The Beast (11 page)

The next stop will be Medias Aguas. It’s a two-hour trip through multiple checkpoints along La Cementera and Matías Romero. Dawn is breaking.

The first sun beams from behind nearby hills and melts away any last shreds of darkness. The cold, though, is still unbearable, the struts we’re sitting on slippery and frozen. Our faces are numb and rigid. Our fingers are so tired they can barely grip the cold metal. Around us is hill upon hill of dried shrub. Here and there a leafless tree looms. The hills are flooded by fog, an impenetrable gray thickness that stretches to the farthest corners of our view. After eight hours of the intense cold, we’re beyond tired and our clothes are soaked by the permeating fog.

By the time we get to Medias Aguas it’s late morning. We reach the grand station, the station of stations where the Atlantic route and the Central route, the one we’re on now, merge. They won’t separate again until Lechería, three long stops ahead.

The train wails its whistle, waking everyone from their stupor. People try to shake off their exhaustion and quickly get their bags to scramble off the sides of the train before it comes to a complete stop. Most mass kidnappings happen in these moments, when the
victim-laden trains come into mid-sized cities, like this one, which are dominated by organized gangs. We have to jump ship as soon as possible.

There’s no migrant shelter here like in Ixtepec, and there won’t be another at the next three stations either. Everyone looks for a patch of grass to rest on or the shade of a tree to protect them from the sun. The dirt road running parallel to the train tracks fills with Central American beggars asking for any little thing to eat. Then, with a little something or absolutely nothing in their bellies, they’ll doze with eyes half-closed until The Beast calls to them again, and the journey to the United States resumes.

4
The Invisible Slaves: Chiapas

The strangest thing is that I got used to it. My fear turned to helplessness, then to rage, and then, finally, to acceptance. The sordid lives of the women who live together in southern Mexico’s brothels were just as horrifying as the lives they lived before they came to the brothels. With these women, everyday words take on new meanings. The word
sex
means rape. The word
family
refers to a fellow victim. And a body is little more than a ticket from one hell to another hell. It’s called “The Trade”: thousands of female Central American migrants, far from their American Dreams, trapped in prostitution rings in Southern Mexico
.

Three women are laughing furiously at the back table. In a gallery of metal, asbestos, and wire fencing, at the last white plastic table, the women, thinking back on the previous night, are roaring with laughter. The reason for their excitement isn’t quite clear. Standing some steps away from them, the only sentence I can make out is: “The old drunk was tripping over himself.” And then the guffaws ring out again. I couldn’t have imagined then that these same women, while explaining how they got here, would later be crying over their recent pasts.

It turns out they’re laughing about a client: some dipso who was trying to dance the night before, trying to pinch whatever body part he could get a hold of, jerking and jiggling in the middle of the bar until, finally, he fell flat on the face.

The women, chuckling along at the table, are waiting for the
night to begin. They’ll soon start taking turns climbing onto stage to strip naked in front of a crowd of drunk and howling men.

This cantina (locally known as a
botanero
) is enormous: some fifty yards long and twenty wide, with thirty-five scattered white tables and a plain cement floor and counter. From the back of the bar come the buckets of beers and the
botanas
: small plates of beef, soups, and chicken wings.

The twenty-five women who work here are just arriving, coming in from the dirt road outside. These women are known as
ficheras
, waitresses who work for
fichas
, or little plastic tokens they collect, one for each beer, chat-up session, or dance a customer pays them for. At the end of the night, usually as dawn is breaking, the waitresses cash in the chips they’ve earned. Each beer bought for the girls costs the customer 65 pesos worth in
fichas
, or about six dollars.

The bar, which I’ll call Calipso, is one of the ten or so strip clubs that light up the night in this part of the city. This border region, on the Mexican side of the Mexico–Guatemala border, is known as the “zone of tolerance.” What is tolerated is prostitution. There are whole strings of similar bars, with the same process and the same sort of clientele in the small towns and cities that run along this border. Tapachula, Tecún Umán, Cacahuatán, Huixtla, Tuxtla Chico, Ciudad Hidalgo … all small towns smelling of alcohol and tobacco, sweat and imitation perfume, and cheap sex. And in all of these bars, just like in Calipso, you’d be hard pressed to find a single Mexican woman. The bars are brimming with Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans. Here, “the market,” as the women are referred to, is exclusively Central American.

The owners run the bars tightly, even hermetically. Most of them have dorms attached where the women are cloistered after the nights dancing and working clients for chips. They do have to pay rent. The prostitutes in this region often refer to working one of the bars with the self-reflexive term,
me ocupé
, meaning, literally, I occupied myself, I employed myself. They speak as if
they were two, as if one of their selves managed the other, as if the body that had sex with the men was a puppet that they themselves only temporarily occupied or employed.

I came to Calipso by way of a series of contacts. One NGO worker, who preferred to be left unnamed, directed me to Luis Flores, a representative of the International Organization of Migration (IOM), who sent me to Rosemberg López, the director of A Friendly Hand, an organization that works for the prevention of HIV, who sent me to the owner of Calipso, who he knew because the owner allowed him to come and give HIV awareness talks to the women who work there. López had to press hard to be given access to Calipso’s dancers, access which he wasn’t allowed in any other bar along the border. Most of the bars didn’t let him through the door. Some of the owners have even threatened to lynch journalists who’ve tried to film and interview their female workers. But the Calipso proprietor not only let López in, she told her employees to be open with him, assuring them that he wasn’t an undercover cop.

In recent years, public concern has begun to close down some of the bars that prostitute Central American women and girls against their will. Since 2007, when a new law was passed in Mexico against human trafficking, various civil organizations have increased pressure against the bars, making “trafficking,” especially trafficking women, a much more publicized issue.
¹

Modern people trafficking, it turns out, is not the image many expect—a scar-faced man tending a cage of women. It’s a complex system of everyday lies and coercion that happens just behind our backs. For this very reason, for its open secretiveness,
it’s important to look closely into the shadows, to speak with the victims of trafficking, with the women themselves.

The three women still laughing in the back of Calipso have offered their testimonies.

ALONE IN THE WORLD

Erika (I’ve changed all of the names) wails with laughter. Though she has a thin thread of a voice and occasionally falls into silence, when she laughs, she shrieks, opening her mouth wide and even clapping her hands. She has white skin and reddish, curly hair pulled back by a headband. She’s Honduran, from Tegucigalpa, and thirty years old. A dancer, she has round, thick legs, a thick torso, and a curvaceous body. She is short, cheerful, playful, and a good teaser.

“All right Daddy, what is it you want? What can we help you with?” Erika sits at my table. She orders a beer. It’s one thirty in the afternoon. She’ll keep drinking—beer after beer, all bought for her by clients—until well after midnight.

When Erika was fourteen years old she left her country and twin babies behind. “I had to go to El Norte … looking for what we’re all looking for, a better life.”
Una vida mejor
. She traveled with five other girls around her age. “Things happened to them. What can I say? Bad things. We’d all heard that women on the trail get raped.” El Norte, meaning the United States, may not always be the final destination. Erika preferred to stay in the first state she came to north of the border—Chiapas, Mexico. She settled in Huixtla, known for its prostitutes, those shadows that anyone can see but few openly talk about. She arrived on a Monday or Tuesday, she’s not sure exactly when, and then went to the Hotel Quijote to ask for work.

“But how is it,” I ask her, “that a pregnant fourteen-year-old has the guts to leave home all by herself?”

A loud guffaw bellows from a table in the back. Erika turns to look. It’s early yet, and there are only two tables of customers, but
men are already dancing with a couple of the prostitutes. A waitress swoops over to the tables with overflowing plates of chicken wings and shredded meat.

“Let’s get out of here,” she says, “I hate it when my coworkers see me cry.”

Tears are a defect in this world of stone.

We step out onto a dirt road that leads to another dive bar. This city is like a dead-end alley. Up ahead there’s another brothel followed by a guesthouse, a euphemism for the row of motel-style rooms where prostitutes take their clients.

“I never met my family,” Erika tells me. “See, I’m from Honduras but I never had papers. I never had a birth certificate either. I’m like an animal.”

When she was still a girl she was told that her mother worked in the fields, “whoring like me.” Her mother had given her and her twin sister away as a baby to a woman by the name of María Dolores, who Erika remembers very well. “That old whore had seven kids, and we, my little twin and me, weren’t treated like her kids, we were like her slaves.” She always calls him her “little” twin, though had he not died at the age of six, he’d be thirty years old.

What was her life like? Like a slave’s, she says. At five years old, her job was to walk the streets, selling fish and firewood. If she came back with something still in her hands because she hadn’t sold everything, María Dolores would whip her with an electrical cable until she had open sores on her back. Then María Dolores would cover those cuts with salt and oblige her “little twin” to lick it off. It was on one of those days, one of those sore-licking days, that her brother died on the floor where they both slept. They said it was parasites, Erika says. She’s convinced that those parasites came from the sores on her back.

She cries and clenches her teeth. A truck pulls up and parks beside us. Three more clients open the door into Calipso.

“The day my brother died, I got sick. They took me to the hospital but never came back to pick me up. After that, I lived like a drunk on the streets, sleeping between dumpsters.”

She lived like that for two years. Selling this, carrying that, begging wherever, sleeping on corners. Eight years later she bumped into María Dolores, who talked her into coming back.

“I was little,” Erika says. “I didn’t really get it. So I went with her.” The physical abuse wasn’t as bad, but, in general, life was worse. Omar, one of the woman’s sons, was fifteen years old and repeatedly raped her.

“That’s why I wonder if I’ll ever understand what it is to have normal sex. I got so used to him tying up my legs and arms and having sex with me like that.”

Sitting on the curb of a dirt road, weeping just outside of Calipso, Erika paints a typical portrait of the Central American migrants whose suffering lights up the nights of these border towns. Many of the women have no previous schooling. They flee from a past of severe family dysfunction, physical and sexual abuse, and they often come to these brothels as girls, little girls, incapable of distinguishing between what is and what should be. They’re fresh powder, ready to be packed into the barrel of a gun.

“If you’re not from the social reality of our countries, you’re not going to understand,” explained Luis Flores who, as head of the IOMin Tapachula, leads community education projects in the area and case-manages Central American human trafficking victims. Here, he explains, migrant women are turned into a product. “They come having already been raped and abused. They come from dysfunctional families in which it was often their father or uncle who raped them. What many of them won’t tell you is that they knew they’d be raped on this journey, that they feel it’s a sort of tax that must be paid. According to the Guatemalan government, it’s estimated that eight of every ten Central American migrant women suffer some form of sexual abuse in Mexico. It’s six of every ten, according to a study done by Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies. They travel with that lodged in their minds, knowing that they’ll be abused once, twice, three times … Sexual abuse has lost its terror. That’s the vantage point from which
to understand human trafficking. At a certain level, they know they’re victims, but they don’t feel that way. Their logic runs like this: yes, this is happening to me, but I took the chance, I knew it would happen.”

There is, as Flores says, an expression for the transformation of the migrant’s body:
cuerpomátic
. The body becomes a credit card, a new platinum-edition “bodymatic” which buys you a little safety, a little bit of cash and the assurance that your travel buddies won’t get killed. Your bodymatic, except for what you get charged, buys a more comfortable ride on the train.

Erika, the girl who was repeatedly raped from age eight to thirteen, gave birth to twins and then, as if her suffering were inevitable, her story goes on.

“I didn’t understand what pregnancy was. I only felt I was getting fat. That woman accused me of being a whore. I told her it was her son that did it, but she told me I was like my mother, a prostitute, and that just like her I’d ditch my future kids like dogs. She dragged me out of the house naked and walked me five blocks to a nearby park and left me there. And so I had to start completely from scratch.”