The Beast (18 page)

LOS ZETITAS

Standing under the burning Tabasco sun, we decided to go to Macuspana, a small rural municipality along the train route about 150 miles north of Tenosique. Those who ride The Beast from Tenosique pass through Macuspana. And there, just like in El Águila, El Barí, El 20, Villa, El Faisán, Gregorio Méndez, and Emiliano Zapata, there are bands of zetitas.

Instead of a shelter in Macuspana, there’s just a bare-bones church where migrants get a nap with a roof over their heads and a bowl of food before continuing their journey. A thin man with a sharply featured face, who turned out to be the parochial administrator, came out of the church to greet us. He calmly pulled a bench up to a table and there we began what turned out to be a very short conversation.

When we explained that we’re looking for information about gangs and kidnappings, the man quieted, his eyes started darting. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “I just serve food to migrants. I don’t know a thing.” And that was all he had to say.

We went to sit down on the patio with a group of eight Hondurans and one Guatemalan. The conversation proceeded as usual. First thing they wanted to know was who was asking. The trick, we’ve learned, is to talk about the trail, let them know that you know something about it, know its secrets, its dangers, that you know about the train and where it stops. This trick is getting past the initial response—“No problems, man. All fine so far, thanks to God”—which is always false, and to persist until the migrant starts talking about what he or she has actually been through.

Following these steps I learned that three of the men out on that patio had nearly been kidnapped in El Barí. The Guatemalan man
from El Petén, who was leading the group on his second try north, reacted quickly when a truck pulled up in front of them. The passenger had a pistol at the ready and said into his cell phone “I got a small group here.” The three migrants bolted.

One of the people in the group, a chubby Honduran man with a black rosary around his neck, dropped a few telling comments. I mentioned that it was common that cartel members lie to infiltrate migrant groups, and he quickly responded, “So they can get your phone number, which is what matters most.”

“And they politely ask for your number,” I added, “like a coyote taking you north.”

The Honduran agreed: “Yes, but it’s all lies. Later on you figure out that you’re kidnapped and on your way to Coatzacoalcos.”

You could see that the man was street-toughened. You could hear it in his words, catch it in his gestures. He went on to talk about his last trip north, when some cartel members recognized that he was a bit reckless and invited him to crash at the house of El Barí’s gang leader, El Cocho. They were trying to woo him into the group of zetitas. “They knew I didn’t have anyone to pay my ransom, so instead of kidnapping me they gave me a place to stay.”

I’m not sure whether to believe this. It could be he was actually working for them as he spoke to me, scouting the trains for potential victims. What I do know, however, is that a lot of his stories were later confirmed by the agent.

The Honduran man told me that El Cocho, about thirty years old, is Honduran as well. That he works with eight other Hondurans and never lets his nine-millimeter out of his sight, “not even to sleep.” El Cocho’s band is still active, but for the moment they’ve taken to the mountains “because of a recent raid.” He explained that some of the cartel members told him all this before he arrived in Macuspana.

Two months ago there was a military raid in which twenty-four kidnapped migrants were discovered. When the soldiers showed up, however, only the municipal police were there; the zetitas had already split.

“They’re all in it together,” the chubby Honduran said. “When I was crashing with them, a couple of police dropped by to eat. I saw El Cocho give them an envelope full of money.”

He went on to describe the group running Hotel California.

In years of covering immigration as a reporter, this is one of the most outrageous examples of impunity I’ve come across. The Hotel California in Tenosique is known by every authority in town as being Zetas turf. And everybody knows they store arms and drugs and house kidnapped migrants in the hotel. And the hotel itself is just down the street from the Migration offices, which are next to the train tracks where numerous mass kidnappings have occurred.

“There,” the Honduran said, referring to Hotel California, “about ten or so guys work for the Train Man.”

The Train Man is an ex-coyote, around forty years old, who back in 2007 was apprehended by Los Zetas for not paying their tax. He pleaded that he hadn’t known the rules, and was willing to make up for his mistake. He spent the next year on a corner in Coatzacoalcos selling tamales and bags of cocaine. After paying off his debt, just when the the police detained the Zetas chief, El Gordo, the Train Man was promoted to zetita chief. And now, when he shaves his head, you can see on the top of his skull the loyal tattoo of a Z.

“Yeah, the cops paid me to show them where El Cocho lives, where the Train Man lives. A few others as well. That was the day I showed the cops all around.” This was the last comment the Honduran made to me before we left Macuspana.

THOSE WHO ARE BOUGHT AND THOSE WHO ARE SCARED

“Everyone knows about Hotel California, but no one wants to get involved. They’ve bought up half the world, not just city and state officials. You know the two women who stand on the edge of town every day, selling sodas. Do you think that’s what they’re really up to?”

The agent pauses, gives me another of his mysterious smiles, and then looks me in the eyes before answering his own question.

“Nooo. They’re in charge of seeing if any military convoys come in, if a suspicious car comes in, if more cars than usual come in. Of course, all you see is two young women selling sodas.”

They hire small-town women, Central American migrants, policemen, politicians, and businessmen. A town has been taken over once half of it is on the payroll and the other half is scared. Anyone who speaks up is threatened, like Fray Jesús, a young, brave priest at the Tenosique church who publicly denounced Los Zetas during his sermons and in front of the media. Fray Jesús got three warnings: two written (one stuck onto his windshield wiper, the other onto the front gate of his parish church) and one by word of mouth: “Tell the little priest that if he keeps getting into things that don’t concern him, he won’t end up so hot.” Fray Jesús has since learned to speak out against Los Zetas without crossing the invisible boundaries they’ve set for him with their threats.

Everyone is confined to one of two roles in this town, a fact at the forefront of each individual mind in every encounter between residents: is this person among the threatening or the fearful? The woman who works the pharmacy counter and lowers her head when she sees a stranger pass by is someone who fears. The men driving the yellow car who pass us three times in less than five minutes are those who threaten.

“We’re talking about people with money. Los Zetas are pushing between 50,000 and 200,000 pesos a month to every gang of zetitas in this area. The gangs have enough money for themselves and to bribe authorities. And keep in mind that this is a small slice of their business. They get money from drug trafficking and arms trafficking. Migrants are their third business.”

He ponders for a moment. Silence hovers over our table. The sun sinks, the light around us dims.

“Yep, it’s their third business, but they don’t have any small businesses, only money-making gigs that require turning on their
entire machinery of corruption. It’s a conservative estimate that 40 percent of all state police units have been bought by Los Zetas.”

THE JOURNO AND THE COP

The two meetings began with the usual reverberation of the fear that steeps this region of the country.

After talking to a few of his colleagues, we found the reporter without much trouble. We called him one afternoon and, as he already knew what we wanted to talk about, simply set up a time to meet in person. We took a bus from Villahermosa to a small outlying town, and walked into a modest restaurant. A half hour later a hot and sweaty man came in with a stack of papers under his arm. It was the reporter we were looking for, the man who for ten years had been covering the drugs, the shootouts, and the corrupt military and police beat in this region, where the high number of military convoys driving down the dusty streets makes it look like we’re in Iraq.

The reporter typed notes into his laptop while talking and cocking his head every which way, always attentive to who was around him. He eyed a scruffy old man at the next table. With juice sellers working as lookouts and corrupt officials in every direction, anybody could turn out to be listening and anybody could turn out to be a Zeta.

We chatted for a bit, but it was obvious that we should move to another spot, somewhere where we wouldn’t need to whisper every time we said the word Zeta. We eventually found ourselves in an electronics repair shop, where the nervous reporter opened up. He even turned on his computer to show us some of his photos.

The pictures were of old ranches, captured Zetas, corrupt policemen caught in the act, as well as corpses, lots of corpses.

But what we wanted to know, the reason we had come to him, was why nobody was talking about what everybody knows, what even outsiders like us know in just a few weeks of poking around. That is, why does nobody name the corrupt officials, if everybody
knows who they are? Why do they only open up when there’s a crackdown and a few of them get arrested and paraded before the media? Why does nobody talk about how deeply involved many officials are, or how widespread and everyday the corruption is?

“Because I live here. And my family lives here. And, like you say, if they have half the village bought off then they definitely know your name, where you live, how old your kids are and where they go to school. And if you decide to risk it and publish something, you’re going to face the same thing I faced. A black truck filled with armed men pulling up outside your house. A knock on the door. ‘We’ve come to ask how you want it to turn out,’ they say. ‘You want it to turn out good? Then stop writing that shit you’ve been writing. Or you want it to turn out bad? Because if you continue we’re going to murder you and then murder your whole family.’ ”

The reporter had a point. A point for reporters on the ground, but not necessarily for the media companies safely holed up back in their offices in the capital. For those who live in the middle of the violence in these towns, for those who travel without bodyguards and earn a pittance for their work, for those who work from their homes where their kids live and play, silence is understandable.

Because when the thugs pronounce their famous motto, when you hear, “We are Los Zetas,” you either fold or they are going to fold you. The reporter understood the dynamic all too well. Kidnapping victims understand it, too. But Mario Rodríguez Alonso, the transit chief of the town Emiliano Zapata, understood it too late. Rodríguez chose not to fold when he arrested a man for drunk driving and the man started yelling that he was a Zeta. The next morning (in July 2008) a group of armed men showed up at the police station and took Rodríguez away. The following morning they dropped his corpse back at the same police station. His head was covered in a black plastic bag, his arms were handcuffed behind his back, and his body showed signs of being tortured and was riddled with bullet holes.

~

A few days after talking with the reporter, we tracked down a cop and asked him what he thought of the public’s fear. Getting hold of a cop willing to talk, it turned out, was more difficult than finding a willing reporter. We contacted him originally through some relatives who had a friend in the government, and we never actually spoke with the man until we met him. Instructions were relayed to us through our contact: two o’clock, the small corner restaurant along the river.

He arrived on time. This policeman, on his off days, worked as a security guard for the restaurant. He suggested a walk, so we headed down an alleyway and stopped in the shade of a tree on the riverbank.

“We’ve heard it said that sometimes,” I started, “they call the police station and play narco-corridos at full volume.”
²

“Yeah, those shits call us sometimes. They’ve even been calling some of the commanders’ houses recently too, to threaten them, to let them know that if we act against them, they know where they live and won’t hesitate to kill their families.”

“And this happens a lot?”

“Look, there’s always something. Only five days ago we found another body in Tenosique, in Colonia Municipal. He was a cattle herder. Three months ago they killed a police commander who thought it was all a game, and started messing with some of Los Zetas, nosing around Hotel California.”

He was talking about Tirson Castellanos, the Tenosique police commander whose second job was as a used car salesman. One day a truck full of assassins followed him on his way home. He gave them the slip at first and tried to hide, shutting himself in the bathroom at a mechanic’s shop. But they found him. He was shot fourteen times.

“And yourself, what do you do to stay alive?” I asked.

“I wash my hands of it all. Focus on other problems, on
pickpockets and drunks. They’ve gotten to me, though. I was on patrol once and they pulled me over. ‘We are Los Zetas,’ they said. Then they showed their weapons and said that I was going to work for them now. I told them I wouldn’t do it. When they started to get rough I told them that I wouldn’t get in their way either. ‘All the better for you, then, you son of a bitch,’ they said.”

“Once,” he went on, “I even saw three trucks full of men in AFI uniforms pass through one of our checkpoints.
³
We asked if they were on a mission and they told us, ‘We aren’t the government. We’re Los Zetas.’ The police commander at the checkpoint was smart enough to wave them through, saying that he didn’t want anything to do with them and hadn’t even seen them. I’d never seen so many weapons in one place as I saw that day in those three trucks.”