area their captors knew like the back of their hands, but that they didn’t know at all. One of the Zetas soldiers went to hunt them down. He shortly returned with one of the migrants, who was marched in front of the other captives and forced to his knees.

  “See what happens if you fuck with us!”

  Melesit Jiménez, from Ho
nduras, was shot dead in the back of the neck.

  Only a few minutes after the body of Jiménez fell, two more shots rang out from the hills. The second fugitive was hit once in the neck and once in the stomach.

  In the next few days, while the group now numbering fifty learned to submit to their captors, Los Zetas entertained themselves by raping the two women in the group, both from Honduras, and occasionally paddling the men in the back. They were waiting for the ransom money: between $1,500 and $5,000 apiece, wired from each of the victims’ families.

  This massive kidnapping occurred only a few days after the National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR) presented a paper on the current state of migrant abductions. A mass of reporters jostled for photos and sound bites of the event. The NCHR stated that, even with their limited resources, they were able to document 10,000 firsthand reports of kidnapping, including documentation of the police conspiring with Los Zetas. The conference made national headlines. But the next day everything returned to normal: silence.

  In this world of pilgrims without papers, kidnappings have become just as common as migrant assaults in La Arrocera, or the torture and mutilation of train hoppers throughout Mexico. It’s so common that in Tabasco we don’t need to go looking for it. After months of watching Los Zetas infiltrate the country, making it clear that they are an independent cartel (after splitting from the Gulf Cartel), after months of hearing their name and smelling the fear in the small towns of southern Mexico all the way to the northern border, we’re starting to understand who they are, how they work, and, above all, how they have such wide-ranging control. Their secret is simply fear. They shake the bones of policemen and taxi drivers, lawyers and migrants. All you need to do to get someone to dance the dance of fear is to utter the famous, simple motto: we are Los Zetas.

  In Tabasco, which marks the beginning of Zetas’ turf in Mexico, you can almost taste the fear. It hits you in your sixth sense: that feeling of walking round a dark corner and knowing you’re about to get mugged. It was the fear we saw on a taxi driver’s face when we asked him to take us to La Victoria ranch and he responded: “No, I can’t go there, they won’t let us through. No. I’m not going.” He shut his cab door and split. We could feel it in the looks of the men sitting in the parked black truck on the corner, where we waited for the bus that would take us to the ranch. And in the almost trembling words of the driver when he realized where we wanted to go: “But you guys … You wouldn’t be … I just don’t want any trouble.”

  Before leaving the ranch, we even saw the fear in the three policemen. While they were hanging the seized property sign, one of them, holding tightly onto his AR-15 and glancing up toward the mountains, said: “We can’t show you the tombs because they’re still hanging around, keeping watch.”

  By “they” he meant Los Zetas. Los Zetas always keeping watch.

  The same nervous policeman later told me, “Of course they’re hanging around in the mountains. They have more arms buried somewhere around here.”

  And indeed it was close by the ranch, in the tangle of mountain shrubs, that two Honduran men who were presumed to have been part of the hostage group, and who had already been apprehended and put in chains, led police to Jiménez’s body. Worms were crawling through the wound on his neck when they uncovered him. Close to his body, an Uzi and two of its cartridges were dug up as well.

  Police had to take the two Honduran men out of the Tapachula detention center. Apparently a brawl broke out in their holding cell. And when authorities tried to break it up, they saw what looked like a lynching in progress. The fifty undocumented migrants were beating the two Hondurans. They were, it turned out, both Zetas.

  “They’re Zetas!” people screamed. “They were armed and paddling us at the ranch. They’re part of the gang!”

  So the police took the two men back to the ranch in Tabasco, where they were forced to help uncover the other body. The other escapee that these men themselves had killed and buried.

  Los Zetas are like a metastasizing cancer. Migrants are recruited. Soldiers are recruited. Policemen, mayors, businessmen—they’re all liable to become part of the web.

  SURVEY FOR THE ENEMY

  “So then,” I ask the agent, “everything they found out about La Victoria ranch was due to dumb luck? I mean, it wasn’t uncovered because of good military work, but just because two lucky migrants escaped and bumped into a squad and told them about the fifty-two other migrants held captive?”

  The undercover agent smiles at my question. It’s a smile that flashes with complicity. A smile that says that both my question and its answer are obvious.

  “Why do you think I move like I do?” he asks. “Slowly, step by step? Because Los Zetas find out about most operations even before the military. They have ears all over the place. And when there’s a bust like that, it’s for one of two reasons: either things went down fast, without any planning, with some impressive whistle-blowing, which in this case was done by two migrants, or because an extensive undercover operation went down silently, slowly, without anyone even knowing about it.”

  It was, in fact, dumb luck, an unraveling of will and time. If the two who escaped had been too scared to confront the soldiers, worrying that they’d be detained and questioned, if instead of talking they had run into the hills, if minutes before bumping into the squad they had stopped to rest, hidden under the shade of a tree, at the edge of a trail, then the squad would have passed them and no one would ever have heard about the ranch called La Victoria, hidden in the outskirts of Gregorio Méndez.

  “I already told you, they have ears everywhere,” the agent goes on. Like a good informant, he knows how to surprise. “So tell me,” he says coyly, “were there any police at the ranch?”

  “Three.”

  “Well, okay, one of them is under investigation because allegedly he works for Los Zetas.”

  For over a half hour we’d talked to and questioned someone who is possibly a Zeta. This is what enables them to do whatever they want. This is how they know of almost every undercover operation planned against them. This is how they almost always know the who, the when, and the where. This is why it’s hard to act or react on their turf. This is why our photographer, Toni Arnau, was only able to take out his camera for a minute. And this is why this agent moves so cautiously, because Los Zetas see everything.

  It’s becoming uncomfortable moving through their domain, and walking the streets of Tenosique. One afternoon, a city official showed us around. As we made our way down the main road that divides the city of 55,000 in two, our driver started pointing out the businesses we were passing.

  “See that place? The owner’s son was kidnapped a month ago. The owner of that place,” he points, “was kidnapped and killed four months ago. Our ex-mayor, Carlos Paz, was kidnapped over on that street in May, and I’ve heard that Los Zetas have the wife of the owner of that pharmacy locked up right now.”

  This is a showcase of kidnappings. A tour through a town taken over by narcos, where there are plenty of landmarks, but instead of pointing out a café where someone famous once ate, we gawk at the business where the last kidnapping happened, or the block with the most recent murder.

  When Los Zetas take over, they take over everything. They’ve monopolized crime—kidnappings, extortions, murder, drug trafficking, retail, pirated movies, migrant guides. These crimes are all part of the same enterprise, and whoever wants a job, any kind of job, has to somehow work for Los Zetas.

  “They control everything,” the agent explains, “every institution. Notice how so many of the kidnappings in Tenosique happen near the rails, right in front of the migrant trail. City and state officials know that one of them will die if they do so much as lift a finger. Better to keep quiet and take what Los Zetas pays them.”

  “It must have taken them a long time to create such a network,” I say absentmindedly, as though thinking out loud.

  “No. Don’t be so sure,” he says. “They came one day and hit har
d. They swept up all the small criminal organizations that already existed. We actually just started hearing about them in July 2006, when authorities caught Mateo Díaz, known as El Comandante Mateo, or Z-10.1”

  Before that it was the Gulf Cartel that roared loudest in Tabasco, but back then few knew about them, or their heavily armed unit which later peeled off to form Los Zetas. Mateo was arrested back in his hometown, a small city in Tabasco called Cundiacán, because he made a big scene one drunken night at a bar called La Palotada. They arrested him along with one of his sidekicks, a Guatemalan by the name of Darwin Bermúdez Zamora. The city police didn’t know who they had, but might have guessed he was important when just minutes after his detention, an armed commando unit of fifteen attacked the police station with bazookas, grenades, and AR-15s. Two policemen were killed in the fray, another seven were injured, and the station was destroyed. Only afterward did they find out exactly who they had locked up next to the other petty troublemakers.

  It was Z-10, El Commandante Mateo, who in 1998 deserted the feared Army Special Forces (GAFES) to help form Los Zetas. One of the most wanted criminals in the country, he lorded it over the plazas of Tabasco, Chiapas, and Veracruz, three important states in the smuggling of Colombian cocaine and Guatemalan military arms. He now hovers near the top of the U.S. most wanted list.

  El Comandante Mateo had brought order to Tabasco. He and his henchmen explained the rules to the small local gangs like this: join or leave the state. They took over the gangs of some thirty boys and men, between the ages of twelve and thirty-five, who made a profession out of charging every migrant a hundred pesos to hop on the train to Tenosique. From now on you work for us, they announced. From now on, you won’t have any problems with the migration authorities. From now on, any games worth just a few pesos are over. We’re going to take over this route, charge any coyotes who pass through here, punish those who don’t pay, and kidnap those who don’t travel with someone hired by us. That was their offer.