Carlos Bartolo, who runs the migrant shelter in Arriaga, tells me that just today four people who’d been robbed showed up. One of these, Ernesto Vargas, a twenty-four-year-old from a small Salvadoran town called Atiquizaya, was robbed by two men, one who carried a machete and another who held a .38 revolver pointed at his chest. They took everything he had: $25 and 200 pesos. I call Commander Maximino, who says he’s checking into it. It seems, he tells me, that a group of bandits have moved a few miles to the north, to the border of Oaxaca, where they’ve set up a safe house in the mountains.
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