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

Author:Oscar Martinez
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781781682975
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2013-10-08T06:00:00+00:00

Once in a while, to turn yourself in as a witness offers a way out of the game, but I have a bad feeling that El Chilango is going to get killed, that there’s no way out for him.

I decide to spend the night looking for possibilities.

El Chilango, I learn, had first come to the hostel the day before. He was supposedly loitering around outside of its gates. He walked up to Solalinde once, but never said anything, and never actually set foot inside the shelter.

I won’t say who I spoke with, but they’re people I trust, who I’ve known for awhile on the migrant trails. Two of them told me that El Chilango is a typical coyote, hard to deal with and a pain just like the rest of them. They said that he had two run-ins with Don Fito. First, when he lost five migrants in Tierra Blanca because he was drunk while waiting for a train and his migrants decided to go on alone. The second incident was more serious. El Chilango wanted to fatten his wallet a little and stole two migrants from another of El Abuelo’s coyotes. This is a serious violation in the coyote world. Each boss pays his pollero by the number of pollos he tends while they’re in his zone. Stealing two migrants is what got El Chilango in trouble, and put him out of work. Don Fito himself had to call him and force him to give up all of his pollos in restitution.

They tear each other up. Coyotes fighting coyotes. Hardly any of them follow the rules anymore. They attempt to pacify the narcos, but it’s like trying to tame a tiger in the jungle. They know what they’re up against, but money keeps driving them. And El Chilango’s case isn’t unique.

UNKNOWN TERRITORY

In Ixtepec I was introduced to another coyote, Alberto. It was January 2008. Alberto was from San Miguel, a neighborhood on the east side of San Salvador, but had since moved to Monterrey in the northern state of Nuevo León, Mexico.

He was part of a network of luxury coyotes who don’t work with impoverished migrants overland. His clients paid as much as $7,000 per trip. The way it worked was that these migrants gathered on a designated day and hour in the central plaza of Tapachula. From there a driver picked them up and took them to a house to spend the night. At dawn the following morning the same driver would take them to a hidden runway in a remote canyon region. From there the migrants would fly to Monterrey, which is within a short drive of the Texas border. And that’s where Alberto’s work began. He would collect the migrants at the runway in Monterrey, arrange them in groups of no more than five, assign one coyote per group, and tell them the rules and the route they were to use in crossing the border.

The coyote group Alberto worked for would earn $35,000 for every five clients successfully ferried across.

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