The Beast (12 page)

It meant begging again, picking through trash, sleeping on street corners. She gave birth there, on the streets, and then she decided to, as migrants say, “try her luck.” She left her kids with one of María Dolores’s neighbors, and started her trek north to the United States with another five young women. Here’s where, after hearing that the journey would be full of death and humiliation, and after witnessing many of those she’d been traveling with get hurt, she decided to stay. She doesn’t remember if it was a Monday or a Tuesday when she came to Hotel Quijote.

Flores describes a typical transition: “Most start out as waitresses. Then they become call girls and finally end up as prostitutes. Usually they get to that point because they’ve been lied to.” An illustrative case study by Rodolfo Casillas delineates the range in ages that traffickers target: “Between ten and thirty-five years old, hardly ever older. And the trafficking problem is exacerbated with
underage migrants, specifically those between eleven and sixteen years of age.”
²

At the Hotel Quijote, Erika was propositioned.

“It goes like this,” she explains. “Some asshole comes in and says, ‘Let’s get out of here. You and me. I can easily get you a job at another bar where you’ll get paid more.’ And then, if you’re not careful, it can get to be a big problem. And all the time a ton of guys tell you that. ‘I’ll get you a place to live, I’ll get you all the papers and documents you need, I’ll get you a job.’ ”

She doesn’t share any more details. Like most trafficking victims, she tells her story in the third and second person, and it’s hard to tell what pieces of her story are directly autobiographical. It’s as though the horrors of their lives were shared by all, as though what happened to one them has inevitably happened to all of them.

Erika assures me she didn’t let herself get tricked. “I was no fool.” She says it was by her own volition that she left her post at Quijote and sought out a dive. She says that even as a girl she knew to go straight to the managers and lay out her ground rules: “I said to them I’m not here to work only as a dancer, but I don’t want to be locked up like the others either. I’m not an idiot. I’ll work here every night, finish, and get paid right away.’ See, it’s because I grew up on the street that I at least knew how to look out for myself.”

I ask about the other girls.

“They were locked up. Never let out. They ate only once a day. Whatever man took them there said to them, ‘It’s not so bad, you’re gonna be able to work, but you also have to pay.’ Whoever brings you there asks for his cut from the owner of the dive, and that, of course, is taken out of your pay. They sell you. But that never happened to me. Only to the others, because they’re stupid.”

This rationalization is commonly used as justification—those
who let themselves be exploited have only themselves to blame. But, as Flores explains, such passive victims are young girls with no education, who don’t know how to condemn or report anything that happens to them, who are easy to intimidate.
If you try to escape, I’ll call Migration and they’ll get hold of you real fast!
“It’s a problem of submissiveness,” Flores explains. Of 250 sexually abused migrants surveyed by the IOM, only fifty accepted medical and counseling help. Many didn’t see the point, because they expected it would all happen again; there was still a lot of road left to walk.

Though solidarity among Central American migrants isn’t unheard of, the world of migration tends to isolate people. The journey is hard; tender moments are rare. Those recruiting fresh bodies to work in the brothels are the same Central American women who, against their will, were tricked into prostitution and now, years later, are offered extra pay to trick other newly arrived girls by making them the same false promises they once heard: you’ll become a waitress, you’ll be well paid.

Flores has a term for this: spiral logic. “I, a Honduran, a Salvadoran, a Guatemalan, got here when I was fifteen years old and I had to go through it, but now I have my own job which is doing the same thing to other girls who have to get through this before they can do what I’m doing.”

Erika remembers her first days of prostitution with disgust. She’d close a deal with a man at a dive, and they’d go to a motel for a half hour. The room would fill with the smell of beer and sweat and she’d let herself be used. Sometimes it was like these men felt that they owned her for that half hour, that she was like a house that they’d rented and that they could do inside her whatever they pleased. She remembers that many times the sessions ended with what she’d gotten to know so well as a girl: insults and violence.

She takes out a small, circular mirror from her purse and looks into her eyes. She puts away the mirror, lights a cigarette, takes a drag, and then looks ahead, her eyes narrowing as though she’s
concentrating on returning from her past. She has sixteen years of this under her belt. Her vulnerability quickly fades. The laughing, teasing woman comes back, and she says goodbye to me with a playful slap on my arm. She walks into Calipso swinging her white, wide hips.

Flores explains that Salvadoran and Honduran women are particularly sought after for this business because, unlike the Mexicans of this indigenous area of Soconusco, Chiapas, or the small, dark-skinned women of Guatemala, their bodies tend to be fleshier and they tend to have lighter skin.

It’s three in the afternoon and Calipso is filling up. Another batch of men have come in. The jukebox pop music clashes with the mustachioed, big-bellied clientele. Keny, a Salvadoran with small, button-like black eyes, is in the middle of delivering a round of orders to a table when a manager stops her. They talk a moment and then Keny walks toward my table.

Calipso is, relatively speaking, not a bad place to work. Here pimps don’t decide who the women sleep with. If they feel like closing a deal, they do it on their own. If they only want to serve food and drinks, they can. At other clubs, or on street corners, most Central American sex workers have two pairs of eyes locked on them at all times, watching every move.

Flores remembers one time, while trying to do interviews, he approached a woman working a corner at the central plaza of Tapachula. He explained that he was putting together interviews for his organization and asked if they could talk. The girl glanced nervously over her shoulder. “I can’t, my boss’ll hit me,” she excused herself, while imitating, with her gestures, a typical negotiation with a customer. Smile, no, no, thank you, goodbye.

Keny asks for water. She’ll switch to beer later. Today is Friday, and she needs to last through the long night to make it all worth it. The difference between a Friday and a Saturday is that white-collar office workers come in on Fridays, because they have both
weekend days off. On Saturdays it’s the laborers who like to end their work week with a Central American girl.

TWICE BANISHED

Keny speaks in a whisper. It’s a soothing sound that issues from somewhere deep in her throat, but sometimes the whisper turns hoarse, her voice tiring, pausing as she closes her small black eyes to add emphasis. “I’m here,” she says, speaking slowly, “because I don’t have anyone on the other side.” She lets her eyelids fall shut, straightening her long black hair.

Her life has been marked by that huge magnet that pulls Central Americans north. When she was just a baby her grandmother left for El Norte. When she was fourteen, her father went north as well. Then her mother followed. When she was fifteen her older sister was pulled by the magnet, and Keny was left living with an aunt and uncle.

“They didn’t even feed me,” Keny recalls. “They took the money my father sent and they beat me instead of raised me.” Her grandmother, after getting US papers, returned and saw that Keny was living like a martyr. She arranged for her to move in with some of her grandmother’s friends. But the change didn’t help. Keny stayed with the new family until, when she was sixteen, the mother of that family died of a heart attack and the newly widowed husband started beating and molesting her. For help, Keny called her older sister, who had moved to Guatemala City on her way north. Then she too decided to try to follow the family north.

She moved in with her sister but only for a few months. The sisters didn’t get along. They got in a fight and Keny almost lost a breast when her sister stabbed her with a knife. “She left me mutilated,” Keny explained. “And so I went to the streets. That’s when I started to work in a cantina.”

She bounced between a number of different bars and cantinas, eventually moving to Puerto Barrios to try dancing at a joint called the Hong Kong. When she first arrived she was wearing a child’s
T-shirt with cartoon dinosaurs on it. The other waitresses, after having their laugh, decided to show her the ropes. They taught her how to dance, how to put on makeup, how to woo men, how to smoke pot and crack, how to snort coke, and how to drink, and drink a lot. “When I left that place,” she said, “I was showing all of my cleavage.” She had left the dinosaur shirt behind.

One of the older girls from the Hong Kong kept taking trips over the border and into Mexico, coming back with a lot more money than anyone was earning in Puerto Barrios. “They just pay more in Huixtla,” the girl would explain to the newbies, like Keny, who was still only seventeen.

Keny took the hint. She moved to Cacahuatán, Mexico, and started working at the infamous El Ranchón. For a while El Ranchón was closed after some clients got into drug trouble, but after a change of name, to Ave Fénix, things seem to be back in swing.

Keny’s been working these joints for seven years now, from Huixtla to Tapachula to Cacahuatán, from bar to bar.

I ask her if she also works as a prostitute, or just for the chips.

“I worked a little bit at first,” she says. “I didn’t like it, though, because you had to be with someone that you didn’t feel anything for. You never know who you’re going to run into. Some of them like to hit. A john’s gotten aggressive with me a few times, but when you try to cool them down they start hitting. So now I just stick with dancing, chips, plus drinking.”

The price of a prostitute in these parts varies. A youngster has more value than a veteran. And a youngster means a minor. A veteran means having passed thirty. Older than that hardly even counts.

On one evening, after returning from an interview in Tapachula, I asked my taxi driver about finding some young prostitutes, twenty years old or so. The driver responded: “Later on, buddy. My cousin and I have a little business with the girls. We drive them to hotels or houses, wherever you like. They’re all real young. Not twenty, more like fourteen or fifteen. Two hours for 1,500 pesos [less than $150].”

Like I said, the prices vary. The older they are and the more indigenous they look, the cheaper they come, 400 or so pesos for half an hour. Younger though, with whiter complexions, you could pay up to 2,000 pesos. Flores says, “They call the more indigenous or more Guatemalan migrants
coppers
. The more Honduran or younger ones they call
escorts
or
teiboleras
.
³
”

The pop song playing in the bar ends. A slow-swinging norteña number by Valentín Elizalde—“El Gallo de Oro,” The Golden Rooster—picks up. I ask Keny if it was true what the other waitress from Hong Kong had told her, that she would earn more in Mexico than in Guatemala.

“Yes, definitely,” she responds. “Sometimes I waitress by day and dance by night and earn as much as 2,000 pesos.”

“And your family,” I ask, “do they know where you are?”

“I only speak with my father. He doesn’t know. My sister might suspect something. They probably think I’m a waitress, not imagining what I’ve come to, that I also dance. I want to go back to El Salvador now. I don’t want my son, who is nine months old, to grow up and see me like this. There nobody knows who I am. Here everybody knows. Over there I’ll be just another single mother. I can’t let my family know about this. They wouldn’t understand.”

I see a stream of tears fall from Keny’s small black eyes. She wipes them neatly with a napkin, trying not to ruin her makeup.

I go to visit the women’s shelter on the Mexican border, looking to interview women who have been raped or abducted while on their way to El Norte. The administrators who run the shelter agree to speak, but ask me not to identify the place. “As you know,” they say, “the cartels are involved in all this.” They explain that there are two principal reasons why women decide to stay in these border towns.

One is simply that they make more money than they could
make in Central America, and after a month of being forced to dance or have sex, before they fall all the way into this life of darkness, vice, and vulnerability, they start to accept their situation, realizing how much money they’re sending back to their families.

The second reason, the directors explain, is shame. The past. To have to explain where they’ve been. What they’ve done. The fear of being discovered. Flores describes a common trap: “They recruit an indigenous girl from her land, tell her that she’ll be a waitress, and then sell her as a prostitute. They tear up her papers and assure her that if she escapes, or if she doesn’t obey, they’ll contact her family and show them a picture of her sitting on a man’s lap at the bar. They tell her that her whole village will know that she’s not a waitress, but a prostitute. Now ask that girl if she’s willing to go home. Of course not.”

“Have you also come across girls who’ve been kidnapped and forced into prostitution?”

“They’ve mostly been coming voluntarily. I’ve heard stories of girls that have been sold, but once they see where they’ll be working, they decide to stay put. They tell me they like the money.”

But here we’re confronted again by the tricks of trafficking. The subtle wording that makes trafficking not sound exactly like trafficking; the suggestion that it’s the girls’ decision if they want to stay. Blackmail camouflaged as proposals. In the end, it seems it’s nobody’s fault. Things are as they are. How they’ve always been. The girls themselves are used to suffering: they “choose” to suffer, they “choose” to be treated like market goods.