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

by Oscar Martinez

  All that’s left of him, this dead man, is a cross on the hill, marking the spot where he fell.

  New Mexico and Arizona are the two states with the most civilian-run border militias hunting migrants. The Minutemen, describing themselves as patriots, are the ones who gave new currency to the idea of civilian vigilantes.

  ~

  We finish our coffee, and José, the youngest Quintana, decides to go with us to the cemetery, where we want to photograph Apodaca’s grave while it’s still light. The back road we take is in even worse shape than the washboard of a path we’d traveled on earlier, and the cemetery we find is little more than a handful of crosses in the middle of the desert hills. It’s already getting dark when, as we’re about to start heading back, we notice the puddle of transmission fluid under the car. There’s no other option but to hoof it. Hiking through the brush and the burs on the way back to Las Chepas, we chat with José.

  He’s warmed up to us by now, and gives us his view of the ghost towns. “I want to get out of here,” he says, “but my pop says I need to stay, because he needs help with the house. My brother already lives in Palomas. They let him leave when he got married. But I’m young still, and there’s nobody but old folks here. And nothing happens. I need to go out for drinks once in a while, go to bars, have a life.”

  Palomas, though, isn’t much more than a small highway town either. It has two restaurants, five cantinas, and a few unpaved roads surrounding its small central plaza. Compared with Las Chepas, Palomas is a big city.

  Back in town, the Quintana family offers to let us to stay the night in their house. Arturo has already towed our car with his pickup, and we plan on seeing if we can get it running again tomorrow. They serve us a dinner of beans and potatoes and tell us about life in rural northern Mexico. Their stories sound surreal to us, as if they’re from another century.

  Trying to describe the feel of the region, Arturo reminisces about a murder in Los Lamentos. A cowboy, rounding up his cattle outside of town, approached a ranch house and asked the owner if he could use his stove to heat some water for his instant soup. The rancher showed him in just as another cowboy came to ask the same favor, to heat some soup. The second cowboy ended up using the first’s hot water. There was a discussion; the second cowboy suggested that the first cowboy merely heat more water; but, his pride wounded, the first cowboy took out his gun and shot the second cowboy in the head.

  “That’s desert people for you,” Arturo explains, opening a bottle of tequila. “Rough.”

  After Arturo pours a round and Margarita leaves for bed, we ask him again if he’d like the migrants to come back to town. And maybe it’s the tequila, or because the family finally believes that we’re not coyotes ourselves, but he admits something we hadn’t heard before: that it was the departure of the migrants that turned this place into a ghost town.

  Arturo tells us that up until the end of 2005 his son José didn’t work with customs, he drove a truck for migrants on their way from Palomas.

  “There were sixty each trip,” José puts in. “Each migrant paid fifty pesos. That’s almost five dollars a head. And, only spending about one hundred pesos on diesel, I was taking home about a hundred dollars a day, plus what the owner of the bus gave me on top.”

  Now José earns twenty-five dollars a day as a customs guard, sometimes having to work as long as forty-eight hour shifts.

  Arturo serves another round of tequila. We wonder about Margarita.

  “How was it for her?”

  “Oh, it was gooood,” Arturo sings his northern-accented response. “I tell you, back in those years,” 2005–6, “we never had less than 300 people passing through every day. Sometimes there were as many as 600. Some of us would be renting out rooms, others, like José Ortiz and Evelia Ruiz, working their stores, then Erlinda and my wife selling lunches, and then some others who aren’t around anymore worked transporting people, taking them up into the hills. The whole place was a big market. Each migrant put fifteen or twenty pesos into the town. Sometimes my wife would make as much as 6,000 pesos a day.”

  After such nostalgic musing, he pours the last round of the night.

  “Yeah,” José chimes in, “my pop even bought himself a truck. Isn’t that right, Pop?”

  “Yep, but that’s history now,” his pop responds.

  When Arturo went to the States, we learn, to buy and legalize his truck for transporting migrants from Palomas to Las Chepas, it was almost 2007. Governor Richardson had already asked the governor of Chihuahua to put a stop to the migrants flowing out of Las Chepas. Bush’s Operation Jump Start had already sent National Guard troops to the border to assist the Border Patrol. The flow of migrants was already dwindling.

  Arturo had taken a risk. He usually made about $1,000 for each job his union found him in the United States. His son convinced him that a new truck would be the best investment he could make with his savings. Back then José was forking over sometimes as much as 7,000 pesos a day (almost $700) to the owner of the truck he was driving.

  “And then,” Arturo says, putting a cap on the night, “everything stopped. Las Chepas stopped existing. We’re not even on the maps of Chihuahua anymore.”

  It was getting cold. The wind outside was whistling through the ruins of the town.

  The next day, thanks to the family’s help, we fixed up the car—a few taps of the hammer and some soldering—enough to get us back to Palomas.

  As we thanked the family for their hospitality, Arturo held out his large calloused hand to us, and said, in all sincerity: “If you see some migrants in those parts, tell them to come back.”

  13

  Juárez, Forbidden City: Chihuahua

  Why, we asked ourselves when we first arrived in Juárez, has such a long-standing crossing zone, so close to El Paso, died? Yet after just one day in this city known as the most violent city in the world, our question was simplified. What the hell is going on here? Thanks to anonymous testimonies we were able to sketch out an answer in the form of a travel journal. A day-to-day log marked by gunshots, the wall, the narcos, the dead, the deported, as well as the few and frightened Central Americans who still come to this deadly city.

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 31

  El Paso del Norte International Bridge, better known as the Santa Fe Bridge, spits out dozens of deported Mexicans. It’s a busy day. Every Friday at five o’clock in the afternoon, airplanes from all over the United States land in El Paso, Juárez’s sister city. Undocumented migrants are unloaded from these planes and driven down to the bridge that circumvents the border wall. They emerge disoriented, with a plastic bag in hand that holds a copy of the papers ordering them out of the country. Some hardly speak Spanish and use Spanglish to ask how to reach their hometown, which they may hardly remember. Some have no family in Mexico at all.

  “Seventeen years over there,” says one young man, turning, stupefied, to look down Juárez Avenue.

  There’s an immense difference between one side of the bridge and the other.

  Grupo Beta agents offer the deported men and women transportation. A volunteer driver suggests going to a shelter run by Dominican friars. I can tell that for a few of them, it’s hard to take those first few steps away from the Santa Fe Bridge. They stare into the distance, into their home country. A few, however, dressed like cholos,1 plow forward with confidence, swaggering in their bright sneakers and loose pants, decked out with earrings and huge, swinging chains. The few sporting gray pants and a gray sweatshirt have just been let out of prison for serious felonies, such as attempted murder. Others are in field laborers’ garb, thick long-sleeved button-down shirts and cotton pants. These guys have been caught in the act of trying to cross, and it’s rare that they’re younger than forty. The minority group is made up of over-fifties who came to the United States in the 1980s or early 90s, when there wasn’t yet a wall. When Juárez wasn’t what it is.

  Some 6,000 Mexicans are deported every month by the El Paso customs office. On Friday eveni
ngs it looks like a school parking lot at the end of the day, with people rushing out the doors or waiting for their ride.

  Currency exchange dealers mob the freshly deported migrants, hollering their offers. They circle the migrants as if they were tourists at a market, knowing that any money they have left from el otro lado, the other side, needs to be changed into pesos. Rodrigo, one of these dealers, dresses in orange, just like the Grupo Beta agents, to try to confuse migrants who are looking for advice. The three young women who work for him, wearing tiny shorts and shirts that show off their dark legs and belly buttons, take migrants by the arm and walk them to the exchange house.

  “We only charge you 3 percent, we do it to help more than anything else,” Rodrigo lies as he pockets 8 percent as tariff.

  Still, on this street, options have to be measured by their degree of evil; the corner shop keeps thirty of every hundred dollars. But the technique there is more sophisticated. The fat woman responsible for luring migrants in tries to convince them that it’s the only place to get pesos. “They’re all swindlers who bribe the authorities,” Rodrigo complains, suspiciously eyeing the shop. The owner, a tall skinny man with gray hair and an enormous, hawkish nose mounted on his gaunt face, films us with a small video camera.

  “He always does that,” Rodrigo explains. “It’s to intimidate us so we won’t work this corner.” The giant’s threat has nothing to do with showing the video to authorities, at least not for legal purposes. Rodrigo has a license to do his work. The threat is more along the lines of, I’m going to show your face to so-and-so and he’s going to smash it if you keep taking away my customers. Rodrigo has already suffered two beatings: one from the police, who accused him of resisting arrest (though he asserts that they came up to him already intent on attack), and another from a group of gangsters who waited for him on a corner a couple of blocks away.

  “Beware of the police,” Father Jose Barrios, director of the Juárez migrant shelter, warned Edu Ponce and me as we parted ways a few hours ago. “And beware of the thieves who roam around here. They’re in it together. They’re the ones robbing migrants.”

  When people talk about the danger in these parts, they don’t mean a young man who tries to snatch a purse away from an unsuspecting passerby. The fear here is sown by the police and by the drug traffickers. No one can trust anyone. Three hundred city police positions were taken over by national military forces this past October. Only those few agents who passed some obscure test of trustworthiness are still working. And, according to Father Barrios, people should still be wary of them, even though most do nothing but act as chauffeurs for the military.

  There are no city officers in sight today. Instead, nine military officers armed with AR-15 assault riffles watch over Juárez Avenue, which ends at the bridge. At least seven businesses in the area have shut down this month. Pharmacy owners, bar owners, and restaurant owners have chosen to leave the area rather than pay the monthly 20,000-peso tax that some of the drug cartels currently fighting over the area demand. The Juárez Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel, two of the largest organized crime groups in Mexico, are battling for control of the border zone, all in order to win more for their side: more people, more streets, more authorities.

  They’re not gangs and they’re not corner hoodlums. They’re organizations that cross hundreds of tons of South American cocaine and Mexican marijuana and methamphetamine to the United States. The Juárez Cartel was the largest in Mexico during the 1990s. Back then it was led by Amado Carrillo, known as El Señor de los Cielos, The Lord of the Skies. Carrillo was something like the Mexican version of Colombia’s Pablo Escobar. He earned his nickname because he used his Boeing 727 to cross loads of cocaine every week, sold at 200 million US dollars. The Mexican government alleged that an unrecognizable body, found in 1997 in a clinic specializing in plastic surgery, was Carrillo’s. Since his death or disappearance his relatives have led the Juárez Cartel, but it has been weakened by the Sinaloa and Gulf Cartels’ power surge.

  The Sinaloa Cartel has its hands in both Central and South America. This cartel is led by the most famous Mexican narco-trafficker, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, who wants to strip the Juárez Cartel of its last bit of armor in the city that gives it its name. El Chapo became a household name in 2001, when he escaped from a maximum security prison by supposedly hiding in a crate of dirty laundry. Now he wants to snatch the throne that the Lord of the Skies left empty.

  Ciudad Juárez is now considered the most violent city in the world. According to many newspapers, Mexican cartel warfare has left some 4,550 people dead, 4,000 in Juárez in 2008 alone. Since late 2008, there’s been a self-imposed curfew in town. At five in the afternoon, as soon as dusk sweeps over the city, everyone recommends doing one thing: “Lock yourself in.” Already today, four people have told us to do the same.

  Under the bridge, the lights hung along the six-foot metal wall dividing Mexico from the United States give a glow to the borderline. On the US side, two Border Patrol SUVs are making their rounds. The recently deported crowd into the shelter or into Grupo Beta vans. They stare sidelong at Juárez Avenue. The military is on the alert, and people walk hurriedly to leave the area or make their way to customs to cross over into the United States. Where they feel safer, I imagine.

  This is how night falls over the Santa Fe Bridge in Juárez, the city that went from receiving thousands of departing northbound migrants to receiving thousands of southbound deported migrants; the city where everyone watches their back. The militarized city. The war in Juárez provoked increased border militarization, to prevent the violence spilling over to neighboring US cities. Yet, despite the heavy military and Border Patrol presence, the outskirts of Juárez is still a major drug crossing zone.

  This is one of the many faces of Mexico’s northern border. This is Juárez, a frontier hot spot and, at the same time, a city that little by little has been vanishing from the migrant map.

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 1

  A body lying on the Juárez pavement can be one of two things: it can be an execution or it can be a murder. The stabbed body of a man found in the suburbs, briefly mentioned in yesterday’s papers, represents a murder. The body of the man found downtown in his white truck, punctured by forty-nine high-caliber rounds, represents an execution. That is, if a man dies in a bar fight or is stabbed in the street, he was murdered. It’s very different to what happens when a cartel, or the mafia, executes somebody. When a cartel kills, you know it.

  In recent years Ciudad Juárez has developed its own whispered vocabulary, words that carry meaning from the streets: muro (wall), rafagueo (machine-gunned), malandro (bad guys), ejecución, mafia, among others. As night falls, everything shuts down and the words come streaming in, telling stories, giving warnings.

  “Here’s where they executed the owner of the funeral parlor. Twelve shots. He was involved,” a taxi driver tells us on the way to our hotel. The driver adds: “He was a friend.”

  When in a city of 1.3 million there are thirty-seven police murdered in the last year, twenty-two stores torched for not paying narco-taxes, thirty-eight businessmen kidnapped, 10,000 cars stolen, and fifty-two bank robberies; when 5,000 families move out of the city for their own safety, 2,500 soldiers move in, and 521 small gangs are active, all allied to various cartels, then we need to emphasize a few words in particular that may help describe the situation.

  Fear. A worker at the migrant shelter (whose name I won’t reveal) tells me that he is scared to use a public restroom, in case he finds a decapitated head. It sounds at first like he’s paranoid, or crazy, but it’s happened to him twice.

  Lockdown. The woman who sells us lunch on the street says she’s been living in lockdown for the last six months. She’s been in Juárez for twenty-two years, and says that ever since “the war” (as people call it) started at the end of 2007, “you can’t go out for a beer, you can’t go to a movie, and you can’t go out dancing,” because you don’t know when things are going to e
xplode, if they’re going to light a place up with machine-guns, or drop off another human head. “From home to work and back, that’s it,” she says. Just a month ago she witnessed her most recent execution. She points to the pink house opposite her shop: “Over there a truck pulled up and someone blasted some guy with bullets. It was in plain light of day, around eleven in the morning.”

  Get out of town. This is what the only Central American staying at the migrant hostel told us he wants to do. He’s a twenty-six-year-old Honduran who came to Juárez with intention to cross. He had tried in Ojinaga, about 200 miles southeast of the city, but it was flooded by the Rio Grande. That’s when he came to Juárez, “a lo burro,” unthinking as a donkey, without knowing what he was getting into. And now he just wants to get out of town. “What with the wall and the crime, it’s not even worth trying to cross here,” he says. Nor does he have a chance to “work a little to make a bit of cash, because everybody says how dangerous it is to even step outside the door.”

  Tax. According to the owner of a bar nearby the Santa Fe Bridge, taxes have put an end to Juárez night life. Hardly any clients come anymore. When we met him at about ten at night, he was sitting completely alone at his own bar, bored and drinking a glass of wine. “As owners we wanted to close because even though nobody was coming to drink anymore, we still had to pay the tax or fear for our lives,” he explains. The bar was very popular, he tells us, just a year and a half ago. “This is the worst I’ve ever seen the city.” He received a notice saying that he’d have to pay $500 a month if he didn’t want the place burned down. The last bar to go up in flames, four months ago, was just down the street. Five masked men showed up one night, armed and carrying drums of gasoline.