The Beast (16 page)

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 kidnappings—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.”

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.