by Dawn Paley
The situation facing migrants traveling through Mexico has long been complicated by extortion and abuse, but over the past years, the experience of migrating through Mexico has been transformed as drug war militarization has led to better equipped and more disperse armed groups. The long-functioning coyote system, in which migrants pay (often through loans) to be guided over part or all of their route by experienced border crossers, was slowly dismantled as coyotes were threatened or killed by criminal groups. The illicit activities of migration authorities and police were either assumed by cartels, or they began to function in a complimentary fashion with them. “In reality migrants always complained of abuses by authorities, especially police, not just here in Nuevo Laredo but also in Chiapas, in Veracruz, and in Tabasco; the stories they tell reflected the total fear they feel toward the authorities,” said a man I interviewed who was involved in the migrant shelter in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. “The situation they are facing became more complicated because of organized crime. Initially the kidnappings started in 2004 or 2005, when the group the migrants feared were the Maras (Central American gangs).… Those groups have since been substituted by cartels like the Zetas or the Gulf, who are responsible for this whole disaster, especially of kidnappings and the extortion of family members—that’s been the new element.” Migrants don’t generally travel with cash, they are detained and forced to give a phone number of a relative in the United States; it is that person who is then extorted for sums nearing $5,000. In dozens of interviews with migrants, I heard over and over again about groups of people traveling above one of the trains to the United States being corralled or detained by migration officials, only to be abandoned by authorities and turned over to criminal groups. They described how, from the moment they crossed into Mexico, they were subject to open recruiting by members of criminal organizations, and how once they were at the north border they would be forced to pay quotas to the Zetas or other crime groups in order to cross.
Dramatic events in Chiapas and Veracruz provide some examples of how this informal border enforcement takes place. At the crime scene, one of the women lay face up, her torso cutting a diagonal line across the railway track. The other lay face down, her right leg splayed over the same track at the thigh. Both wore reddish tank tops and pants that went down just below the knees. A police officer with an automatic weapon watched over the bodies. It was far too late to do anything to help. Little yellow numbers, from one to six, were placed on each piece of ballistic evidence, dotting across the tracks. According to local media, the women were shot and stabbed in the late afternoon of May 30, 2013.[21] A preliminary report suggests they refused to pay the quota charged by a criminal group after climbing up on the train.[22] Their bodies were found later that same day just north of the Mexican tourist town of Palenque, in Chiapas. Both women were from Honduras—Mexicans don’t risk traveling on cargo trains when they migrate through their country toward the United States. Most Central Americans traveling through Mexico do so as undocumented migrants, which means they are not afforded the right to free movement.
If undocumented migrants board a bus in Mexico, they can be pulled off by soldiers or immigration agents at numerous checkpoints along the roads, and deported. Without paperwork, they can’t make it past the airport service counter. Thus, the train is the most accessible means of transport for Hondurans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and others who hope against hope they’ll make it to the US and find employment. But the train represents another set of risks, as it is completely under the control of criminal groups. Groups of migrants I met with in Palenque explained in hushed tones that they are expected to pay three $100 quotas in order to advance through to Tamaulipas state sandwiched on top of a cargo train, which for the purpose of comparison, is more expensive than it would be to buy a cheap plane ticket from Chiapas to northern Mexico.
The double murder on the train tracks in Chiapas took place on the heels of an attempted mass extortion of migrants in the same region on May 1, when hundreds of Central American migrants making their way through Veracruz state on top of a cargo train experienced first hand what it is like to live through absolute horror. After nightfall, the train passed Las Barrancas, a community of about 3,000, in the southern part of the state. As it neared the village, a group of people linked to the Zetas began demanding that those riding the train pay them a quota. According to the testimonies of people on the train, members of the Zetas demanded each migrant pay US$100. As the train chugged along, people who resisted or couldn’t pay were beaten, shot at, stabbed, and thrown from the train over the course of nine kilometers. Approximately twenty-five people were hospitalized with injuries, one of which was serious. One boy survived because bullets lodged into his backpack. Hundreds of people jumped off the train to safety, landing on the gravel road that follows the tracks and leads to Las Barrancas. Amid the confusion, someone got word to Julio Pérez Zabalza, a spry seventy-year-old with the energy of someone half his age. He got on a loudspeaker mounted on a twelve-foot pole in front of his house and called for the migrants to come up to the plaza. “I started to make announcements on the loudspeaker; five or ten minutes later the migrants started to come out to the soccer field; within an hour or an hour and a half the field was full, with 500 or 600 migrants,” he said. Residents of Las Barrancas fed and sheltered the migrants, most of whom have since continued on toward the United States. The few who remain in the community, because their injuries prevented them from carrying on, preferred not to speak to journalists.
Ruben Figueroa helps run a migrant shelter on the Guatemalan border, which for many is a point of entry into Mexico, and the first place they’ll climb up on the train heading north. He says that abuses of migrants in Veracruz have reached epic proportions because of the government’s close relationship with criminal groups. “By its nature, migration is a humanitarian tragedy, but when there are governments that are complicit with organized crime, it becomes a holocaust.”
Some have accused the governor of Veracruz, Javier Duarte, of covering up for the criminals who attacked migrants in Barrancas on May 1st. Duarte stated in a press release that the incident was actually caused by infighting between the migrants themselves.[23] But Guillermo Cortes Moreno, the adjunct mayor of Las Barrancas, rejected that version, reiterating that the conflict was related to the extortion of migrants. According to newspaper reports, no one was killed when the criminal group attacked the passengers on the train. Local journalists, however, say they think it is possible that people were killed that night, but because police were in control of the area for ten hours following the attack, no bodies were seen. Without bodies, there are no dead, they said. According to members of Grupo Beta, a government-funded group that provides food and water to migrants and minimally interacts with them, what happened in Las Barrancas isn’t necessarily unusual. The difference is that this time it was denounced by local authorities, and picked up by the media. “Events like this aren’t rare; they are common here,” said Figueroa, the migrant rights activist. “It’s normal that the government tried to deny what happened, but this got out thanks to the media.” Figueroa works at La 72 in Tenosique, Tabasco, a slow-moving town in the humid lowlands on the Guatemala-Mexico border. La 72 was opened after the August 2011 discovery of the corpses of seventy-two migrants, who were killed after refusing to work for Los Zetas. There were at least two survivors, from Ecuador and Honduras. The bodies of fifty-eight men and fourteen women were bound and stacked in the back of a ranch in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. The shelter was named in honor of the victims, who were said to have been killed by the Zetas after failing to either pay extortion or join the ranks of the organization.
“Effectively, this is the beginning point for the sinister Gulf route—the route through hell is what we call it,” Figueroa told me in 2012. “[The migrants] take about 25 days to arrive to the north border. They use trains, they use buses, they use many means to arrive to the north border, and from there they try and pass over to the U
nited States.” Figueroa went on to explain why he calls the Gulf route, which sees migrants travel north through Veracruz and Tamaulipas, the route through hell. “There’s a lot of economic interests at play on the part of organized crime; for them migrants are like merchandise. What [members of organized crime groups] don’t seem to realize is that this is a poor migration, a forced migration, and that the migrants don’t carry money. But they want money anyway. They torture [the migrants] until they give them the phone number of a family member in the United States, and if they don’t have it, they’ll be murdered.”
It’s a short walk to the church from the shelter, or you can hop on a three-wheeled moto-taxi, locally called a pochimovil, and be there in minutes. There I met with Fray Tomás Gonzáles Castillo, a Franciscan who also works in Tenosique supporting migrants passing through. “I’ve heard various testimonies of mass kidnappings, and when they tell me what happens to them, honestly it is incredible and it’s only after many testimonies that one starts to believe it. It sounds like something out of a horror movie, when people tell you about the mutilations,” he told me, in the small, unevenly lit backroom of his parish. The horrors faced by migrants transiting Mexico have generally been kept out of the headlines in Mexico and the United States.
Paramilitarized Extraction
In the last chapter, we looked at how formal militarization can benefit transnational corporations, as police and soldiers form security corridors and quell dissent. Concretely, there are also a number of cases where paramilitarization linked to the drug war is taking place in areas where resource extraction is a key economic activity. These cases differ from the formal militarization documented in the previous chapter, because the government formally distances itself from paramilitary violence, or is made to look as if it is struggling to control it. Take northern Tamaulipas, the Zetas stronghold: it is also home to the Burgos Basin, which is rich in oil and gas. The US Geological Survey said in 2003 that Burgos could contain more than six billion barrels of undiscovered oil, and over seven trillion cubic feet of gas.[24] The Burgos Basin is centered on Reynosa, Tamaulipas, covering an area about the size of Ireland, in a border region that has become one of the most dangerous parts of Mexico. Much of the violence in Tamaulipas stems from the 2010 split between the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas, as well as the deployment of 8,000 troops throughout the state.[25] Ciudad Mier, which sits atop the Burgos Basin, experienced intense, midday gun battles through 2009 and early 2010. “The scale of the upheaval increased at the beginning of November 2010, when the Zetas issued an open threat to all of Ciudad Mier’s inhabitants, saying that those who remained in the town would be killed. As a result, as many as 400 people who had not been able to leave throughout the year fled to the nearby town of Ciudad Miguel Alemán, where they took shelter in a community hall.”[26] Gun battles and kidnappings of oil workers have also forced Pemex to shut down oil production at drilling rigs in the Burgos Basin. “Pemex hides cases [of kidnappings]. There’s more than twenty people disappeared in our union,” said a man I talked to in Reynosa, who has been with the company his entire working life. “They just are marked down as missing work,” he said. Theft of petroleum products by organized crime is also a common occurrence. As much as 40 percent of natural gas condensate production from Burgos is rerouted and stolen, something generally blamed on Zetas.
In 2011, Pemex filed a lawsuit in Houston against ten US oil and pipeline companies for collaborating with organized crime to purchase condensate stolen from the Burgos Basin in Mexico. “The cartels built tunnels and even their own pipelines to facilitate the thefts.… All of the Defendants have participated and profited—knowingly or unwittingly—in the trafficking of stolen condensate in the United States and have thereby encouraged and facilitated the Mexican organized crime groups that stole the condensate,” says the complaint.[27] The significance of this lawsuit cannot be ignored, as it alleges a direct relationship between paramilitary groups and various Texas oil companies. The Burgos Basin is just one of the oil- and gas-rich areas along Mexico’s northern border. The new discoveries of shale oil are recoverable through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and Mexico has passed reforms allowing US oil companies to do so in these areas. The recently announced deposits are in northeastern Mexico, including in the states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosí, and Veracruz.[28] These regions have all been militarized as part of the war on drugs, and some of them also have high levels of displacement because of violence linked to the drug war. Following a pattern set in Colombia, there is little doubt that the abilities of residents to organize or even protest against the thousands of wells to be drilled in these desert areas will be massively compromised by the intense violence that precedes the projects.
The overlap between paramilitary activity and transnational mining is particularly evident in Chihuahua, Mexico’s largest state by territory. Chihuahua is, at once, experiencing an important expansion in transnational mining, militarization, and paramilitarization, under the pretext of the war on drugs. Because of this, it presents us with a microcosm of what is taking place in areas throughout Mexico, parts of Central America, Colombia, and Peru. The fact that there is a resource rush taking place in tandem with the militarization (and paramilitarization) linked to the drug war is an open secret, one which provides a more adequate explanation of why governments (host and foreign) are promoting drug control strategies that do little to control drug trafficking or lessen consumption.
The Reyes Salazar family is the most high-profile family to have been displaced and targeted by organized crime activity in Chihuahua State. I met Saul Reyes Salazar in El Paso, Texas, across the border from where two of his sisters, his sister-in-law, and two of his brothers were murdered between January 2010 and February 2011. The Reyes Salazar family was known for their environmental activism, having successfully fought a proposed nuclear waste facility in Texas and carried out campaigns against contamination and toxins being illegally disposed of in Juárez. They were also among the loudest critics of the army incursion into the Juárez Valley.
Today, Saul Reyes Salazar lives in El Paso, Texas, with his family. He and his immediate family were granted asylum in January 2012, and his activism is now focused on denouncing the killings and the war that destroyed his family and forced him to flee Mexico. “Today there’s pretty much no one who talks about this, but the Juárez Valley is still contaminated by a 100 km canal that carries Juárez waste water, the farming lands are contaminated by chemicals from various maquilas who dump their chemicals in the water, there’s oil from the mechanics shops, and of course all of the human waste from all of the houses in Ciudad Juárez end up in the valley, which is basically the septic tank of Juárez,” he told me in March 2013. Environmental and protest actions in the border region have fallen off in the face of the violence, which has been extreme in many locations of the Juárez Valley. “We’re not the only ones who have suffered this tragedy. In Chihuahua, there have been more than forty social, environmental, and human rights activists who have been murdered. I consider it like a cleansing … an ideological cleansing.”
In order to explore this phenomenon in more detail, let’s look closer at what’s at stake in Chihuahua. According to the Mexican Geological Service, in 2010 Chihuahua was the second most important state in the country in the production of all of gold, silver, lead, and zinc.[29] More than half of the land in Chihuahua state, which is almost the size of Texas, has been granted in mining concessions.[30] The volume of precious metals mined in Chihuahua has increased since 2006, with silver extraction almost doubling between 2006 and 2010.[31] As mining has increased, so has the violence in there. As we shall see with the story of Ismael Solorio Urrutia and Manuelita Solís Contreras, drug cartel–linked violence can work to the benefit of mining companies or their boosters seeking to silence dissent.
Ismael Solorio Urrutia and Manuela Solís Contreras were two more victims of the cleansing described by Saul Reyes Salazar. They both b
reathed their last breaths seated inside their truck, which was parked beside the highway leading out of the city of Cuauhtémoc. According to video footage acquired as part of the investigation into the murder, Ismael pulled his pickup off the road, and turned the car around as if to talk to the driver of a car that had pulled in behind him. As the killer approached, Ismael pulled 160 pesos (about $13) out of his wallet as if planning to pay him. He was still clasping the bills when his body was found. When I asked Martin Solís Bustamante, an activist and lifelong friend of the family, how exactly they died, he got up from his chair and walked around behind me, pressing two fingers to my lower skull. Two shots passed through Ismael’s skull and lodged themselves in Manuela’s breast and shoulder, killing her. Their killings are the first of opponents to Canadian mining in Mexico’s northern Chihuahua state. The double murder shocked the people of Benito Juárez, a desert town with a population about 12,000. Benito Juárez spreads out from a small central park, where vendors sell ice cream and burritos and elderly men rest on benches in the shade. After a few blocks, the paved roads leaving the park turn into dusty gravel roads, which lead for kilometers into a harsh desert. Water flows from a reservoir at the foot of the Carmen River through a small canal, providing farmers with the raw material for cattle ranching, chili growing, and cotton harvesting—the economic mainstays of the area. Benito Juárez is also an ejido, with 53,000 hectares of land collectively owned and farmed by about 400 families. The mining concessions supposedly grant the right to explore and exploit minerals below ejidal land, but in order to access the minerals, the company that holds the concessions must secure surface rights. The road out to where MAG Silver—a Vancouver-based mining exploration firm—was drilling core samples cuts through sunbaked desert plains, flanked by mountains in all directions, the stark landscape interrupted only by chaparral bush and spindly spikes of ocotillo. Without irrigation, little survives here, and securing water in the desert is no small feat. In Benito Juárez, the effort to ensure the survival of the local economy and a way of life based around family and farm is multi-generational and involves hundreds of residents. Ismael Solorio and Martin Solís, for instance, studied together at an agricultural school in Juárez. Returning to the ejido in the early 1980s, they got their start in activism, organizing in defense against predatory banking practices after the peso was devalued in 1987, and using direct action to help improve the lives of the ejido’s members.