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

This English-language edition first published by Verso 2013 Translation © Daniela Maria Ugaz and John Washington 2013 First published as Los migrantes que no importan © Icaria Editorial 2010 Foreword © Francisco Goldman 2013 All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books 4/715 ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-132-9 eISBN (US): 978-1-78168-190-9 eISBN (UK): 978-1-78168-502-0 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publica- tion Data Martínez, Óscar (Oscar Enrique) [Migrantes que no importan. English] The beast : riding the rails and dodging narcos on the migrant trail / by Óscar Martínez; translated by Daniela Maria Ugaz and John Washington. pages cm “First published as Los migrantes que no importan [copyrighted] Icaria Editorial 2010.” ISBN 978-1-78168-132-9 (hardback : alk. 5/715 paper) 1. Illegal aliens—Mexico. 2. Central Americ- ans— Mexico. 3. Immigrants—Mexico. 4. Mexico— Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. 5. Central America—Emigration and immigration— Social aspects. I. Title. JV7402.M3713 2013 305.9>069120972—dc23 2013020580 v3.1 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Foreword by Francisco Goldman Chapter 1. On the Road: Oaxaca Chapter 2. Here They Rape, There They Kill: Chiapas Chapter 3. La Bestia: Oaxaca and Veracruz Chapter 4. The Invisible Slaves: Chiapas Chapter 5. Kidnappings Don’t Matter: Veracruz, Tabasco, Oaxaca Chapter 6. We Are Los Zetas: Tabasco Photo Insert 7/715 Chapter 7. Living among Coyotes: To the Rio Grande and Back Chapter 8. You Are Not Welcome in Tijuana: Baja California Chapter 9. The Funnel Effect: Baja Cali- fornia and Sonora Chapter 10. The Narco Demand: Arizona Chapter 11. Cat and Mouse with the Border Patrol: Arizona Chapter 12. Ghost Town: Chihuahua Chapter 13. Juárez, Forbidden City: Chihuahua Chapter 14. Dying in the Rio Grande: Tamaulipas Foreword By Francisco Goldman ElFaro.net advertises itself as Latin America’s first online digital newspaper. It is based in El Salvador, and was founded in 1998. Many enterprises nowadays, individual and collective, proclaim themselves or would like to be considered “alternative,” and as part of a “vanguard” showing the way forward, but ElFaro.net truly is both. It certainly offers an alternative to the kinds of fare provided by El Salvador’s familiar newspapers—complicit with the political and moneyed establishment, and 9/715 thoroughly mediocre at best, as is true of the establishment press and other media throughout Latin America. And ElFaro.net is a vanguard because it is so very excellent in every way that it has become a beacon of the possible, of the ambitious, of the truly revolutionary, to young journalists up and down the con- tinent. To the question of how it can be that the Bloomsbury of Latin American journalists has sprung up in tiny El Sal- vador and not in Mexico City or Buenos Aires, one answer is, Why not? and another is, Actually, it makes perfect sense, and yet another is, Isn’t this just what the digital age promised? No more periphery, the center is every- where. Except it takes a visionary editorial team, and exceptionally cour- ageous and talented journalist-writers, to fulfill such an idealized and wishful supposition. 10/715 ElFaro.net was founded in 1999, six years after the end of El Salvador’s civil war, by two young Salvadorans who’d been raised abroad, the sons of political exiles. When they returned home to their war-devastated country, and found it still as violent or even more violent than before, saturated by organ- ized crime and gangs, the infamously sadistic maras, terrorizing poor urban neighborhoods and towns, they decided that there really could be such a thing as cutting-edge journalism, and that it should and could make a difference. And what is cutting-edge journalism? It means writing about what nobody else dares to write about, at least not thoroughly or memorably, and getting as close to your subjects as you can, and taking as much time as you need, and then somehow knowing how to write the hell out of what you 11/715 find—capturing mareros’s ways of speaking, their jargon and gestures, as if the writer himself has been a marero all his life, deciphering their codes, prising from them their life-stories, their secrets, their most scarifying and gruesome stories, their odd vulnerabil- ities, learning the layout and nuances of their places, and doing the same with their rivals, their victims, with the police and prosecutors who pursue them, and shaping that material into compelling narratives that engross the reader and deliver much larger and more unsettling meanings than those found in ordinary newspaper dispatches. I hadn’t read stories like those published in ElFaro.net anywhere else. Such high-quality and important work doesn’t go unnoticed, and the digital newspaper’s writers have gathered some of the world’s most prestigious 12/715 journalism awards: cofounder Carlos Dada, the current editor, won the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, and Carlos Martínez won the Ortega y Gasset Award. Now Carlos’s brother, Óscar Martínez, has produced The Beast (ori- ginally Los migrantes que no importan, “the migrants who don’t matter”), about the Central American migrants who trek across Mexico to reach the northern border and the United States. With mind-boggling courage and com- mitment, Óscar Martínez went where no other journalist from Mexico or else- where had gone, exploring the migrants’ routes, in a series of trips, from bottom to top, that take in not only the infamous train known as “La Bes- tia”—he rode on that train eight times—but also the desolate byways traveled on foot where the very worst things happen. Despite being a 13/715 compilation of dispatches published over two years in ElFaro.net, the book has the organic coherence, develop- ment, and narrative drive of a novel. It reads like a series of pilgrims’ tales about a journey through hell. (Even calling it hell feels like an understatement.) The Beast is, along with Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, the most impressive nonfiction book I’ve read in years. I first read it in Spanish a couple of years ago after it was recom- mended to me by Alma Guillermopri- eto, in an edition published in 2010 by Icaria, a small press in Barcelona. In Mexico and Latin America, the book might as well have not existed. How could it be that this book, which should be urgent reading for all Mexicans at all interested in what occurs in their country, was not immediately published in 14/715 Mexico? Perhaps because it holds up a mirror to a Mexico almost too de- praved, grotesque, and heartless to be- lieve. In different ways it holds up just as painful a mirror to the United States, and another to Central America. Finally The Beast was rescued and published, in late 2012, by the Oaxaca-based Sur + Ediciones, one of a handful of excellent small presses in Mexico that have rein- vigorated the country’s literary land- scape. Thanks to their initiative the book was discovered by Verso, which has brought out the present edition in English. Over the last few months, I’ve had many conversations with people who’ve read the book, which I urge upon everybody I meet. They always speak, of course, about the importance of what it conveys, and in awed tones about its author’s courage. And then they always 15/715 add, “But how come that cabrón writes so well!” Though only in his mid-twen- ties when he wrote the book, Óscar Martínez writes really, really well, with liveliness, precision, vividly observed detail, with a restraint which it must have been terribly difficult to sustain considering the rage he often felt over what he was witnessing, with astonish- ing and never superfluous poetry and, most of all, with a genius for conveying human character. Martínez’s literary gift is what lifts The Beast into a work that delivers much more than journal- istic information—though its information is of pressing and illuminating importance—and makes it a masterpiece. Each chapter narrates a unique story. At times the book reminded me of Isaac Babel’s Red Army Tales. 16/715 “ ‘I’m running,” Auner says, his head ducked down, not meeting my eyes, ‘so I don’t get killed.’ ” So begins the first pilgrim’s tale, in a migrant shelter in southern Oaxaca where Martínez meets Auner and his two Salvadoran brothers, embarking on the journey north without any set plan, without knowledge of its dangers, traps, and rules. Yet it’s all-important to know what you’re doing on this journey, the book will teach us, again and again: it should be required reading for any migrant setting out across Mexico. Along the way only these widely scattered migrants’ shelters, most run by the Catholic Church, offer some res- pite from the hardship and unyielding fear of the journey, though not en- tirely—because the shelters are also in- filtrated by spies working for the Zetas 17/715 cartel and other criminal groups, or corrupt coyotes who prey on the migrants. The first time I asked him, though, he told me he was migrating to try his luck. He said he was only looking for a better life, una vida mejor, which is a common saying on the migrant trails.

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