The Beast (28 page)

Los mascaritas
, the little masks, are the guys in charge of counting the passengers in each van and collecting 500 pesos per head. They’re narco-employed and take the 10,000 pesos per van to their boss who takes it to his boss who takes it to his boss, until it gets to the hands of the narcos in charge of distributing profits. The little masks have to work in Altar’s central plaza, in front of the church and City Hall where fifteen or so vans are parked, one
after another, their drivers waiting for them to fill up. They need to get twenty migrants into a van before they can move an inch. The guys are called the little masks because, simply, they always wear masks and are known as such by Mr. X, Father Peraza, the local priest, and the old women who sell roast beef cooked in salsa in front of the plaza. Because everyone in town sees them working with masks on yet they don’t take any other precautions.

“But you seem very calm,” I say.

“Look, last we talked, the narcos had just showed up. Now they’re more organized than any other business in town, now they have fees and they handle things pretty calmly. They don’t want any more than what they get. They have their business set up. They know how to get what they want from migrants and they know they can’t be given more. That’s it. Everything is peaceful. I’m telling you, van drivers say they’re better off with them, they say the narcos can charge whatever they want, but that they at least know how the business is and that it works.”

Nineteen months ago, everything was just getting settled. Kidnapping was necessary. The narcos needed to hit hard so that the town, the guides, and the migrants understood that the fee demand was serious, that the fifty-five miles that separate Altar from El Sásabe was narco property, and that on their property a fee has to be paid or there will be skin to pay. Stories had to be sowed in order to harvest good fear. Now everyone understands. Talking about the narco’s fees is as common as talking about the rise in the price of tortillas, which, indeed, has spiked the price of tacos at the street stand, El Cuñado.

Altar exemplifies what’s happening all along the border. When migrants and narcos cross paths (and they always do, because they’re both chased down ever-tightening routes) the same thing happens, all the way from the Suchiate River to the Mexico–US border: the migrants pay. This has been happening in Altar since 2007, but people were scared then, and that fear fueled the perception that something might change, something might explode, that things could still turn to a less extreme normal. But no, the only
thing that’s happened is that those who were once princes have now become kings.

Van drivers warn everyone seeking out their services, they stress it without lowering their voice: “Yes, I’m going to El Sásabe, but you have to pay me 100 pesos and another 500 in fees.” And if they’re asked who the fee is for, they’ll put it one of two ways: it’s for “
el narco
,” as the organized crime scene is referred to, or it’s for “
la mafia
.”

And though they’re inconvenienced by having to wait hours to find twenty migrants with 600 pesos in their pocket, they don’t complain. They have to take it as it comes, as Mr. X says. They make less money now, but they know what they have to do to not get their car or their face burned.

But some, like the taxi driver Paulino Medina, do complain a little. Still others try to outsmart the system.

NOTHING BUT A TANTRUM

Paulino, fifty-three years old, is always grumbling about something. Since I met him in 2007 I’ve heard little but complaints come out of his mouth. This whole town is a disaster, he says, it’s full of crooks, the smugglers don’t get that if they don’t stop messing with migrants the whole business is going to collapse. The difference now, as opposed to a year ago, is that there are more than enough problems to justify Paulino’s tantrums.

Paulino has been working in Altar for twenty-three years. He started as a taxi driver and worked up the ranks until he was appointed municipal secretary of transportation, a position he held for a month. As secretary he tried to work with the narcos. He tried to maneuver a deal between them and the van drivers, so that the latter wouldn’t keep getting exploited. But the narcos didn’t like somebody else trying to organize them. Their organization, or lack of it, was their problem. As soon as word of Paulino’s attempt at fostering a deal with narcos got to the mayor’s office, they sacked him.

I see Paulino again at a taxi stand in front of a church in the central plaza. He’s wearing the same old glasses, has the same gray mustache, and the same old pair of cowboy boots. He used to always greet me with an anecdote of some sort, and today is no exception.

“We all know that you gotta pay, but then there are some tough guys out there who think they’re all that and try to swindle the narcos. Just two weeks ago some van driver reported that he had eighteen migrants with him. He paid the fees to the little masks, but then stuffed two more migrants in his van to pocket an extra thousand pesos for himself. He didn’t even get to El Sásabe. A few armed lookouts pulled him over on the road, called him a son of a bitch and asked him where he’d picked up the extra passengers. Hell no, he didn’t get away with it.”

How it works is that the little masks write a code on a piece of paper and give it to the drivers. Say, for example, “birdy” is the code for twenty migrants. Then the lookouts waiting on the hills stop the occasional van to do a quality control check. If “birdy” doesn’t match up with twenty heads, then the driver had better start explaining.

Paulino continues: “You see how it got all normalized here. They don’t kill you or burn your van anymore. Now that the place is theirs, it’s all about business. As long as you pay your fine. But like they say, if you don’t fork over the 120,000 pesos a week, they’re going to stop by and visit you. I have a friend who needed to sell his van to pay them back.”

Altar has changed. There’s less fear now, but there’s also less work. Back in 2007, Paulino used to make as many as three trips a day to El Sásabe. His beat-up ’87 Hyundai bumped along at least five hours a day with one to six passengers. The trips cost the same, 1,200 pesos, no matter how many were riding. He even bought another car and employed another driver, Artemio, a retired coyote who could also usually fit in three trips a day. Paulino was living large, eating huevos rancheros at the local restaurant Las
Marías every morning, even leaving a nice little tip for the young waitress.

Now Paulino eats at home every meal, pinching every penny. These times are, as the local phrase goes, skinny cow. “A lot of good people left the place,” Paulino tells me. “They couldn’t afford the narco taxes here. But now I hear they’re raising taxes everywhere else too.”

Altar has become little more than a market for migrants. Here is where they’ll pick up their coyotes and here is where the coyote agents rake through the plaza looking for prey sitting scared on the sidewalks. There are about fifty clothes sellers too, pitching warm outerwear in the winter and visors in the summer, hoping migrants decide to outfit themselves for their five- or six-day hike through the desert to Tucson. Some thirty van drivers, forty telephone booth operators, and fifty hoteliers (who will rent an unventilated room with a stained mattress to fifteen migrants for as little as thirty pesos) are eager to capitalize on migrants’ last-minute needs. The same goes for the countless food stands, the two cantinas, and the eleven currency changers, all on the lookout to make a buck from a migrant. And all have very few other clients. Even the eight policemen in town try to make a buck off migrants. Though they never confront the narcos (“They’re not idiots,” comments Paulino), the police do wield their clout, or their pistols, to extort 2,000 pesos a week from coyote agents.

For a migrant, passing through Altar is no cakewalk. It’s not as bad as some places, and it’s not quite the frenzy that it used to be, but it’s still the launching point for maybe as many as hundreds of thousands of people a year. The numbers have recently dwindled because migrants everywhere along the border have started spreading away from the traditional crossing points.

In 2007, the Tucson sector of the Border Patrol apprehended 378,339 migrants. In 2008 that number dropped to 281,207. Esmeralda Marroquín, public relations officer for the unit, explains that this drop doesn’t necessarily mean that fewer people are crossing, just that they are looking for new places to cross.

When I visited Altar in 2007 I saw that some of the agents and coyotes were moving to work in Palomas, a city in the neighboring state of Chihuahua. They told me it was the new in thing, that there were good pickings there. But in 2008, when I went to visit Palomas, I didn’t see a single migrant. The National Institute of Migration stationed in Palomas was even ready to transfer the four Grupo Beta agents, whose supplies of tuna cans and bottles of water were waiting untouched in warehouses.

“It’s all on the move,” Mr. X had said. And he was right.

The constant shifting is why Paulino keeps complaining. He throws his tantrums because in this damn town the narcos (and their taxes) are on the up and up, while the number of migrants keeps hitting new lows. And with the scarcity of migrants, the drivers face tough times. Paulino is no exception.

“Those pricks charge me 1,500 pesos each trip, 1,700 if I take more than five. There’s no way around it. I have to go where they tell me, have to report my count to the little masks. So how thrilled do you think I am paying both the fee and the taxi tax?” Paulino hasn’t made a single trip in a month and a half.

He poses a legitimate question. What group of migrants is going to be able to afford 1,500 pesos for the narcos, 1,200 for Paulino, and 15,000 for the coyote—almost $1,300? A few. Not many, but certainly a few. If nobody could afford it there wouldn’t be thirty folks still baking like lizards under the sun in the central plaza.

Paulino’s regular taxi work has plummeted as well. His two drivers work from dawn till dusk and still they’ve only managed to earn two fares, each taking a woman to her house for fifty pesos. That’s a hundred pesos, less than ten dollars, for Paulino and both his drivers, one of whom is trying to support a family.

A lot of the coyotes have started lumping the tax they have to pay to the narcos into the fees they charge migrants’ families, which means that most migrants can’t afford taxis anymore. They hardly ever, Paulino explains, come in groups of six anymore. They prefer to each pay their 500 pesos and leave the complications of a
group behind, hoping that their coyote will take care of the narco tax for them. And Paulino tells me that he’s heard through the grapevine that there might even be more changes on the horizon.

“You won’t believe the shit going down. They’re saying that they’re going to raise the taxes on the vans, to a thousand pesos a head. How are the poor
pollos
going to afford that?” Then Paulino throws in another local saying: “If you pull a finger and it doesn’t let up, you’re going to end up pulling the whole arm with it.” Who’s going to resist the mafia here?

What Mr. X said—they’ve already made their hit and now they’re satisfied—might not exactly be true. The narcos know that nobody can resist them. And what they also know, as the priest Peraza told me, is that no one is going to resist if they squeeze a little harder.

THE PROTECTION OF THE CROSS

Narcos from any cartel—Gulf, Sinaloa, Juárez, Tijuana, Beltrán Leyva, or Los Zetas—seem to have no qualms about killing police, justice officials, migrants, military personnel, and traitors, but it’s a different story with priests. Narcos were supposedly responsible for killing 5,600 people in 2008, and not one of these victims wore a cassock. That gives Father Peraza a space to talk that no one else enjoys around these parts. It doesn’t mean he can drop names or file reports, just that he can complain in a little more detail than most, and he can mention the names of a few places.

When I met Father Peraza in 2007 the situation was tense after a fresh kidnapping Mr. X told me that a city official from Altar had reported a kidnapping at the Attorney’s Office in Sonora. The guy had had the guts to pick up the phone and call the Justice Department. It took him little time to realize that the narcos weild the power of both the balance (the official judiciary system) and the sword. They called him up, asked why he had just made that report, and then warned that if he continued being so brave, they’d have to deal with him directly. It was after hearing this that Father
Peraza started getting a better feel for his place in the scheme of things. He can talk more than the rest, but he can’t cross the line. The crucifix around his neck doesn’t mean he’s completely untouchable.

We meet at his parish close to the central plaza. He founded the migrant shelter in Altar, but it’s so far out of the way, hidden on one of the many small dirt roads in the vicinity, that few take advantage of it. Despite the shelter, he’s more of a community priest than a migrants’ rights activist. He oversees two other parishes and is up to his neck in leading Mass and conducting confessions, baptisms, and first communions.

Before we get started I give him the option of speaking off the record, but, as I said, he knows his limits and will talk within them.

“I’ve always understood that I don’t have to get too involved,” Father Peraza explains. “If I get them to let one hostage go, that’s enough for me. The ideal would be if these groups just didn’t exist, but what can we do? What they least want is journalists around or for the place to get hot, not because they’d get caught, but because the fees would go up. A report’s been filed, their logic goes, so they’re going to have to charge you more.”

He’s referring to his ability to do what migrants can do, without going out on much of a limb: get the place hot, get the narcos hot, and get Altar in the headlines. And he knows that damning headlines would raise the price mafias have to pay to the authorities in order to be protected. Of course, if Father Peraza heats the place up, they won’t break his ankles with a bat. He’s a priest, and if they kill him, they’ll be the ones responsible for getting themselves in the papers. He has a theory similar to Paulino’s theory. He thinks the rubber band will keep on stretching, but then it will have to snap.