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

by Oscar Martinez

  Pitbull turns to look over his shoulder at a couple of migrant women leaving the shelter. “Hey, sweethearts!” he yells. Fleeing, it seems, isn’t always a somber procession. At least not for Pitbull. He takes a drag of his cigarette, then sinks back, lying down beside the rails and propping his head on a rock. He looks up at the sky and takes another drag. His posture makes him look like he could be a patient talking to a shrink.

  After he saw that body fall, Pitbull got out of Chalchuapa for a while. Two boozy old men were being charged with homicide because he’d identified them to their faces. Leaving was the best thing.

  He went to Tapachula, a Mexican town that smells of fritters and lead, on the border with Guatemala, where one of his older brothers, Josué, aka El Chele, had been living for about five months. El Chele was working in a mechanics shop in a factory slum in Tapachula, saving up money to continue his journey to El Norte. He also had some hope that his father would call and tell him that a coyote was ready, the money paid, and all that was left to do was make the trip north.

  “Nos vamos al Norte, hijo, verás cómo ahí sí hay chamba, buen jale, buen dinero,”2 his father had told him in his migrant Spanish, a mix of Central American and Chicano.

  The three brothers, Auner, Pitbull, and El Chele, had never been close to one another, but recently their lives have forced them together. Auner was especially distant, working as a farmhand in rural El Salvador, waiting for his wife to bear his first child. None of the brothers called each other. They followed rural codes, a man’s campesino way, always keeping a tight cap on their emotions.

  El Chele was in good with the owners of the mechanics shop, but not quite good enough for them to let Pitbull sleep there as well. The owners did, however, let El Chele bring women to the shop and spend a slow afternoon in the back with them. And so El Chele’s time passed in Tapachula, working at the shop and working to lure girls into the back room, but never making steady friends. In his free hours he would take a shower to wash the soot off, slick gobs of gel into his curly hair, put on an imitation designer shirt and fake Converse shoes, and then start his solitary prowl through café corners on the main plaza, through the pseudo-colonial white rotunda and through the paleterías or soda fountains where men and women gathered, and, as El Chele hoped, where they fell in love. Sometimes he’d succeed, score a date, flirt with a girl on a bench in the park. They’d eat an ice cream, and then he’d woo her back to the shop where they’d squirm their pants down. Not long after, he’d forget about her and return to his routine.

  Part of El Chele’s success was due to the fact that he doesn’t look like the typical delinquent. Unlike Auner and Pitbull, he’s fair-skinned, and the innocent look of his face matches his boyish brown curls. He doesn’t have calloused hands, and he keeps his nails clean and clipped, so you can’t tell that he’s already spent most of his young life in laboring. All of it makes him seem like somebody you could trust.

  Pitbull, on the other hand, was scraping together his life as best he could. He spent his time in Tapachula, roaming the Zona de Indeco, one of the most dangerous barrios and site of many national and foreign-owned factories. In Indeco—thanks to the giant walls, graffitied with Mara Salvatrucha gang signs, that section off the safer parts of Tapachula—walking the streets is like stepping on a spinal cord, a touchy boundary line between two countries in conflict.3

  Pitbull worked those months variously as a bricklayer, a mechanic’s assistant, and a load-carrier in a market. All of it was under the table and day-to-day. He made a few friends who, as he put it, made him feel like he was living on a tightrope, always on the verge of becoming a nameless dead body lying on the street. It was that same rope on which he teetered in El Salvador when he was weighing whether or not to give in, like most of his hopeless friends, to one of the gangs. As a gang member, he told himself, at least he’d have constant backup, and so be able to make the best of the constant fear.

  “It’s not that I wanted to join a gang,” Pitbull told me, in a sort of self-critical confession. “I know it’s a bitch getting into that, but I was just like all those other kids. We were street punks who didn’t go to school, just wandering around, trying to live the best we could, looking for a good time.”

  In Tapachula, having a good time means walking that tightrope. If there’s no fear of the fall, it’s hardly worth the walk.

  And it didn’t take long for Pitbull to fall in with a new crowd. Some young thug came up to him and made an offer. “So what, you want to go fuck something up around here?”

  “I’m down,” Pitbull responded.

  They started stealing bicycles from kids, grabbing women’s purses. They found most of their prey outside of schools, in middle-class neighborhoods, around the markets. One of the wallets that they stole, however, sent Pitbull back to El Salvador. After Pitbull snatched that fated wallet, he jumped on his bike and turned a corner right where a cop happened to be passing by. Since he didn’t want to ditch the bike, he pedaled up onto the sidewalk and turned down an alleyway where, for his misfortune, there was another cop. They had him cornered. He was taken down to the station.

  “Piece of shit thug,” the cop yelled at him. “You come to my country and do nothing but cause trouble. We’re going to put you away for three years so you learn not to fuck around anymore.”

  Pitbull’s looks didn’t help him any: his hair on end, his head always thrown back, his eyes always squinting like he’s about to attack someone. Plus he has that insolent thug walk, that hard, body-teetering limp.

  He didn’t even try to explain that he wasn’t a gang member, that he was only a kid from Central America. The only thing that crossed his mind in that moment was the three years.

  “Three years. I’ll be twenty-one, almost. A veteran.”

  And the police wouldn’t ask him anything but what gang he was in. Pitbull looked the part, enough to have them convinced.

  In the end, the three years was only a threat. Pitbull spent eight months in a juvenile prison in Tapachula, during which time nobody visited him. Not once. Not Auner, not El Chele. Not even Doña Silvia, his mother.

  “I was fresh meat,” he said.

  His first time in the shower, somebody left him naked, stealing his shoes, pants, and shirt. But then, after a few more days, he started figuring things out. The other kids spoke the same language as he did. He overheard words like perrito, chavala, boris, chotas, and he started to feel at home. It was gang slang. Mara Salvatrucha slang. Pitbull turned back into the reckless kid he was. Speaking the language opened the door to the dominant gang in the prison.

  The Mara Salvatrucha leader was El Travieso (Naughty Boy), an eighteen-year-old Guatemalan who’d been locked up for four years, since he was fourteen, on account of three murders. Three black tears tattooed under his eye laid claim to those bodies. Next in command was El Smokie, with two black tears, and “MS” tattooed on the inside of his bottom lip. Then El Crimen (The Crime), also Guatemalan and also with two black tears. Then finally there were El Hondureño and Jairo, both from Honduras.

  “All of them were two-lettered,” Pitbull said, referring to the MS of the Mara Salvatruchas. “All of us Central Americans were the big shits of the prison. We sold weed, cigarettes, cocaine, and we kept all the other little shits in order.”

  What does it take to survive as a young man? According to Pitbull, it takes recklessness. Recklessness like Juan Carlos had, before he was killed back in Chalchuapa. Like El Travieso has. Like El Crimen. Like all his friends from childhood, and like he himself who is now on the run. And what does the recklessness do for him? It gives him “reputation.” And what’s the best way to gain that reputation? Earn a few tears under your eye, learn to run in the game, learn to make the rules, rather than lose your shirt and pants in a prison shower room.

  “The first thing I did when I joined,” Pitbull says, “was to get my clothes back.” He laughs. “I fucked up those shits who stole them from me too. To make up for the shame. Back in the ba
throom, we broke those pigs in good.”

  After sitting with Pitbull for a while, listening to him reminisce about prison days, we return to the shelter and stand next to a table where some of the other migrants are busy with conquián. As they play the card game it’s as if, for this moment, they’ve forgotten about the streets back in El Salvador, and the bodies that were hitting them.

  The card players laugh. They joke around, insulting each other, glad to be surrounded with fellow Salvadorans who understand why they’re fleeing. When one of the men puts down the wrong card in this fast-paced game, the other players howl and jeer. Moron! Ass! ¡Pendejo! ¡Burro! And the one who put down the wrong card laughs right along.

  Then Auner takes me aside. He wants to tell me the decision he and his brothers have come to.

  “We’re going by bus across the mountains,” he says. “But, it’s like,” he hesitates. “It’s that … I wanted to see if you could help us out, because … It’s just that we don’t know anything.”

  I agree to help them as best I can. I’ll go with them to Oaxaca.

  We decide to meet tomorrow at the Parque Ixtepec, and then, without any gesture at emotion, we say goodnight.

  THE DROP OF A PEN

  The morning sun hasn’t yet scorched the town. A protest march passes through the cobbled streets, headed by a pickup with a megaphone strapped to its roof, that usually makes its rounds advertising the daily paper. Those with street jobs watch the march, which is about a hundred people strong. The news truck has loaned its services to denounce the alleged rape of a local prostitute by eight policemen. Police crime here doesn’t surprise me. Two years ago I wrote a report about a gang of migrant kidnappers made up of municipal and judicial officers in this same town.

  “Son of a bitch,” I say, “eight of them raped her.”

  Auner and El Chele look down. “Qué paloma,” they mutter, an expression meaning something like “What a shame!,” and go on absently staring at the magazines of a nearby kiosk. Pitbull looks pensive. He doesn’t say anything at first, then he spits out, “But she was a whore, right?”

  Who knows what it is that makes three brothers what they are. Auner is paternal. El Chele could be confused with any other adolescent. And Pitbull, he seems like he’s been an ex-con all his life. So how did they turn out so differently? Maybe a few more minutes spent one day at the corner store or at a soccer game, maybe a punch doled out by their father in a moment of despair. It could be something that subtle, as random as the drop of a pen.

  The three of us hunker down into the beater of a bus, which is filled with indigenous folks on return trips back into the mountains. After a while we figure out why this is the route preferred by migrants who can afford to spend a little extra. The road is a hair-raising series of steep ascents, dives, sharp turns, and broken sections of pavement, winding like an intestine through a no-man’s-land of forest and patches of rugged limestone, a path where the Mexican Institute of National Migration still hasn’t set up a checkpoint.

  Overcoming our fear and our stomachs, we finally arrive at Santiago Ixcuintepec. It’s a small indigenous town bathed in mist and drizzle in the thick of the jungle. We come to a church to rest the nine hours we have before the next bus leaves for Oaxaca City. Some young locals glare down at us as if in challenge. Pitbull veers between wanting to shoot them an even more provocative look and keeping his cool, keeping his head down, remembering that he’s on the run and that the odds of this road are stacked against him. Luckily, he says nothing.

  In just a few minutes three separate locals, wearing kind faces and cheap rubber-soled sandals, offer to take us to their homes which are in small towns farther down the road. But their offers, I know, are two-faced. They tell us we’ll sleep well there, stuffed with beans and tortillas—and then each of them asks for $150. Because our bus, they tell us, isn’t coming today anyway.

  They’re scammers, no doubt. Of course our bus is coming, which will cost only $8 a head for the whole ride. This little town, like so many others I’ve seen on this road, is turning into a nest of thieves. Migrants are the perfect prey because they’re invisible, always hiding from authorities.

  The brothers, not knowing how to respond, turn to me. The locals’ offer clearly doesn’t sound too bad to them. Forward is forward.

  THE OTHER BODIES

  “Hey, old lady, treat us to a couple sodas, would you?” It was Los Chocolates, two dark-skinned brothers from Chalchuapa, members of the 18’s. They were shouting at Doña Silvia, the Alfaro brothers’ mother. Los Chocolates hung out mornings and afternoons in front of Doña Silvia’s corner shop, often asking for free drinks. Their job for the gang was to stand guard, but they spent most of their time on the post getting high.

  It was June 19, 2008. A day like any other.

  “Them again,” Doña Silvia whispered to herself, just before she heard eight gunshots, followed by the screams of her eldest daughter who’d been standing outside the shop with her children.

  Doña Silvia came out running and found her daughter and grandchildren hugging onto each other, still screaming. A taxi cut a quick U-turn and sped away down the street. Los Chocolates—Salvador, thirty-six and Marvin, eighteen—were splayed out on the sidewalk. Their faces, chests, and legs all pockmarked with bullet holes.

  The taxi, its windows darkly tinted, had parked in front of the store right next to where Los Chocolates were passing their day. Then, as though the driver wanted to ask for directions, both the front and back windows of the taxi slowly rolled down. Out peeked four nine-millimeter muzzles.

  Silvia was stunned, her gaze fixed on where the taxi had squealed away.

  It was a dizzying scene, the stuff of violence-torn barrios, where members of different gangs openly fight on the streets. Doña Silva’s shop isn’t in one of those barrios. It’s in a neighborhood known for its children’s soccer games, for teens chitchatting and mothers working their corner food stands. The peace here is only seldom interrupted by the violence. This violence, though, has lately been encroaching.

  Silvia ushered the little ones into the store and closed up shop. When the police finally came to collect the bodies, there were no witnesses, nobody to answer even a single question.

  To Silvia it was a sign. She had lived all her life in that city, had raised her kids there, but she felt a tide change that afternoon. The day after the murders she called her sons, Auner and Pitbull, and told them to get out of town, to hang out a while with their grandfather in Tacuba. El Chele was already across the border in Mexico. Silvia let him be. No one told him about the death of two known gang members only steps away from his mother’s store.

  Auner and Pitbull fled to Tacuba where they worked on the farm, pushing cows out to pasture, sharpening machetes, cutting grass. For Pitbull it was a return to his childhood as a laborer, a campesino, a childhood that made him wince. That sort of work, he was convinced, led nowhere. Besides, he couldn’t get his mind off hanging out in clubs, flirting with girls, or getting another piercing. Auner didn’t like it there either. His new wife’s pregnancy had sparked in him the dream of being able to provide for his family on his own. Their grandfather paid the boys nothing but rice, beans, and tortillas. It wasn’t enough for them.

  And so they decided to leave for Mexico, for Tapachula. Auner spent one last night with his girl. Pitbull got high with his boys in Chalchuapa, his first time smoking outside of prison. And the next day Auner and Pitbull got on the bus and headed north to meet their brother.

  They were together again, not by choice but by necessity. They helped each other out, and yet all the while they carried on with that cool affect particular to campesinos, leaving little room for comfort or future plans made together.

  Then, one night, not too long after he had arrived, Auner was walking home after a day of work, pondering his future, ambling that slow pensive amble that would befit a man ten years older, when he received the call from his uncle.

  “Auner,” his uncle told him, “th
ey killed your mom.”

  Doña Silvia Yolanda Alváñez died aged forty-four from two gunshot wounds to the head, one through her forehead and the other through her left temple. The murderers were two men. The getaway vehicle was a bicycle: one man pedaling, the other riding the back pegs. They stopped in front of Doña Silvia’s store where she was washing silverware on the sidewalk next to her brother. The two men walked past the brother and surrounded Doña Silvia. Then each of them shot her in the head.

  THE ANXIETY OF ESCAPE

  “This is a bitch,” Pitbull says loudly, with every intention of being heard.

  The bus is chugging its way from Ixcuintepec to Oaxaca City, its headlights illuminating moths and mosquitoes and cutting through the pitch dark of the jungle. We’ve been listening to norteña music since we first boarded, and Pitbull is sick of it. He wants a taste of reggaeton. After a while, though, he calms down and nods off to the trebly beat of the bus.

  El Chele and Auner are sleeping in successive rows behind him. They decided to spread themselves out, in case a cop came looking for undocumented migrants. But they still stick out enough to almost glow: three young men with loose pants and tennis shoes on a bus entirely full of indigenous folks. And they’re not just migrating, remember, they’re fleeing. You can tell. They’re the ones with the light sleep. The ones who peek out the windows when the bus comes to a stop. It doesn’t matter if the bus stops for someone to pee, or to pick up passengers, the boys get nervous every time.

  Dawn comes while we’re still in the mountains. We open our eyes and see that the dirt road we’d been traveling is now paved. El Chele, staring out the window at the distant mountains, has hardly said a word the whole ride. But Pitbull, when awake, is the same unrestrained guy, shuffling around in his seat, trying to crack jokes, insulting passing cars, whistling the random tunes that come into his head. And Auner has been sleeping almost the entire time. When he finally wakes I notice a sad look on his face. With his brow furrowed, he sees me looking at him and shakes his head.