The Beast (5 page)

“What’s going on with you?” I ask.

“Just thinking the same thing over and over.”

“Your family?”

“My family.”

“What about them?”

“God. Just hoping the threats against us don’t turn against them. Those people are damn crazy. They didn’t even say who they were coming for. They only said,
for the family
.”

Auner explains to me that by family he means only his two brothers, their older sister who stayed behind, his wife, and his two-year-old daughter. The rest of them, he says—his grandfather, his uncles, all of those who didn’t say a word or do a thing about his mother’s death—aren’t worth a dime to him.

That hot night in Tapachula, when Auner got the call from his uncle, he and his brothers decided to leave immediately to try to make it in time for their mother’s burial. None of them want to walk me through that night. They only give me the shortest of phrases:
it was hard, we just had to get back, it was total hell
.

For two days they traveled against the migrant tide, getting farther from the United States, crossing the river that divides Mexico and Guatemala. They arrived too late. They made it only just in time to see the casket lowered into the dirt. El Chele admits he had a child’s rage. He was angry, he says, but felt like crying more than lashing out. Pitbull and Auner silently knew they were in agreement—they wanted blood. But whose blood, neither knew.

A shroud of silence fell over the body of Doña Silvia. The uncle who had witnessed the murder claimed ignorance. “No,” he said. “I don’t know anything. I really don’t. I didn’t even see them.” Their grandfather held his Evangelist bible out in front of him as if it were a shield. “You’ve got to be quiet,” he told the brothers. “Leave everything in the hands of God. It’s how He wanted it. Stop asking questions and jump into the hands of God like your mother has.”

None of it sat well with the brothers. Months passed. The brothers looked for answers, but none came. Were the killers Pitbull testified against in the Juan Carlos murder finally getting their revenge? Was it the Mara Salvatruchas, trying to eliminate any witnesses to Los Chocolates’ murder?

“Or maybe,” offered Pitbull, “it was some old witch that hated her for God knows what.”

Death isn’t simple in El Salvador. It’s like a sea: you’re subject to its depths, its creatures, its darkness. Was it the cold that did it, the waves, a shark? A drunk, a gangster, a witch? They didn’t have a clue.

Months passed: two months of rage and questions, then two of resignation, and another of exhaustion. Eventually the time came for the brothers to reap what they’d sowed. All those questions sprouted not answers but threats. In one week, both their uncle, who was in Chalchuapa, and their grandfather, who was in Tacuba, received the same anonymous note. It was sent to their relatives, but addressed to the brothers.

“Someone wants to kill you,” their uncle told them. “Someone told me they’re gonna kill you three and then the whole family.”

That was it. The tip-off as anonymous as the threat itself.

The brothers felt the purgatory of their country, they felt the force with which their country spit people out or dropped them dead (twelve murders a day in a country with only six million people). They packed their bags and started north, joining the pilgrimage of upchucked Central Americans. They dove into that stream of escapees. Those fleeing poverty, those fleeing death.
Because poverty and death touches them all: the young and the old, the men and the women, the gangsters and the cops.

TWO STORIES OF VIOLENCE

I can’t help but think of other stories I’ve heard on these roads. I can’t help but think of the shocking indifference to receiving a death threat as if it were a part of daily life. I remember the nearly identical reactions of a Honduran policeman and a Guatemalan gangster: I had to escape. That’s what they both told me, both of them emphasizing the
had
.

The gangster’s name was Saúl. He was nineteen years old and had spent fifteen of those years in Los Angeles with his mother. Five years ago he’d gotten involved in the 18’s. He was arrested and deported, however, when he was no longer a member—at least that’s what he told me—for robbing a twenty-four-hour convenience store.

I met Saúl in Mexico. Both of us were traveling north toward Medias Aguas, hanging onto the tops of cargo trains. The headlamps cutting a brief path of light through the mountain darkness. Saúl was heading north for his fifth try at crossing over. One attempt after another, five in a row without a break, trying to get back to the United States. We cupped windbreaks around our cigarettes with our hands. He was telling me why he was running, and he kept stressing, again and again, that he
had
to run, that he had no other choice, that for some people in this world there are not two or three different choices. There is only one. Which is, simply, to run.

The effect of riding the rails is always the same. On top of a train there aren’t journalists and migrants, there are only people hanging on. There is nothing but speed, wind, and sometimes a hoarse conversation. The roof of the cars is the floor for all, and those who fall, fall the same way. Staying on is all that matters when The Beast,
La Bestia
, a popular name for the train, is on the move.

Saúl was deported from the United States to Guatemala, a country he didn’t know. When he was sentenced, still in the United States, he was allowed to make a single phone call. He used it to get an address in Guatemala from an uncle. When he arrived in the country he’d been born in but hardly remembered, he started looking for a man he’d never known, a friend of his uncle. His search sent him to a slum neighborhood, somewhere along a river. This is what he told me. Like he was anybody walking through any neighborhood, he just walked right on in. And what happened to him is what happens to any kid who doesn’t know what he’s doing in Central America, who thinks any neighborhood is just any neighborhood. A group of thugs turned out of an alleyway and beat him straight to hell.

When the thugs ripped off his shirt and saw the “18” tattooed on his back, they started snarling.

“Aha! A little gangster prick!”

Saúl tried to calm them by offering the name of the man he was looking for. “Alfredo Guerrero, Alfredo Guerrero!” he called.

The gangsters went quiet. Then, like a butcher drags a slaughtered animal, they dragged Saúl’s pulped body through the barrio, all the way into a house and left him at the feet of a man. The man had an M tattooed on one of his cheeks, and on the other, an S.

“Why are you looking for me, you little fake-thug piece of shit?” the man said.

“You’re Alfredo Guerrero?”

“You got that.”

“I’m Saúl,” Saúl said, breathless, “I just got deported. And, I swear it, I’m your son.”

The man, as Saúl recounted it to me on top of the hurtling train, opened his eyes as wide as possible. And then he exhaled, long and loud. And then a look of anger swept over his face. “I don’t have any kids, you punk,” his father said.

But in the days following, the man gave Saúl a gift. The only gift Saul would ever receive from his father. He publicly recognized him as his son, and so bestowed to him a single thread of
life. “We’re not going to kill this punk,” Guerrero announced in front of Saúl and a few of his gang members. “We’re just going to give him the boot.” And then he turned to Saúl. “If I ever see you in this neighborhood again, you better believe me, I’m going to kill you myself.”

They left him in his underwear in another Mara Salvatrucha neighborhood. He only got out alive by covering himself (and the 18 tattooed on his back) in mud and pretending to be insane.

I got to know the Honduran police officer a year before I met Saúl. Her name is, or perhaps was (who knows if she ever made it to the United States), Olga Isolina Gómez Bargas. She was around thirty years old. Her story is also about a neighborhood she was barred from. And her story also has to do with two letters: MS.

She decided to leave her country after a bullet almost bore through her head. It was a bullet from the nine-millimeter pistol she carried with her every day. Her own gun.

Olga’s first husband was a cop who was killed by the Mara Salvatruchas. He’d made a simple mistake. He entered the El Progreso neighborhood of Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, without backup. A volley of thirty bullets left his body like a colander. He was killed two years before I met Olga Isolina crying on top of a train, fleeing, so she told me, from herself.

Olga’s second husband, also a cop, was killed only a year and a half after the first. Olga had long been living in a neighborhood where the MS had a strong presence, but she’d learned to disguise herself so they wouldn’t know what she did for a living: she worked only in faraway parts of town, and she always changed into street clothes before coming home. She tried to convince her husband to take the same precautions, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He’d come home in uniform, his pistol still tucked into his belt.

And then, one day, her husband got shot three times in the neck. Pride and violence, she had learned, are never a good mix. Since her second husband’s death, Olga started thinking about her gun as a way to escape that hurricane of violence. “I’m going to
kill myself,” she would say to herself. “I’m going to kill myself and my daughters and my dog, and then we’ll have nothing left to fear.”

But she didn’t do it. She started the escape to El Norte instead.

Violence, as Saúl well knows, can come from your own blood. Violence, as Olga Isolina says, can thrust you into depression. Violence, as the Alfaro brothers know, can terrorize you, especially when it has no face.

GOODBYE BOYS

Downtown Oaxaca City is shining in its Sunday best when we get out of the taxi at the central bus station. Blonde chubby children hold onto balloons while parents photograph indigenous men and women selling artisan crafts in the central square.

Auner, Pitbull, and El Chele smile at the tourists, but they’re distracted, their eyes are darting in every direction, especially behind them. They’re searching for a guide in the midst of
paleta
vendors and the pyramids of caramel apples. Following each other in close succession, the travel-worn brothers seem out of place—like a black-and-white picture spliced into a colored film—and they know it.

Though I’m going to accompany them through their next step, we know we’ll soon have to say goodbye to each other. Their father has given them the cell number of a Oaxacan friend who he’d worked with in El Norte. He told his sons that his friend would give them a hand. But the brothers don’t know what this man looks like, or how much he’ll want to help. Will he be their guide? Has their father, hopefully, already paid their transit? Or might he just feed them a meal, let them rest before they continue north on their own?

I lend them my phone to make the call.

The difference between fleeing and migrating is becoming clearer to me. Fleeing takes speed. The boys know how to flee. Migrating, though, takes strategy, which the brothers don’t have.

On the migrant roads there are wolves and there are sheep. The three brothers, bumbling naively through the square, look nothing like wolves. They don’t even prepare themselves in case the father’s friend turns out to be a coyote. They don’t think about how they’ll try to negotiate to avoid the undeclared taxes and extra charges. If a coyote knows he’s working with fresh meat, he’s going to try to squeeze them dry.

Auner hands me back the phone. The friend of the father has offered them bed and board and a little advice.

And so the brothers will continue north by themselves, without a guide. And they decide to go by train, instead of paying for another bus. They’ll start the ride on the back of The Beast, straight ahead into the region of assailants and assassins, where migration authorities have been expanding their reach and capacity.

The afternoon in the central plaza is calm. Dry leaves fall lightly and blow along the ground. Old men and women rest on benches and nod amiably at the passersby.

On one of the benches, after shooting a look to Pitbull and El Chele, Auner says to me, “I don’t want to offend you, but there’s something we don’t get. Why do you want to help us? Why do you even care?”

At first it seems easy to respond: so I can write your story.

But as we’re about to say goodbye, a lump comes into my throat.

The question, I realize, is really a thousand questions. Who wants to hear the story of three more boys condemned to death? Why follow three bumpkin brothers who are running from becoming bodies on the street? What kind of story, in Latin America, is another body on the street? Why even try to help? What’s there to say about people spit out of their own country?

But my answer is cut short. A dark man walks up to the bench. It’s their father’s friend. He makes a quick motion with his hand for the boys to follow him. I give Auner, then Pitbull, then El Chele, a quick, strong hug, and then they turn to go. I lose sight of them as they continue their escape, passing through the crowds of children and Sunday strollers.

WHERE ARE THEY?

For the next few days I keep in contact with the brothers through text messages. They’ve picked up a phone along the way.

Where are you? How are you?

Good. About to get on a bus to Mexico City
.

Days pass. In Chalchuapa and Tacuba, young men and women condemned to violence and death become the new bodies on the street. Roberto, Mario, Jorge, Yésica, Jonathan, José, Edwin. All between fifteen and twenty-seven years old. All of them murdered in El Salvador in August and September.

Where are you? How are you?

On the move. About to board the train
.

Then our communication cuts. I keep sending messages, but get no replies. I read about the massive kidnapping in Reynosa. At least thirty-five Central Americans, all riding the rails, all captured by Los Zetas.

Where are you? How are you?