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

by Oscar Martinez

  It’s a fall November afternoon, five o’clock, and migrants are just starting to pool around the shelter run by Scalabrinian priests. The migrants are returning from their day jobs loading sand onto trucks, putting up drywall, or selling newspapers at traffic lights. Shelter rules only allow people to stay from four in the afternoon until seven in the morning.

  There are about sixty of them today. Most from Honduras, plus a few Guatemalans and Salvadorans. The black, skeletal man sitting apart from the rest with his shoulders hunched and his head hidden between his knees is the only Dominican at the shelter. The others suggest I go talk with him. “He tried it yesterday, stupidly, and the river almost took him,” a young Honduran tells me, laughing.

  The Dominican’s name is Roberto. He’s thirty-two years old. He has a wife and three kids, aged eight, five, and three, waiting for him—and for money—back on the island. His family is eating nothing but beans. He was a bus driver before leaving his country a month ago, earning some $120 a month. Out of everyone here, he’s traveled the farthest. A group of his friends lent him the money for a plane ticket to Guatemala, where visas aren’t needed for short stays. From there he migrated like many Central Americans: on third-rate buses, on foot, on top of cargo trains, until he arrived in Nuevo Laredo after being assaulted six times, five of them by the Mexican police. His journey almost came to an end yesterday, coughing up mouthfuls of water as he fought the current, briefly made it, and then returned to the Mexican shore, exhausted, the sun setting behind him.

  The irony of Roberto’s story is that he decided against migrating to Puerto Rico—the more prosperous neighboring island—because he didn’t want to risk drowning. The Mona Passage, an eighty-mile strait in the Atlantic, divides the two countries. Dominicans cross on small, speedy motorboats, often lugging too much weight on board, and sometimes end up shipwrecked.

  “Your plan failed you yesterday?” I ask

  “Hell! I didn’t have a plan,” he says, and quickly falls into the story of his attempt.

  “I’d been here three days already, and was tired of selling newspapers from seven in the morning till three in the afternoon to earn six pesos [less than fifty cents] a day, and so yesterday I took the plunge. I went down to the river behind the shelter with thirteen other people. It was maybe five in the afternoon. We stood there just watching the other side a while, until I started praying. And then I jumped in to swim. The others followed me. And the current dragged me a few yards. It was tough, but I got to the other side. Then when I looked up I saw one of those police officers turn on a light and shine it on us, and so I jumped back in the water. But I was too tired then and I almost drowned on my way back. I thought I wasn’t going to make it. I swallowed a lot of water.”

  Pray and swim. That was his strategy to reach the United States.

  “And what happened to the others?” I ask.

  “Three of them went ahead. They were probably caught. The rest were dragged away by the current. Farther than I was. And I never saw them back on the shore, and I haven’t seen them around here either.”

  Maybe the Rio Grande will soon spit up more bodies.

  According to the Center for Border Studies and the Promotion of Human Rights in Reynosa, more than seventy bodies have been found along the shore each year since 2005. Representatives of the center, which is dedicated to gathering data from multiple migrant shelters along Mexico’s northern border, acknowledge that those numbers are estimates, and that the real figure is probably much higher. The river passes through many miles of uninhabited shoreline where brush can easily hide bodies.

  The shelter in Nuevo Laredo, like many of the migrant shelters in Mexico, seems like it’s in a war zone. A young Mexican man walks into the front room with a bandage around his head and a black eye. He was recently deported from the United States, and after his parents wired him $1,700, assailants stole the money and pistol-whipped him in the head. The Salvadoran man next to him is rubbing cream on the ankle he twisted earlier in the day on the riverbank.

  Julio César lights a cigarette, his three children playing in circles around him. The first time we met was in Ixtepec in southern Mexico, about 1,250 miles from Nuevo Laredo. That was over a month and a half ago, and neither Edu nor I thought he had a chance of getting even close to the US border. Julio is a twenty-five-year-old brick worker, traveling with his wife Jessica (twenty-two) and his three children: Jarvin Josué (seven), César Fernando (five), and Jazmín Joana, who was born on the trip north two months ago. She almost died on the first adventure of her life, when she slipped out of her mother’s arms on the roof of a moving train. Luckily Julio César was able to catch her before she fell. And now here they are, all five of them.

  From Ixtepec the family rode north by bus. “I wasn’t going to put the baby at risk again,” Julio César explains. Making sure to take out-of-the-way and shorter stretches to avoid immigration checkpoints, they took fifteen buses to arrive to Nuevo Laredo. Julio is a very thorough man. He draws maps, marks up potential routes, asks questions, and knows how to wait.

  These days he’s been studying “the flow of the river.” He’s already crossed twice from Nuevo Laredo. In 2005, like the Dominican, he swam it alone. But the Border Patrol picked him up as soon as he hit the opposite bank, and promptly deported him. Agents tend to hide in the thickets on the US side, so that people will at least give the crossing a shot. They prefer to arrest them instead of just deterring them, knowing that they’ll try eventually, and maybe in a spot without patrols or cameras.

  For his second attempt, Julio César paid $1,200 to a friend in the United States who arranged for a coyote to show him a crossing point outside of the city. That time he made it, and worked for a year in the States until he was deported after a raid at a construction site in San Antonio, Texas.

  This time he can’t afford the coyote, and needs to rely on himself and his memory. “I want to inspect the place where I crossed back in 2005. See what the currents look like, and if there are agents watching, and then in January I’m going to cross alone and work up enough money to bring over Jessica and the kids safely.”

  This is the difference between Julio César and Roberto. Roberto dove in at a deep bend of the river because it was close to the shelter. He chose a spot where agents are on the lookout, and almost died in the attempt. Julio César, however, is waiting until January, studying the river, finding the shallows. This is the difference between knowing and not knowing.

  Before saying goodbye, we arrange to accompany Julio on his scouting expedition the day after tomorrow.

  Seven of El Abuelo’s dealers stand just outside the shelter. They radio municipal police, and high-five and fist-bump when they arrive.

  El Abuelo oversees all the polleros who use the route closest to the Atlantic, the one that runs through Tabasco and Veracruz before reaching Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo. It’s a route plagued by kidnappings, where coyotes who don’t pay put their migrants in danger of being held ransom for $300 to $500 a head. Los Zetas call that business the kidnapper express. But El Abuelo and his henchmen never have to deal with this problem. From Nuevo Laredo, the home base of many Zetas, El Abuelo forges deals that let his people cross largely without trouble. If you’re in one of El Abuelo’s circles, you can rest assured that Los Zetas won’t be a hindrance when you get to the city on the Rio Grande.

  At four in the afternoon, migrants start to huddle on the sidewalk in front of the shelter.

  Armando, a twenty-five-year-old Salvadoran, is there. He’s one of those puzzling men who are addicted to the ways of the road. He’s been wandering Mexico’s streets since he was twelve years old. He travels north until hitting the border, works in whatever he can find, and goes back to El Salvador whenever he feels the need. He sums up his ambitions with one word: fun. He says he gets bored being in the same place for too long, that when he was a kid he went north to try to cross, and that little by little he got sold on this nomadic life. He became addicted to a road of assaults,
rapes, mutilations, and kidnappings. It seems hard to understand migrants like Armando, yet there are many with similar stories. They are perfectly conscious of the risks they run, but there’s an attractive perversity there that quickly turns them into adrenaline addicts. The Zetas do a good job of recruiting these types, many of them Central American, to work as spies on the trains.

  Armando tells me that just a month ago he saw a body as he looked out over the river. “It was floating over there, by Viveros Park,” he recalls. “That sort of thing happens because most guys go diving in at random, without studying the river first. And so one of two things happens: they get caught by Migration or they drown. I know where to cross, where it’s shallow, but I don’t want to go to the States.”

  I think I can see it, the difference between knowing and not knowing.

  There are two patrol boats, three long-range, night-vision surveillance cameras, and some twenty reflectors and motion sensors covering the seven miles of the Rio Grande that separate Nuevo Laredo from Laredo, which is why wading in at one spot instead of another can make the difference between swimming into the arms of an agent or getting the chance to try your luck. But to try your luck you have to go to a less patrolled area, far from the city. That’s Julio César’s plan.

  My conversation with Armando is interrupted by the leader of the gang made up of drug dealers and El Abuelo’s troops. A guy about twenty-five years old, with a dragon tattoo on his neck, asks Edu: “Hey, what’s that camera for?” Edu hastens to explain that he’s taking pictures of migrants. We make it clear that whatever he’s doing on his street corner is of no interest to us. “A twenty-eight,” he says into his radio. And then he leaves.

  Armando and I start talking again. Three more migrants sit down next to us. Then the guy with the dragon tattoo and another two from his group approach us. “Hey, that really is a kick-ass camera. Why don’t you let me see it?” one of them says to Edu, who immediately starts shaking his head no. Then a red car shows up and drives close to us.

  “Don’t ask them, just get them in here!” orders the fat man at the wheel. Four men from the back of the car get out and walk toward us. We stand up and get ready to run, but Dragon Tattoo lets out a laugh and says, “Easy, easy, we’re not going to kidnap you.” They only wanted to let us know that we were on their turf. Just to scare us into understanding what could happen.

  After that, they leave us alone and start to mingle with the thirty or so migrants sitting on the pavement. They trumpet their offer: “With El Abuelo! With El Abuelo! 1,800 dollars to Houston! We give you food, water, and shoes, and we cross you by boat. Come on, whoever wants to travel safely!”

  Color comes back to the cheeks of the man sitting next to me. “I thought they were going to kidnap us,” he whispers.

  Kidnappings are an ever-growing threat on this route, and a lot of what goes on in the south is actually managed from two cities bordering the States—Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa. In these areas—which are entered by thousands of migrants every month—criminals rule, often with the complicity of the authorities, and shamelessly shout out offers on the streets as if they were selling tomatoes.

  Eighty-three percent of the reports coming from the migrant shelter and recorded by the Center of Human Rights accuse Nuevo Laredo’s city officers of being corrupt. In the past three months alone, from June to August 2009, 477 migrants have filed accounts of beatings, arbitrary detentions, kidnappings, and robbery. Over 80 percent of these migrants were from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

  “This used to be a peaceful place,” explains José Luis Manso, the shelter director. “Before the shelter was built. But then this area became a big market for narcos and human smuggling. The situation is awful now. The police are in on it with the polleros and drug traffickers. This is where El Abuelo operates. His greatest income is from crossing Central Americans. He does a good job, illicit, sure, but at least whoever pays him can be pretty sure they’ll get across okay. We’ve sent four municipal officers to ask the mayor for greater surveillance around the shelter.”

  The officers never got an answer. But Manso says that up until now, no promise has been fulfilled.

  The shelter is stuck in this high-risk area. To describe the situation, Manso recounts a murder that happened only four days ago. “It was behind the shelter. Police violently knocked on the door in the middle of the night. They wanted information because they’d been told there’d been a fight between gangs, one Mexican and the other Central American, who mostly specialize in robbery. But then this strange thing happened. Only members from one gang were detained, which makes me think that the Central Americans who died or were hurt were actually migrants who resisted kidnapping.”

  Manso says that most Central Americans try to cross the river on their own: “They don’t have the money, so they swim across or buy a car tire to help them keep afloat, and so they risk their lives.”

  I pick one of the shelter’s migrants at random, a middle-aged Guatemalan. I ask him if he’ll pay for a coyote. “Can’t afford it,” he answers. I ask him if he knows the river. “No.” I ask him if he can tell me how he’s going to cross. “By my faith in God,” he says.

  Before leaving the shelter, we make plans to meet with Julio César tomorrow, early in the morning in Hidalgo Park, to start our tour. The gang is still just outside the shelter walls, waiting for their prey.

  They laugh shamelessly when they see us. But they leave us alone. We get on the bus.

  It’s just before sunrise. We’re in Viveros Park, right where they found the two swollen corpses last week. Today there are two men fishing. The river is deep and the cold currents pull hard against the steep banks.

  The Rio Grande doesn’t belong to either of the countries it divides. A treaty signed at the beginning of the twentieth century permits each country to use its waters. Here, closer to its mouth than to its source, the river is already swollen by its three largest tributaries: the Picos River from the north, and the Conchos and Sabinas Rivers from the south. Here it’s as wide as a football field, and even an expert swimmer would struggle against the swiftness of its currents.

  A man fishing for catfish warns us: “When it gets dark you better leave. These hills fill up with drug mules at night. Plus there’s bandits looking for people trying to cross.” We take heed and decide to come back in full daylight.

  Just as he promised, at eight o’clock on the dot, Julio César is sitting on a bench in Hidalgo Park. “Let’s go,” he tells us. “We need to jump on a bus.” The area we’re going to inspect, known as El Carrizo, is on the outskirts of the city.

  The bus, far behind schedule, costs ten pesos. After waiting forty minutes at the stop, an employee announces the departure. We ride for a half an hour on the highway that runs from Monterrey to Nuevo Laredo, and still the sprawling suburbs of the city run on—dirt roads, half-built tract homes—until finally, at an unmarked spot along the highway, the bus stops and the three of us jump down. On the other side of the highway there are two dirt roads. Julio César points to the one on the right, which is narrower and a lot rockier. “That’s the one,” he says. “The other road is where the army patrols go.”

  We don’t have to ask why there are army patrols. Along this stretch of border the formula is always the same: the wall, the back roads, and the military patrols add up to drug-trafficking routes.

  We walk for thirty minutes on the abandoned trail. The sun burns down, though the winter temperatures rarely rise above eighty degrees. On each side of the path we see nothing but brambles and burs that keep catching onto our clothes.

  Julio César starts reminiscing as we make our way: “Yeah, this little ranch here I remember. This is where they gave me water when I crossed back in 2005.” We start to see how he got to know this place. The difference between knowing and not knowing is patience and hard work.

  On his first attempt in 2005, when he swam into the hands of the Border Patrol, he realized he’d need to find a site with less act
ivity, where a coyote wouldn’t be able to trick him, and where being captured wasn’t the most likely outcome. That is why he decided to start working for El Veracruzano.

  El Veracruzano is a well-known figure around Nuevo Laredo. He’s thirty-some years old and lives in Viveros Park, next to the migrant shelter, in a small clapboard shack full of inner tubes. He charges 200 pesos to ferry people across the river. Not too long ago, Julio César became El Veracruzano’s right-hand man. He would cross the river and attach a rope to a tree on the US side. Then he would pull in the inner tubes ridden by migrants. The service can be understood, basically, as drowning insurance, and he and El Veracruzano would split the 200 pesos down the middle. There is no such thing, however, as Border Patrol insurance.

  Julio César never tried crossing himself this way, explaining that it’s a far cry from getting safely all the way to San Antonio, which is where he and most of the undocumented migrants crossing at this point are headed.

  Little by little, while working hard for El Veracruzano and getting on his good side, Julio César saved up money to pay for his own coyote. “We never crossed less than fifteen people a week,” he says, which added up to about $150 a week. Increasingly confident, El Veracruzano started toying with the idea of crossing outside of the city, where the Border Patrol was less ubiquitous, and there were small islands in the shallower parts of the river. That knowledge was something El Veracruzano kept close to his chest. He could have potentially lost a lot of business if migrants started finding out about better crossing zones. But he did finally tell Julio César of El Carrizo, who knew right away that that was where he was going to cross with his coyote.

  Another half an hour passes, and we’ve left the dust path for the scrubland of a private ranch. We approach the front door of a small ranch house where a man, the first person we’ve encountered on our walk, is listening to a boom box at full volume. We wave to get his attention, and ask if we’re on the right path to the river.