Hopelessness takes hold of me. I think it must be the same feeling that overcame the journalist, the policeman, the priest, and now this agent. As we walk the streets of these southern Mexican towns and make way for people with lowered gazes we will be witnessing the fear. And we will witness the fear in the people making vigilant rounds in their cars. And we will witness it in the streets where soon there will be another murder, and where soon many more migrants will be kidnapped.
“It’s complicated,” the agent repeats. Then we shake hands and say goodbye.
1 In Spanish, the word “zeta” is the name of the letter Z.
2 Narco-corridos are popular norteña or country-style songs celebrating the big drug barons and their deeds.
3 AFI stands for Agencia Federal de Investigación, akin to the FBI, currently subsumed into the federal police.
Crossing point at Suchiate River, which separates Guatemala from Chiapas.
The crossing of the river marks the beginning of the journey across Mexico for undocumented Central American migrants.
On many stretches of the trail through Mexico, migrants are forced to travel on foot, avoiding roads in favor of areas of dense vegetation. La Arrocera—the Rice Cellar—is one of the most notorious of these stretches, a network of twenty-eight ranches scattered across one hundred and sixty miles of thick vegetation in southern Mexico, where migrants endure robberies, assaults, and rapes.
A woman from the group Las Patronas. For almost twenty years, the women of La Patrona, Veracruz have been bringing food and water to the migrants as they pass by on the trains.
Stowaways. The journey from Ixtepec to Medias Aguas takes six to eight hours. Falls, assaults, and kidnappings are common on this stretch.
A man murdered in one of the dangerous neighborhoods of Huixtla, Chiapas. Violence against migrants also affects many others areas and has prompted the formation of community patrols.
At El Bambi, a brothel where a number of Central American migrants work.
A Guatemalan mother and daughter, inside a car traveling north. On this trip, they were intercepted by Mexican agents, but were able to continue their journey after delivering a payment of 1,000 pesos (about eighty dollars).
Waiting at the Casa del Migrante in Nuevo Laredo. A loose network of nonprofit and Mexican government organizations tries to help migrants.
Two groups of migrants in the Sonoran desert, guided by their coyotes.
At the border wall in Tijuana.
Detained at the border.
7
Living among Coyotes: To the Rio Grande and Back
They live to push the limits, working under constant risk, repeating over and again this lethal journey. They are coyotes, polleros, the pirates of the migrant trails. They live in a world they don’t control, taking orders from narcos, those who run the migrant trails in this country. Many of the polleros don’t like the new rules, and so they’ve started infighting, devouring each other. This is what a man named El Chilango taught me about coyotes in Mexico.
He looks like a frightened animal. He whistles, calls out: “Hey! You!” But when I turn to look at him he lowers his hat, almost covering his eyes, dropping his head. And then he darts back into the bushes, glancing at me over his shoulder. A crazy person, I think.
I ignore him, but he calls out again. We’re a few steps outside of the migrant shelter in Ixtepec, Oaxaca. He retreats into the bushes and then peeks out when I don’t respond.
“Pst! Hey!” he calls, jerking his head, inviting me into the bushes with him. I shoot him an annoyed glance, then turn back to the card game I’m playing with a group of Hondurans. At first he seems to give up. He buries his hands in the pockets of his threadbare pants and shoulders deeper into the bushes with a face like thunder. As the card game continues, I see him occasionally poke his head back out and shrug at me.
Definitely crazy, I think. I keep an eye on him as the afternoon passes, watching him grumble to himself. He has a spotty gray beard and an abnormally large jaw that juts out from his face. His shiny head, which he occasionally uncovers from under his hat to scratch, has only a few stray hairs on it. He’s dirty and has a crazy, undecipherable look in his eyes.
David, the head of security at the shelter, walks past carrying firewood for the kitchen. He tells me that the man in the bushes wants to talk to me. I tell him that I’ll go over in a minute, and David, a military/police veteran with a good eye, says, “I bet he’s a pollero.”
That brings me to my feet. I leave the card table and move toward the man in the bushes, who steps out to meet me.
“Not here,” he whispers. “I’m going to sit over there. Wait a minute and then come join me.”
I watch him walk away. I understand his plea for privacy and try to look indifferent for a minute. I pour myself a coffee from the large pot that’s usually bubbling over the fire, and light a cigarette. Then I give away nearly half my pack. The migrants always notice when I have cigarettes. And then, after a few minutes, once I think nobody’s paying attention, I walk over to the crazy man and sit down next to him. We’re protected from view of the shelter by a tree and from view of the railroad tracks by bushes. After a moment of silence, the man looks at me squarely and starts to talk.
“You can call me El Chilango, but I’m not going to tell you my real name. I’m a pollero, a coyote. A Mexican. I’m going to talk because I’ve already seen you on these trails. I’ve seen you around and know that you know a little about how it is. And I’m fed up with what’s going on here. These assholes are taking my job. So, yeah, if you want to hear me out, grab me a coffee and give me a cigarette and I’ll tell you.”
I look at his eyes, which are black and small and surrounded by a circle of wrinkles. The iris of his right eye lazes up and out, his left stares straight ahead. The skin on his face is dry, slightly burnt, and covered in dust. Even up close he has a crazed look.
I don’t ask a single question. El Chilango, smoking and talking without pause, lays out his life for me. He is forty-one years old, though he could probably pass for seventy. He was born in Mexico City and for the last twenty years he’s been working as a coyote. He started when he got fired from a trucking company he hauled for after he stole a load of bananas. He approached some migrants in southern Mexico and offered to drive them to the capital in his trailer. In those days there weren’t the migration checkpoints that there are now. He got to know a few other coyotes, and soon learned the routes on foot as well as by train. He learned like all coyotes learn, apprenticing to someone more experienced. He doesn’t tell me who his teacher was, but mentions that they ended their relationship with machetes. I notice the two, long, raised scars on his right forearm.
Since then, he explains, he’s been working alone. He never had another teacher and he never took on a student. He had contacts in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador that would send him clients, and he’d pick them up himself in Tapachula, on the north bank of the Suchiate River, and take them to Nuevo Laredo, on the south bank of the Rio Grande.
“I never used to ask anything from anybody,” he tells me. “But that’s all changed now. I had to accept that a year ago. I had to start paying out and working for Don Fito, one of the big-time coyotes. But I’m sick of these assholes now. The coyotes who actually walk with the migrants, who take care of them, we can’t work in peace anymore. We’re all employed by the big fishes that live up north. And they’re all mixed up with Los Zetas who make sure to take their cut.”
THE COYOTE WHO’S NOT A COYOTE
Ten years ago, the image of the coyote as custodian started crumbling. The friendly neighbor who, for a small, reasonable sum, would take his compadre, his friend, to El Norte, is now a sullen man, covered in scars, and often a danger to his own clients. Sometimes he’s even a Zeta ally, who migrants go with because there’s no other choice. Sometimes he’s a kidnapper, and most of the time he’s a swindler. This new breed of coyotes lives on the road. And the road, malicious and deceitful as it
is, has turned against them as much as they’ve turned against the road.
The good coyote no longer has that option—to be a good coyote. He has to pay his dues to Los Zetas, or hand over human loot instead. The good coyote has to give up his reputation, relinquish the essence of his trade, abandon the routes and cantinas that once served as hangout and pickup spots. He’s had to start calling himself a guía, a guide, instead of a coyote, and his fees have been slashed. And yet these old pros carry on. The inevitable vice of the road awakens something in them. Life off the road is just too calm, lacking the speed, fear, and constant adrenaline that keeps one awake. That keeps one alive.
I met Wilber, one of these guías, in 2007 when he was only twenty-two years old. He had already been detained seven times, had been a coyote for nine years, had taken part in thirty assaults—at least—in La Arrocera, and had witnessed eight murders. Observant and smart, Wilber is from El Progreso, a barrio in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. He never submitted to the new wave of his trade, and never contacted or let himself be contacted by any Zeta. He stayed on the migrant’s side. He was and is afraid of Los Zetas, and yet he doesn’t pay them. And that’s why Wilber now mostly lives off of what he makes from a small market garden and the two horses that pull his banana cart. That and guiding relatives or friends to the north.
Wilber has the wiry, tanned body of a campesino. Nothing about him makes him stand out, and no one would imagine that when he’s not selling bananas he’s running the narco-controlled migrant routes of Mexico. I’ve seen him five times since I first met him while he was crossing a cousin, the head of a private insurance company Wilber occasionally worked for. I’ve traveled with him twice now, and I’ve learned to trust him.
There’s a difference between Wilber and other coyotes these days. Wilber still eats with his migrants, stills sleeps with his migrants, and he doesn’t abandon them so he can go on a spree. He doesn’t get together with strangers on the rails, and he doesn’t show off. He travels like a migrant, and he defends himself not with machetes or AK’s, but with sticks and stones.
And his migrants, his flock, as they wait for the train in an open plot of land, they treat him like a friend, like any member of the group. He humbly takes the lead whenever The Beast blows by and tells them which car to get on and when, and he always hops on last.
He would guide his migrants all the way to the Rio Bravo, and when they arrived he would tell them which coyote to approach for crossing into the United States. He’d send them to someone connected with El Abuelo, one of a handful of bosses guiding Central Americans over the border. El Abuelo deals directly with Los Zetas. Wilber is a good guide, but the northern border has its own rules and, if he wants to stay out of trouble, he has no other choice but to follow them. So the best he can do is tell his migrants to seek out specific coyotes. Besides, El Abuelo is famous for sticking with his end of a job.
Last time we got together we had a lot of time to talk. It was a night in October 2008. The train we waited for in Arriaga hadn’t come for two days. The lot was full of migrants who, sick of waiting, were sleeping on the rails. The shelter in Arriaga is about three quarters of a mile away from the tracks, and many didn’t want to waste time in walking all that way. The two of us lay with our heads resting on the steel track, about ten yards away from the four cousins Wilber was crossing.
Our cigarette smoke, dense in the glow of the nearby lights, lingered in the air. We sat up on the rails and, though the air around us was still, Wilber smoked his cigarette between his thumb and index finger, toward the inside of his hand, as if he were smoking on a moving train trying to keep the wind from eating at his drags.
“I thought you were going to retire, old man,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Last time we were in Ixtepec you told me everything had gone to shit and that you didn’t want Los Zetas to find you. You said it was going to be your last trip.”
“Sure. The thing is, these kiddoes want to go north, and since we’re cousins and all, I know they’re not going to burn me.”
“Burn you?”
“Sure, you know, the problems that come when Los Zetas get a hold of you, them or the police that work for them. If they see a group bigger than five, they’re going to want to know which one the coyote is and they won’t stop fucking with you until someone talks. They take aside the ones that look dumbest and tell them that if they point out the coyote, then nothing bad will happen to them. But I keep my pollos in check, well trained. They know that the deal is to say we’re all cousins, which is why I brought my papers with me this time, and they did too, so they’ll see we all have the same last name.”
“So you’re counting on having a run-in with them.”
“No, but last time we got off at Tierra Blanca, they got thirty of the ones that were with me on the train. I had a brother-in-law in tow and we just booked it. We hid in a factory somewhere near the rails. They saw us, but they didn’t bother to go after us.”
“But Wilber, if you’re fine with dropping them off at Nuevo Laredo, tipping them to one of El Abuelo’s people who works for Los Zetas anyway, why don’t you just work for Los Zetas yourself?”
“Because it’s all fucked. It’s not as simple as working with them, and crossing people whenever you want. They control you. They want your home phone number back in Honduras, and they call you once in a while to cross groups they’ve reserved for you. If you take too long in crossing, or if they don’t see you on the road for a month, they fuck you over. They’ll think you’re working for someone else, or that you’ve found another crossing point. They want you to watch their routes for them, they want you to get them people.”
“People to kidnap?”
“Yeah. And even the other coyotes, they’re always fucking with each other. Sometimes someone who isn’t getting any work sees you crossing big groups of people and always coming back for more, and they start thinking that your slice is getting bigger than theirs, then they try to burn you, making up stories about seeing you with another boss or that you crossed more migrants than the ones you reported. No, it’s fucked. It’s better this way.”
“Sure, better to be a guide.”
“Much better.”
“Until they catch you.”
“No, they won’t catch me. This is going to be my last trip.”
I laughed. Wilber laughed too. Then he called his cousins over and we told each other jokes to keep ourselves from falling asleep.
Morning broke and there wasn’t any sign of a coming train. Wilber looked serious. He hadn’t slept all night, and he still had eleven hours of riding on the train under the pitiless sun. He walked toward the bridge, away from the milling of all the migrants who hadn’t gone to the shelter for a cup of coffee or a bowl of food. I followed him. When he’d gone far enough, down to where the rails are covered by weeds, he crouched, set one hand on a pile of construction debris and another on the ground, and put his ear to the rails. He stayed that way for a minute. Then he got up, serious. He asked me for a cigarette.
“It’ll be here in less than a half hour,” he said, taking his first deep drag.
Quickly, he made his way back to gather his cousins who were buying food at a nearby market.
The train came a half hour later. I wasn’t able to find Wilber amidst all the commotion. Some of the migrants on my car were fighting with two drunks who wanted to board. The drunks stank of liquor and each carried a handle of moonshine. Everything got settled when a black Caribbean Honduran, tall and muscular, offered to split their heads with an enormous log. The two drunks, grumbling, decided to give up.
The cars were properly arranged and the train about to leave when I heard a shout from below. It was Wilber who, with his brow furrowed, was waving at me to get off. I didn’t move. He waved again, this time with both arms.
“What’s going on?”
“Now’s no time to play around. There are three Zeta spies on those cars.”
“How do you know?”
He didn’t answer, only stared at me, his eyes wide and insistent.
“So what, then?”
“So nothing. Time to wait for another train.”
I ran to warn a group of Hondurans who I’d gotten to know the day before. They looked at each other, but didn’t move. The train started to pull forward. I saw a Guatemalan who was traveling with her husband and I made the gesture Wilber had made to me. But the Guatemalans just waved goodbye.
“Shit,” I said.
“They’re going to get fucked,” Wilber said calmly, taking a bite of a scrambled egg taco, “because about five of those bandits had guns.”
“Bandits? You said they were Zetas.”
“Well, yeah, Los Zetas are why I got off. The bandits are fine. I gave them fifty pesos and that was that, they were going to leave me be. The problem is that the spies saw me hand the money to the bandits. So now they know I’m the coyote.”
THREATENED BY RACE
El Chilango’s enormous jaw starts to tremble. For a moment I think he’s going to cry. He’s put himself in a terrible situation, and he knows it. He’s scared. And with good reason.
After an hour of conversation he’s laid out his defense for me. It turns out he broke the rules. He took three Hondurans from Tenosique to Reynosa, on the US border, without telling his boss, Don Fito. He picked up the migrants at the bus station, thinking he could jump a step ahead of his boss and Los Zetas. He says he did it because, after he made a few mistakes, Don Fito hadn’t given him work in more than two months. He doesn’t explain what the previous mistakes were, saying that they’re not important, that he’s been a good worker for years.
His plan was going fine at first. He got the migrants to Coatzacoalcos without a hitch, but then La Doña appeared on the tracks. She’s a sixtysomething who looks like she might be in her eighties. She sells food to migrants along the side of the tracks, mostly enormous tortillas called tlayudas, which are topped with meat and cheese. But the tortilla stand is only a front. La Doña is actually the kidnapping boss in Coatzacoalcos. She runs the business with her three fat and violent sons. I know about her sons. They once pulled the photographer Edu Ponces and me off the train and threatened us. La Doña also monitors the low-level coyotes, making sure they pay their bosses, Los Zetas, so they can send full buses of kidnapped victims to Reynosa.
The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail Page 15
