The Beast (21 page)

“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.

La Doña likes to approach migrants like a mother at first, sometimes even offering them a free
tlayuda
. She tells them that her sons are coyotes and will give them a good price, but then she pulls out a pistol and forces them into a truck.

El Chilango says that the day before yesterday La Doña came out of her stand just as he was getting off the tracks. “Hey, you son of a bitch!” she called to him. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

El Chilango says he’s sure they had their eyes on him the whole time on the train. La Doña screamed at him to follow her so they could ask Don Fito what he wanted to do to his rebel coyote.

But catching La Doña in an inattentive moment, El Chilango grabbed his group of migrants and dove into a taxi. They sped to the bus station where they caught a bus to Oaxaca, and then caught another to Ixtepec. And here we are, under a tree outside the shelter. His migrants are resting inside, hoping not to get
caught in the crossfire between El Chilango and Don Fito’s people.

“What the hell were you thinking?” I ask him.

“I don’t know, man, I don’t know. It’s that these migrants still needed to pay me for the trip. And I knew that if we didn’t get out of there Don Fito was either going to beat the shit out of me or kill me,” he says, his voice trembling up and down with each word.

“Stupid idiots,” he says. “I worked well for them, but the boss just wasn’t giving me any
pollos
. I have two women with kids I need to send them money. The stupid idiots!”

“And so what now?” I ask.

“Now,” he says, still trembling, “I’m going to get on this train, avoid Coatzacoalcos, and see if I can get to the US. And I’m going with my
pollos
. And if I get there, I’m gonna stay. I know how it works here, that all the other coyotes working for Don Fito and El Abuelo already have a kill order on me. Plus all the spies that ride the trains. Stupid idiots.”

I tell him that his plan is flat-out dumb and isn’t going to work. They’re going to find him, and it’ll be his fault if his
pollos
get killed as well.

“Can’t you talk to anybody from the army for me? Tell them I know where all the Zetas kidnappers are, that if they give me witness protection I’ll give them all up. I’ll give up the coyotes that work for them too, plus the spies, the whole lot of them.”

He shows me the list of contacts on his two cell phones. In one of them there are three numbers for “Doña Coatzacoalcos.” In the other there are numbers for “Don Fito” and for “El Borrego” (the Sheep), the famous Zeta chief of Tierra Blanca. I agree to consult the head of the shelter, Alejandro Solalinde. His idea isn’t crazy, I tell the
pollero
, but Solalinde rather than me would know who to approach in the army. I ask him to let me talk with the Hondurans, his
pollos
, saying that afterward I’d call Solalinde and tell him what’s going on. El Chilango accepts. We exchange numbers and he takes off.

~

Once in a while, to turn yourself in as a witness offers a way out of the game, but I have a bad feeling that El Chilango is going to get killed, that there’s no way out for him.

I decide to spend the night looking for possibilities.

El Chilango, I learn, had first come to the hostel the day before. He was supposedly loitering around outside of its gates. He walked up to Solalinde once, but never said anything, and never actually set foot inside the shelter.

I won’t say who I spoke with, but they’re people I trust, who I’ve known for awhile on the migrant trails. Two of them told me that El Chilango is a typical coyote, hard to deal with and a pain just like the rest of them. They said that he had two run-ins with Don Fito. First, when he lost five migrants in Tierra Blanca because he was drunk while waiting for a train and his migrants decided to go on alone. The second incident was more serious. El Chilango wanted to fatten his wallet a little and stole two migrants from another of El Abuelo’s coyotes. This is a serious violation in the coyote world. Each boss pays his
pollero
by the number of
pollos
he tends while they’re in his zone. Stealing two migrants is what got El Chilango in trouble, and put him out of work. Don Fito himself had to call him and force him to give up all of his
pollos
in restitution.

They tear each other up. Coyotes fighting coyotes. Hardly any of them follow the rules anymore. They attempt to pacify the narcos, but it’s like trying to tame a tiger in the jungle. They know what they’re up against, but money keeps driving them. And El Chilango’s case isn’t unique.

UNKNOWN TERRITORY

In Ixtepec I was introduced to another coyote, Alberto. It was January 2008. Alberto was from San Miguel, a neighborhood on the east side of San Salvador, but had since moved to Monterrey in the northern state of Nuevo León, Mexico.

He was part of a network of luxury coyotes who don’t work
with impoverished migrants overland. His clients paid as much as $7,000 per trip. The way it worked was that these migrants gathered on a designated day and hour in the central plaza of Tapachula. From there a driver picked them up and took them to a house to spend the night. At dawn the following morning the same driver would take them to a hidden runway in a remote canyon region. From there the migrants would fly to Monterrey, which is within a short drive of the Texas border. And that’s where Alberto’s work began. He would collect the migrants at the runway in Monterrey, arrange them in groups of no more than five, assign one coyote per group, and tell them the rules and the route they were to use in crossing the border.

The coyote group Alberto worked for would earn $35,000 for every five clients successfully ferried across. And they would usually cross at least four groups a month. Last month, however, they didn’t make a single trip. Mexican authorities, in agreement with the US government, started trying to control the airspace around Tapachula in an effort to slow the flow of Colombian cocaine being flown in from Central America. Usually the smuggling flights are accomplished with Cessna aircraft, which can fly low and fast, and land on short runways.

Alberto, suddenly without income, said he couldn’t wait around for the skies to calm. He went back to his former life and started riding the rails again. It had been three years since he had last worked as a standard coyote, and back then Los Zetas didn’t exist. When I met him he was guiding three Salvadorans north on The Beast.

He was passing himself off as a migrant and seemed to me to be doing it pretty well. He gave instructions to his clients as we were playing soccer, like he was just giving them game strategies. Nobody suspected him of anything.

“It’s because if another coyote sees me, I’m fucked. I’m not paying the taxes of the road,” he explained to me when we were alone.

I remember thinking he was crazy. If they found him they
weren’t just going to reprimand him, or ask him to pay a fine. Los Zetas only educate with pain. A few months after talking with Alberto, I met a Guatemalan coyote who showed me his cigarette burns and the scar on his lower back where Los Zetas beat him nearly to the bone with a paddle.

Coyotes already live on the edge, and yet they push their luck, risking everything.

HELP ME

I tell Father Solalinde about El Chilango’s predicament. He says there might be something we can do. But then El Chilango doesn’t show up again. He told me he’d stop by, and yet at dusk there’s still no sign of him. We sit down for dinner. Maybe tomorrow, I think.

We can hear the train starting up, whistling its departure for Medias Aguas. For the past hour the conductor has been backing into unhinged cars and securing them onto the rest of the train, and now it’s finally time to leave. It’s a small group today, only about forty migrants. They’ll all be able to find a spot on the lower platforms, which means they’ll get some sleep and will be relatively comfortable. They’ve each also just finished a bowl of chicken soup, so they won’t be traveling on empty stomachs. The priest, the other volunteers, and I have sat down to eat, but before finishing the meal I get a call. It’s El Chilango.

“What happened? I was waiting for you all afternoon,” I say.

“I couldn’t swing it. The shelter is hot. Just wanted to call you before I lose the signal. I’m gonna take off on this train.”