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

by Óscar Martínez

some of the Central American women who bring life to these brothels are their family’s sole breadwinners. That’s why, Connie explains, “so many Guatemalan boys and girls accept the offer to come here and earn good money.”

The Law to Prevent and Punish People Trafficking was passed under Felipe Calderón’s administration, and promises perpetrators prison sentences of up to twenty-seven years and fines of up to 3,375 days’ worth of the minimum wage.

El Puma is a thirty-five-year-old Honduran with a nine-millimeter in his belt and a cuerno de chivo (goat horn), the Mexican nickname for an AK-47, hanging off his shoulder. His crew, all Honduran and each with a machete and a cuerno de chivo, surrounded him. El Puma’s turf stretches over the entirety of jungle-shrouded Tenosique, nestled between Petén, in Guatemala, and the Chiapan jungle, the Lacandona. People who know him say, baldly, “He works for Los Zetas.”

The polleros were forced to give up their car and finally left the woman in the hands of the masked men. They dragged her down and into the nearby forest. But their new loot left the assailants falsely self-assured, and they turned their backs on the train. The polleros wanted revenge. They hopped off the train, shot another assailant dead, got the woman back and got onto the train before it took off. Then, minutes later, once the crime scene was out of sight, the polleros and their twenty pollos abandoned the train to look for another way north. It was obvious those assailants would come back for more. And they did. In Chontalpan, about twenty miles north of La Aceitera, three white vans surrounded the rails: one in front of the train, another keeping up beside us, the third behind. Without any polleros to put up a fight, the rest of the migrants ditched the train. “It was Los Zetas,” Arturo says. “It was Los Zetas,” José says. It was Los Zetas.

LOS ZETAS’ OTHER BUSINESS

They gesticulate, ask us to turn off our recorders and put away the cameras, and then they describe what everybody here knows: that every day Los Zeta and their allies kidnap tens of undocumented Central Americans, in the broad light of day, and that the migrants are kept in safe houses which everybody, including the authorities, knows about.

The business logic of the kidnappers is sound: it’s more profitable to kidnap forty people, each of whom will pay between $300 and $1,500 in ransom money, than it is to extort a local business owner who might alert the press or the police. The national authorities, including a unit of the National Commission of Human Rights (NCHR) that is investigating migration, admit the gravity of the problem. These are the kidnappings that don’t matter. These are the victims who don’t report the crimes they suffer. The Mexican government registered 650 kidnappings in the year 2008, for example. But this number reflected only reported cases. Time spent on the actual migrant routes proves that such numbers are a gross understatement. It would not be an exaggeration to say that in any stop along the migrant trail, in just a single month, there are as many kidnappings as the official national figure for the year. In the first six months of 2009, the NCHR visited Veracruz to record testimonies of kidnapped migrants and logged as many as 10,000 cases, claiming that if they had had more personnel the figure would be twice or three times as high.

There is, simply put, nobody to assure the safety of migrants in Mexico. Sometimes a week or more will pass before a migrant on the trail will have the chance or the money to call a family member. Migrants try to travel the paths with the fewest authorities and, for fear of deportation, almost never report a crime. A migrant passing through Mexico is like a w...

After the attack on the train, where there were more than a hundred armed assaults, at least three murders, three injuries, and three kidnappings, there was not a single mention of the incident in the press. Neither the poli...

Tenosique is the launching point. Then migrants run the gauntlet of Coatzacoalcos, Medias Aguas, Tierra Blanca, Orizaba, and Lechería. Then the last tolls, the border cities themselves, Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo. These are the stops along the kidnapping route. All of them, except Lechería, which is outside of Mexico City, are on the Atlantic coast, and all of them, according to the crime map of the Antinarcotics Division of Mexico, are dominated by Los Zetas.

NCHR has often reminded the state of what is happening, but the authorities continue to deny or simply not respond to official complaints. The word “kidnapping” has lost its weight in Mexico. The tangle of normalized, constant violence is complex and confusing, and now even the polleros have to submit to its rules.

THE POLLERO TAX

Though hundreds of thousands of Central Americans pour into Mexico each year—Mexico’s National Institute of Migration estimates 250,000 annually—those who walk this road know each other: Los Zetas know the polleros, the polleros know the assailants, the assailants know who works at migrant shelters, and those who work at the migrant shelter know the municipal authorities. Ismael—a fictional name—is a local and has worked at the nearby migrant she...

so many of the informants for these kidnapping groups pose as migrants, and often they’re Central Americans themselves. They listen in on migrants’ conversations and then find a good moment to ask them if they have family on the other side, if they have anyone to pay for the pollero on the border. If the migrants answer no, they tell their boss to look out for so-and-so who won’t have anyone looking after them. Easy prey.”

“I’ve got eight testimonies of kidnappings that happened in eight different places. Each of the victims said that the kidnappers identified themselves as Zetas. You think it was really them?” “Not necessarily. It goes like this: no one can say they’re a Zeta without permission. A lot of them, though, are just local delinquents who work for Los Zetas, who make sure that the polleros pay their dues,” he tells me, his face not breaking from its steady glare.

“This all comes from way up, all the way from the northern border in Tamaulipas. There’s someone by the name of El Abuelo up there. He’s the guy who controls all the polleros passing through his turf. I know he’s in business with Los Zetas. He pays some sort of tax so that his polleros can work here, down south. And Los Zetas have people to make sure that whoever isn’t paying isn’t getting through.”

“And the kidnappings?” A migrant comes over to us, and picks up his backpack, which sits on our table. Ismael looks at him out of the corner of his eye. He waits to respond until the man leaves. “It started as something against the polleros who didn’t pay. They’d take away their pollitos, their little chicks, and since they already had them in their hands they figured they’d go ahead and get a ransom from their families in the US through a fast deposit from Western Union. And then it got to be a habit. They started picking up any migrant who walked alone.” “When did all this start?” “We started recording victims’ testimonies in the middle of 2007.” At

“Yeah, well, one has to have a sort of boss up in El Norte so that they can let Los Zetas know that you’re okay, that no one should touch you, but that time my cell wasn’t charged so I couldn’t make the call to my boss, which is when they ganged up on me and hauled me into their car. I was guiding six people. They asked me who I worked for. I told them, but they didn’t believe me. Then they tortured me, burning my back with cigarettes.”

“They asked for money. I had to cough up because if I didn’t they’d take away my migrants. I knew those people, we were close. They were two Guatemalans and four Salvadorans from Santa Ana. If I didn’t pay, I knew they’d kidnap and torture them. Anyone who says they don’t have anyone in the States to send money gets burned. I know people who’ve had fingers and ears cut off. And plenty of them just get killed.” “And how do you know it was them?” “People say it’s not them. They say they’re gangs of nobodies, just delinquents who work for them. The real Zetas control these guys from the northern border.”

You risk a lot as a pollero. Because if the boss doesn’t let everyone know that you’re going, then everything gets thrown your way and you’re fucked. They kidnap you, maybe even kill you. There’s been a lot of murders.

A lot of polleros are addicted to cocaine, amphetamines, or caffeine pills that they use to stay awake through the night.

There are almost 300,000 people living here, mostly in narrow rows of wood-and-tarp shacks that run alongside the train tracks.

The word Coatzacoalcos comes from the Nahuatl, an indigenous language of Mexico, and means The Snake Den.

There are some places where the fear is so thick you breathe it. For a migrant, Coatzacoalcos is one of those places. The stories tumble over each other: “They kidnapped me on my last try.” “I escaped from a kidnapping yesterday.” “Three months ago I saw two women being grabbed.”

I tell Ortiz, of NCHR, that right in front of us there are loads of kidnapping victims; that people are getting kidnapped blocks from his office, right where the train rails snake through town. But he’s not surprised. Kidnappings are his daily bread. “The scope of the criminal gangs,” he explains, “has increased by about 200 percent. We have many reports saying that their modus operandi is the same here as in Tierra Blanca. Each kidnapper covers about fifteen ransoms. Which makes me think that the money wiring companies must know [based on the number of wires a single person receives] who they’re dealing with. We have trustworthy reports that municipal police have detained migrants and handed them over to the kidnappers.” “I have three testimonies,” I tell him, “where someone who was kidnapped claims that another from his group who managed to escape came back after having been beaten, saying that he went to the local police to report the crime. And the police, instead of investigating, sent him straight back to the kidnappers.” “Yes,” Ortiz responds, “it’s not that we don’t know about these cases. We know that the migrants get delivered. We haven’t heard about exactly this type of situation, but we know that the police are involved, that there is co-participation.

Usually the officials claim that what’s going on is not going on, and get uncomfortable when we start talking about kidnappings. Actually, only a month after they denied the abundance of kidnappings, the army stepped in and rescued twenty-eight victims. In the last few months everything has been happening in the light of day, with or without the presence of authorities. There are migrants who have told us: ‘The army patrols were passing by. They turned and saw that we were being held on the ground at gunpoint. And they kept on going.’

Erving Ortiz (no relation to Eduardo), the Salvadoran consul, denounced this past August of 2008 that there are “about forty undocumented migrants kidnapped every week” in the state of Veracruz. He made the claim after the army rescued the twenty-eight victims in Coatzacoalcos. And this time the most influential newspapers in the country, Reforma and El Universal, picked up the story.

On April 4, 2008, the head of INM, Cecilia Romero, along with the secretary of the interior, Juan Camilo Mouriño,2 received a forty-page document titled “Kidnappings and Organized Crime.” The document contained a detailed account of what was occurring nationwide, along with three personal testimonies of victims. It was sent out by Leticia Gutiérrez, director of the Pastoral Dimension of Human Mobility, a Catholic organization that runs thirty-five migrant shelters across the country, including in the cities of Tierra Blanca, Coatzacoalcos, and Reynosa. But neither Romero nor Mouriño ever responded.

How is it possible that the kidnappings are still happening when the local governments, the countries of origin, the media, the Mexican government, and the US government all know exactly what’s going on?

What Consul Ortiz says is clear: everybody knows, nobody acts, and the kidnappings continue.

I ask if there are Zetas in Tierra Blanca. “You know,” he says, “there are things I can’t talk about. You guys are passing through, but I live here and I don’t want anyone asking, ‘Who said that about us?’ If they hear something about someone, they can control even where he walks. They can bring him down.” Without meaning to, he said much more than we’d expected. And we feel it’s time for us to leave the tracks.

The rule Osiel gives us is clear: everything is off the record. That’s how everyone, or at least everyone who lives here, talks on Zetas turf.

We meet in a garbage dump full of old dishes and keepsakes from first communions and funerals. At this point it’s hard to get any new information, even if it’s all off the record. “I can tell you this at least,” Osiel says: “everyone knows the boss of all bosses. People call him Chito, and he lives there on the hill. He’s the one behind the kidnappings, but no one would give him away.” A warning we had gotten back in Coatzacoalcos comes to mind: “If you go there asking about the kidnappings, Los Zetas will know in eight minutes. If you talk to any of the town’s authorities, they’ll know in three.”

In both 2006 and 2007 there was an uptick in the incident reports of crimes committed not by bandits but by the authorities themselves: military, police, and even migration officers. Between May 2006 and April 2007, the investigator Rodolfo Casillas of the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO, an international institute with a branch in Mexico City) surveyed 1,700 undocumented Central Americans in Mexico. Among those interviewed, Casillas registered 2,506 human rights violations. The NCHR in Mexico also documented three cases in which common prisons were used to detain Central Americans charged with nothing more than a migration violation. One

Even the Mexican attorney general has publically recognized that kidnappings have passed from a “sporadic” to a “systemic” problem. Of course he is only referring to the kidnapping of Mexican citizens, who very rarely report these crimes not only for fear of the kidnappers, but also for fear “of the local authorities who are connected with and protect the groups that they should be combating.” If not even a Mexican citizen, who votes and pays taxes, is willing to report a crime, what is the likelihood that an undocumented migrant will?

In 2008 the number of assaults maintained a steady pace. Assault became an expected toll for those traveling without papers across Mexico to the United States. And it was in this year that kidnappings—victims and reported incidents popping up all over the country—started to get more attention.

On September 30 in Ixtepec, Oaxaca, quite far from what is considered the most perilous leg of the journey, I meet Gustavo and Arturo. They are sixteen and eighteen years old respectively, both from El Cimarrón, Puerto Barrios, a Caribbean port town in Guatemala. When I meet the boys they are already on their way home. Earlier, while riding the train north around four in the morning outside of Orizaba Los Zetas kidnapped the boys. “Okay motherfuckers,” someone yelled at them, “if you run we’ll shoot!” Seven armed men took them away. They were locked up for three days, beaten, and repeatedly threatened in a closed room. Their ransom was set at $500. “They beat us,” explains Arturo, “and said that if we didn’t give them our family’s phone number they’d cut out one of our kidneys.” His kidnappers, he told me, held up a horse branding iron heated with a blowtorch and threatened to brand him with a Z. Arturo recognized a chubby guy who had befriended him back in Arriaga, and to whom he’d mentioned that he had family members in the United States. The kidnappers told the boys that the day before they were seized, they had released thirty other migrants. “Overhearing their conversation,...

People smugglers, like coyotes. The name means poulterer; their clients are the pollos or pollitos, chickens or chicks.

“But sometimes it must be impossible to do that,” I insist. “You must live on your tiptoes! You never know who’s who. It’s impossible to be sure if the man selling tacos is only selling tacos or if he’s selling them to be able to keep watch.”

He agreed to see me on condition that I wouldn’t report where he works or who he works for.

THE CEMETERY RANCH The rain makes La Victoria ranch seem like a film set.

Last Thursday, fifty-two undocumented Central American migrants were released after being kidnapped and kept crammed in the house for days. They were held by the commander of an estaca (Zeta terminology for squadron) who is said to run this small town of Gregorio Méndez. Two of the migrants who were traveling on top of the train passing through Gregorio closely escaped the fate of the fifty-two others when the conductor, Marcos Estrada Tejero, suspiciously decided to stop the train close to the ranch and fifteen armed men approached. Two days later, the two men ran into an army commander on patrol and told him what had happened. Soon twelve soldiers along with twelve state policemen from Tabasco and thirty state policemen from Chiapas suited up in search of the kidnapped migrants. The train conductor, who was located while driving another train outside of Veracruz, was arrested and accused of working with the same branch of Los Zetas later caught near La Victoria. One of Los Zetas’ chiefs, a Honduran named Frank Hándal Polanco, was arrested as well, but was seen leaving the police station in a taxi only an hour after his apprehension. There were eight others arrested in the joint military-state police operation, while at least seven, still armed with AR-15 assault rifles, escaped into the nearby mountains. On the ranch itself the officers found and confiscated nine-millimeter pistols and M-16 rifles. “The worst part is how they were treated,” one of the soldiers tells me. ...

They already knew by heart the chilling threat the kidnappers used to introduce themselves: “We are Los Zetas! Don’t move or we’ll kill you!” In these small towns, there’s no need of an ID, or any other kind of credential, to prove Zeta membership. If someone says they’re a Zeta, they’re a Zeta. If they say they’re a Zeta and they’re not a Zeta, it won’t be too long before they’re dead. At

They arranged the victims into five groups, lined them up to face the wall and forced them to their knees. Then they started paddling them in the small of their backs. It’s a method of military torture used in Mexico, and it’s one of the identifying marks of Los Zetas. The verb to paddle, tablear, is well known in the overlapping world of both Los Zetas and undocumented migrants passing through Mexico.

Any attempt to break Los Zetas’ rules is pun...

He shortly returned with one of the migrants, who was marched in front of the other captives and forced to his knees. “See what happens if you fuck with us!” Melesit Jiménez, from Honduras, was shot dead in the back of the neck.

Los Zetas entertained themselves by raping the two women in the group, both from Honduras, and occasionally paddling the men in the back. They were waiting for the ransom money: between $1,500 and $5,000 apiece, wired from each of the victims’ families.

This massive kidnapping occurred only a few days after the National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR) presented a paper on the current state of migrant abductions. A mass of reporters jostled for photos and sound bites of the event. The NCHR stated that, even with their limited resources, they were able to document 10,000 firsthand reports of kidnapping, including documentation of the police conspiring with Los Zetas.

But the next day everything returned to n...

In this world of pilgrims without papers, kidnappings have become just as common as migrant assaults in La Arrocera, or the torture and mutilation of train hoppers throughout Mexico. It’s so common that in Tabasco we don’t need to go looking for it. After months of watching Los Zetas infiltrate the country, making it clear that they are an independent cartel (after splitting from the Gulf Cartel), after months of hearing their name and smelling the fear in the small towns of southern Mexico all the way to the northern border, we’re starting to understand who they are, how they work, and, above all, how they have such wide-ranging control. Their secret is simply fear. They shake th...