Enrique's Journey (11 page)

Many are gang-raped, including a Salvadoran woman, four months pregnant, who was assaulted at gunpoint by thirteen bandits along the railroad tracks to the south. They arrive at local hospitals with severe internal hemorrhaging and long scratch marks on their buttocks. Some get pregnant. A few go mad. In one Chiapas shelter, one raped woman paces, her arms tightly crossed in front of her, a blank stare on her face. At another shelter, a woman spends hours each day in the shower, trying to cleanse herself of the attack.

Nearly one in six migrant girls detained by authorities in Texas says she has been sexually assaulted during her journey, according to a 1997 University of Houston study. Some girls journeying north cut off their hair, strap their breasts, and try to pass for boys. Others scrawl on their chests,
TENGO SIDA
. “I have AIDS.”

Enrique does not stop. He reaches the Cuil bridge, where the railroad spans a forty-foot stream of murky brown water. This, migrants and Grupo Beta Sur officers say, is the most dangerous spot. El Cantil's group of bandits often lays in wait here. Bandits haul mattresses up into nearby trees, eat lunch, and wait for their prey. They use local children as lookouts, who race forward on their bicycles to tell the bandits when migrants are drawing near. As migrants cross the bridge, the bandits drop out of the limbs and surround them. Other robbers hide along the tracks above and below the bridge, which is thick with bushes and vines. One fishes in the river or cuts grass with a machete, like a fieldworker, and whistles to the others to set a trap.

Just a month before, bandits ambushed five Salvadorans as they crossed the bridge at 4
A.M
. They tried to run. The bandits shot one in the back. Four months later, three Salvadorans and a Mexican, all in their twenties, were killed. The Salvadorans, their hands tied behind them, were shot in the head. The Mexican was stabbed. All they had left was their underwear. A local resident counts forty migrants felled here by bandits, some hacked to death with a machete.

Enrique dashes across the bridge and keeps running. Mountains stand to his right. The ground is so wet that farmers grow rice between their rows of corn. He can feel heat and humidity rising from the loamy earth. It saps his energy, but he runs on. Finally, he stops, doubled over, panting.

He is not sure why, but he has survived La Arrocera. Maybe it was his extra caution, maybe it was his decision to run, maybe it was his attempt to lie flat and hide atop the boxcar, which delayed his getting off the train and gave the bandits an opportunity to target migrants ahead of him.

He is desperate for water. He spots a house.

The people inside are not likely to give him any. Chiapas is fed up with Central American migrants, says Hugo Ángeles Cruz, a professor and migration expert at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur in Tapachula. They are poorer than Mexicans, and they are seen as backward and ignorant. People think they bring disease, prostitution, and crime and take away jobs. At checkpoints, they bring gunfire, as well. Residents fear that the shots
migra
agents fire into the air to get migrants to surrender could fall on a child playing outside. Some migrants cannot be trusted. People in Chiapas talk of being robbed by migrants with guns and knives. They tell of an older woman who welcomed a migrant into her home and was beaten to death with an iron pipe. And of a man who sold chickens in a market and was kind to outsiders. He gave three Salvadorans a place to sleep and work killing and plucking birds. The Salvadorans robbed him and slit his throat.

Boys like Enrique are called “stinking undocumented.” They are cursed, taunted. Dogs are set upon them. Barefoot children throw rocks at them. Some use slingshots. “Go to work!” “Get out! Get out!”

Drinking water can be impossible to come by. Migrants filter ditch sewage through T-shirts. Finding food can be just as difficult. Enrique is counting: in some places, people at seven of every ten houses turn him away.

“No,” they say. “We haven't cooked today. We don't have any tortillas. Try somewhere else.”

“No, boy, we don't have anything here.”

Many La Arrocera residents lock themselves inside their homes when they hear the train coming. “I'm afraid,” says local housewife Amelia López Gamboa, who corrals her family inside her one-room brick house and bars the door.

Sometimes it is worse: people in the houses turn the migrants in.

Enrique sees another migrant who has managed to make it around La Arrocera. He, too, needs water badly, but he doesn't dare ask. He is afraid of walking into a trap. To migrants, begging in Chiapas is like walking up to a loaded gun.

“I'll go,” Enrique says. “If they catch someone, it will be me.”

Enrique also knows he is less likely to frighten people if he begs alone.

He approaches a house and speaks softly, his head slightly bowed. “I'm hungry. Can you spare a taco? Some water?” The woman inside sees injuries from the train-top beating he took during his last attempt to go north. “What happened?” she asks. She gives him water, bread, and beans. The other migrant comes nearer. She gives him food, too.

A horn blows. Enrique runs to the tracks. He looks all around, trying to spot
migra
agents, who sometimes race ahead in their trucks to catch migrants as they reboard. Other migrants who have survived La Arrocera come out of the bushes. They sprint alongside the train and reach for the ladders on the freight cars.

Sometimes, train drivers back up the locomotive and get a running start. They accelerate to prevent migrants from reboarding up ahead. This time, though, the train isn't going full throttle.

Enrique climbs up onto a hopper. The train picks up speed. For the moment, he relaxes.

A DECISION

Back in Honduras, María Isabel is tense. She is bent on going to search for Enrique. Maybe she will find him along the way, in Mexico. If not, she will continue on to the United States. She and a friend have set a date to start the journey together.

Two days before the rendezvous, María Isabel confesses the plan to her aunt Gloria. She first gets Gloria's promise not to tell anyone, especially María Isabel's strict mother, Eva. “I'm going to the United States,” María Isabel says.

Gloria finds a good-bye letter under María Isabel's mattress. “I'm leaving with a friend to find Enrique in Mexico,” she writes. She bequeaths her stuffed toys to Gloria's fourteen-yearold daughter. The letter makes Gloria realize that María Isabel is serious.

That night, Gloria is so upset, her heart flutters. She can't sleep. The next morning, she confides in her daughter, Karla Yamileth Chávez. Karla immediately confronts María Isabel. “Are you crazy? You want to die along the way?” If you are pregnant, you could lose the child on the road, Karla says. She sends across town for María Isabel's mother.

Eva berates her daughter. “What are you thinking? If you have problems, come home. We'll manage.”

María Isabel listens in silence. She is sorry she made the plan. When her travel companion arrives on the appointed day, María Isabel sends her away. But the reactions to her plan have only emphasized in her own mind how much danger Enrique is in.

STAYING AWAKE

The Iron Worm squeaks, groans, and clanks—black tankers, rust-colored boxcars, and gray hoppers winding north on a single track that parallels the Pacific coast. Off to the right are hillsides covered with coffee plants. Cornstalks grow up against the rails. The train moves through a sea of plantain trees, lush and tropical.

By early afternoon, it is 105 degrees. Enrique's palms burn when he holds on to the hopper. He risks riding no-hands. Finally, he strips off his shirt and sits on it. The locomotive blows warm diesel smoke. People burn trash by the rails, sending up more heat and a searing stench. Many migrants have had their caps stolen, so they wrap their heads in T-shirts. They gaze enviously at villagers cooling themselves in streams and washing off after a day of fieldwork and at others who doze in hammocks slung in shady spots near adobe and cinder-block homes. The train cars sway from side to side, up and down, like bobbing ice cubes.

Enrique's head throbs. The sun reflects off the metal. It stings his eyes, and his skin tingles. It drains the little energy he has left. He moves around the car, chasing patches of shade. For a while, he stands on a narrow ledge at the end of a fuel tanker. It is just inches above the wheels. He cannot let himself fall asleep; one good shake of the train, and he would tumble off.

Moreover, the Mara Salvatrucha street gangsters, some deported from Los Angeles, always prowl the train tops looking for sleepers. Many MS gangsters settle in Chiapas after committing crimes in the United States and being expelled to their home countries in Central America. The police in Chiapas are more forgiving of gangs than those in El Salvador or Honduras. “There, the police don't arrest you. They kill you,” says José Eduardo Avilés, twenty-five, who was deported from Los Angeles to El Salvador and settled in Chiapas along the tracks.

The MS control the tops of freight trains operating north of the Río Suchiate, where many migrants going to the United States begin their trek through Mexico. They rob migrants riding the trains. Migrants, who are often afraid to press charges, make ideal victims.

About two hundred street gangsters in Chiapas share the rolling criminal enterprise. Father Flor María Rigoni, the priest at the Albergue Belén migrant shelter, counts nineteen groups. Each controls a specific part of the train route and certain stations. Periodically, the groups meet to decide who gets what.

“We ask for money to take people to the U.S. on top of our trains,” says Jorge Mauricio Mendoza Pineda, twenty-four, describing what he and his Mara Salvatrucha gang do in Chiapas. “They give me their money. If people treat me well, I treat them well. If they don't, I don't…. If someone says, ‘Please don't kill me,' I won't listen.”

Before the train leaves, the gangsters roam the Tapachula depot, eyeing which migrants are buying food and where they stash their cash afterward. They try to get friendly with the migrants, telling them they have already done the train ride. Maybe they can offer tips? Many of the gangsters wear white plastic rosaries around their necks so the migrants will be less suspicious. They ask, “Where are you from? Where are you going? Do you have any money?”

Ten or twenty board the train, armed with machetes, knives, bats, lead pipes, and pistols. When the train gains speed, they surround a group of migrants. They tell them: hand over your money or die. Drugs embolden them. The gangsters carry marijuana and rocks of crack cocaine in the headbands of their baseball caps. A train engineer, Emilio Canteros Méndez, often sees the armed gangs through his rearview mirror. Fights erupt on top of the boxcars. Migrants who anger the gangsters because they don't have money or resist are regularly tossed off the moving train or left dead on the tops of the cars, to be discovered by train workers at the next stop.

Gangsters' warnings to migrants not to go to the police are ruthlessly enforced. Julio César Cancino Gálvez, with Grupo Beta Sur, recalls how a group of about thirty migrants at the Tapachula train station asked him why the authorities weren't clamping down on the gangsters. Cancino told them they needed witnesses. He urged the migrants to step forward and report abuses. One nineteen-year-old Honduran in the crowd spoke up. He described his assailant in detail.

Hours later, the Red Cross asked Cancino if he could help an injured migrant. It was the same Honduran teenager. His right ribs were broken. His entire chest and face were badly bruised. He spoke slowly, in a whisper, clasping his chest. Two gangsters had overheard his description and kicked him mercilessly. “Next time, we kill you,” the gangsters told him. The teenager, afraid for his life, asked to be deported.

Many of the migrants on Enrique's train huddle together, hoping for safety in numbers. They watch for anyone with tattoos, especially gangsters who have skulls inked around their ankles—one skull, police say, for every person they have killed. Some wear black knit hats they can pull down over their faces. Their brutality is legendary. Migrants tell of nine gangsters who hurled a man off their train, then forced two boys to have sex together or be thrown off, too.

Enrique has heard of the most dangerous gangsters: El Indio, who claims the Guatemalan side of the Mexican border; Blackie, a chubby Salvadoran with dark skin and MS tattooed on his forehead, whose territory stretches from the border to Arriaga in northern Chiapas; and El Yaga, Porkie, and Home-boy.

During his first attempts north, a chance meeting saved Enrique from the worst of the gangs. As he set out on his trip, he noticed another teenager, a gangster named El Brujo, at the bus station in Honduras waiting to go to the Mexican border. Enrique doesn't like gangs. But as the two spent hours traveling through Honduras and Guatemala together, they became friends. On their first train ride through Chiapas, El Brujo introduced Enrique to a dozen other MS members, among them Big Daddy, who is skinny and short; El Chino (the Chinaman), who has slanted eyes; and El Payaso (the Clown), who has a big mouth and eyes. On subsequent trips, when he was deported, he always stuck with one of these gang members to protect himself from any attacks.

On his seventh trip, the convenient relationship ends. He is on the train with El Brujo and two other MS gangsters, who are carrying machetes. One of them is upset because a member of the rival 18th Street gang has stolen his shirt during a train stop in Chiapas. The MS gangsters decide to retaliate and throw the gangster off the train. Enrique refuses to participate, creating a rift. “If you are MS, you have to kill 18th Streeters. And if you are 18th Street, you must kill MS. I wasn't like that,” Enrique says.

After the fight with his friends, halfway through Chiapas, the gang members stop riding with Enrique. That night, without their protection, the six men beat him on top of the train. Now, for a second time, he is alone on a train. He must stay alert.