The Beast (3 page)

In contrast, the voyage by train would have Auner and his brothers clinging like ticks onto its roof struts for at least six hours en route to Medias Aguas, Veracruz, the home turf of Los Zetas. They’d then have to hide in ditches on the outskirts of the town, waiting for the next train, ready at any moment to sprint for their lives.

The infamous gang known as Los Zetas was formed in 1999 by the narco-trafficker Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, founder of the powerful Gulf Cartel, arrested in 2003, and a US prisoner since 2007. Cárdenas originally created Los Zetas to act as his organization’s armed wing, composed of thirty-one elite Mexican army deserters—some of whom had trained at the US-led School of the Americas—but the group expanded and evolved, becoming increasingly, violently autonomous. By 2001, the group had already added to its brutal money-making repertoire the mass kidnappings of undocumented migrants for ransom money. By 2007 it had broken away to form an independent cartel. In 2009 the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) called the Zetas, simply, “Mexico’s most organized and dangerous group of assassins.”

The answer to the Alfaro brothers’ question might seem obvious to someone not familiar with the rules of the migrant trail. Mexican cartel violence has become increasingly notorious through media portrayal, Mexican and US government denunciations, and the cartels’ own use of a gallows-style display of their mutilated murder victims. But the risks of traveling through the mountains, so as to avoid Los Zetas, aren’t inconsiderable. Of every ten migrants from Central America, six are apprehended and mugged by Mexican migration authorities—a potential catastrophe for these guys who pocket, as if they were jewels, the $50
their father sends from the United States every four days. They use this treasure to buy their once-a-day ration of tortillas and beans, which they eat quickly, hidden in thickets, before continuing their escape. And getting caught by the Mexican authorities doesn’t just mean returning home with their heads down and their pockets empty. Their return could cost them their lives, as could riding atop the train, which continuously throws migrants off its back, dismembering or maiming so many.

Just today I learned that a boy named José lost his head under that train. José was the youngest of three Salvadorans I traveled with two months ago. We skirted highways and ducked from authorities as we ventured through another of the high-traffic points along the migrant trail, La Arrocera. His decapitation, I’m told, was a clean cut. Steel against steel. It happened close to Puebla, some three hundred miles north of where we are now.

Though the dream is easy, the voyage is incredibly dangerous. Sometimes it’s simply the exhaustion that kills you. Sometimes it’s just one slow moment of slipping into sleep, and your head is gone from your body.

José was shaken off by one of those train shudders that so easily dislodge you when you’re worn out. Marlon, who was traveling with José at the time, was the one who broke the news to me. He confessed José was fleeing too. But unlike Auner, José knew exactly what he was fleeing from. He escaped from the gangs that closed down his bakery. They were imposing an unpayable extortion tax: $55 a week or he’d be killed. The entire company went to ground, then fled. Now one of them has already returned to El Salvador in a black bag.

The Alfaro brothers, Auner, Pitbull, and El Chele, will decide what they’re going to do tonight. And they know that they need to make the right choice. Otherwise they’re going to meet in front of them—their bodies hitting the street—what they meant to leave behind.

THE FIRST BODY

“Hey bitch!” Pitbull heard someone call behind him. He knew the call was for him.

And when he turned he saw the muzzle of a nine-millimeter pistol sticking in his face. That’s when he dove. Before he even hit the ground he heard the shots. Two bullets pierced the face and back of Pitbull’s friend, Juan Carlos Rojas, a known gang member. A piece of Juan Carlos’s brain landed on Pitbull’s imitation Polo shirt, which he had bought in a slot machine hall in Chalchuapa, El Salvador, to impress the ladies. It was a sunny February day in 2008.

Pitbull felt, in that moment, nothing but blind rage. It came up from his stomach and shot through his whole body. He lost control. He turned into an animal.

Pitbull looked down for a moment at Juan Carlos, who was covered in gore and plainly dead, and then he took off running, screaming incoherently at the assassin and his accomplice, who were trying to escape. But the one who’d fired the shot looked dazed. He was hunched over and heaving. Pitbull, either not caring or unaware that the man still carried the nine-millimeter, saw him as nothing but prey. The prey, a drunk who was about fifty years old, stopped again, pointed his pistol at Pitbull and said, between gasps, “Stand still, you dumb fuck, so I can aim at you!”

There was nothing to be done. Froth rose in Pitbull’s stomach, in his throat. When his prey was only a few steps away he jumped at him, his hands out like claws. The old man’s nine-millimeter fell to the ground.

They say around these parts that rage is cured more easily with a clean fist. But Pitbull just started whaling on the man’s face.

When two cops finally showed up, they pulled off the still raging Pitbull. Then they helped up the half-conscious old drunk. His accomplice had quietly slunk away. Being in a country like El Salvador, the cops drew all the obvious conclusions: a young man
in the middle of a crime scene—a gangster for sure. The kid was the first they questioned.

“Which gang are you in?”

“None, you fuck,” spat Pitbull, with typical grace.

“You’re with the 18’s like your friend they killed, aren’t you?”

The officer already knew about Juan Carlos, knew that he was part of the infamous 18’s. In the smattering of towns that make up this single city, Chalchuapa, even with 73,000 people, the cops know most of the gang members by clan, by name, by nickname, and even by rank.

“You deaf or fucked up?” Pitbull said. He was calmer now, had slipped back into his youthful tough-guy jargon. The cop, on the point of getting violent, took a step toward Pitbull, but the police sub-inspector showed up, just in time, easing the tension.

“Listen, kid,” he said to Pitbull, “they already told me you were looking for revenge. Tell me now. You want to come to court and testify so we can close this case?”

“You’re in the game too,” Pitbull responded, refusing to go testify.

Pitbull was seventeen years old. Already he was itching for adventure, for sharpening his edges. And this he did. A few days later, dressed as a police officer, he went to downtown Chalchuapa looking for the murderer’s accomplice who had gotten away. All day he searched through alleyways and makeshift street shops. He told me he even found it pleasurable, another adventure.

“It was ballsy to walk around in a cop’s uniform,” Pitbull told me. “Too bad we found the old fuck the easy way.”

In the end, Pitbull went to the station to identify both the assassin and his accomplice. Pitbull and the murderers, standing face to face.

“These are the two shits who killed Juan Carlos,” he said to an officer as he pointed them out.

But the assassins also got a good look at Pitbull that day. And in the relative calm of the moment, they were even able to remember
that they’d seen him before, that they knew who he was. The Chalchuapa slums are a small world. The assassins recognized that Pitbull was the son of Silvia Yolanda Alvanez Alfaro, the woman who owned the shop next to the
pupusería
¹
and on the other side of the Conal factory. They knew that this kid with a shaved head and a silver earring was Jonathan Adonay Alfaro Alváñez. He was a brickworker, farmworker, carpenter, plumber. A jack-of-all-trades. He was Johnny. He was Pitbull. Of course they knew him.

PITBULL THE TOUGH GUY

“You must have had some idea,” I say to Pitbull. We’re sitting on the rails of the Ixtepec train line, drinking soda and smoking cigarettes.

After Auner told me why they were on the migrant trail, I asked—feeling as if I were asking a father for a date with his daughter—if I could speak to his two younger brothers. Auner gave me the go-ahead. I started with Pitbull. Silently we slipped out of the commotion of Father Solalinde’s migrant shelter and sat down among towering shrubs. I wanted a shielded place so that he’d feel safe, so he’d feel safe enough to remember.

“No, man,” Pitbull says. “I have no fucking clue who those bitches are. I was just cruising the game rooms with my friend. He told me he had to grab something at the bar. Then, real calm, he came out. We started walking and then the two old fucks just jumped out and popped him.”

“And you don’t think it’s them threatening to kill you now?”

“I don’t have a clue which sons-of-bitches are threatening us.”

Nothing. Not even a clue. Pitbull flees, but he doesn’t know from whom. If he were a character in a movie, of course, Pitbull would have snooped around, hit up his barrio contacts, tried to put a name to the assassins, maybe put on the police uniform again.
But Pitbull lives in the real world. He’s just an eighteen-year-old kid steeped in the violence of one of the most dangerous countries on the continent.

What’s more, not even the police reports contain many details. When they killed Juan Carlos—January or February, he doesn’t exactly remember—nine other men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five were killed, just in Chalchuapa. And Pitbull doesn’t even know if Juan Carlos was his friend’s real name.

“That’s what he called himself,” Pitbull says. “But he was in a gang and he had problems in some of the other barrios. I heard people call him a lot of different names.”

William, José, Miguel, Carlos, Ronal, Unidentified, any of these could have been Juan Carlos. All of these young men were murdered in Chalchuapa in the same month. And even if one were to know the facts of the murder, I have a hunch that, like the facts of so many other migrant murder cases, the details would be so scarce they’d simply disappear. Evaporate. It’d be as if nothing had ever happened.

Pitbull turns to look over his shoulder at a couple of migrant women leaving the shelter. “Hey, sweethearts!” he yells. Fleeing, it seems, isn’t always a somber procession. At least not for Pitbull. He takes a drag of his cigarette, then sinks back, lying down beside the rails and propping his head on a rock. He looks up at the sky and takes another drag. His posture makes him look like he could be a patient talking to a shrink.

After he saw that body fall, Pitbull got out of Chalchuapa for a while. Two boozy old men were being charged with homicide because he’d identified them to their faces. Leaving was the best thing.

He went to Tapachula, a Mexican town that smells of fritters and lead, on the border with Guatemala, where one of his older brothers, Josué, aka El Chele, had been living for about five months. El Chele was working in a mechanics shop in a factory slum in Tapachula, saving up money to continue his journey to El Norte. He also had some hope that his father would call and tell
him that a coyote was ready, the money paid, and all that was left to do was make the trip north.

“Nos vamos al Norte, hijo, verás cómo ahí sí hay chamba, buen jale, buen dinero,”
²
his father had told him in his migrant Spanish, a mix of Central American and Chicano.

The three brothers, Auner, Pitbull, and El Chele, had never been close to one another, but recently their lives have forced them together. Auner was especially distant, working as a farmhand in rural El Salvador, waiting for his wife to bear his first child. None of the brothers called each other. They followed rural codes, a man’s
campesino
way, always keeping a tight cap on their emotions.

El Chele was in good with the owners of the mechanics shop, but not quite good enough for them to let Pitbull sleep there as well. The owners did, however, let El Chele bring women to the shop and spend a slow afternoon in the back with them. And so El Chele’s time passed in Tapachula, working at the shop and working to lure girls into the back room, but never making steady friends. In his free hours he would take a shower to wash the soot off, slick gobs of gel into his curly hair, put on an imitation designer shirt and fake Converse shoes, and then start his solitary prowl through café corners on the main plaza, through the pseudo-colonial white rotunda and through the
paleterías
or soda fountains where men and women gathered, and, as El Chele hoped, where they fell in love. Sometimes he’d succeed, score a date, flirt with a girl on a bench in the park. They’d eat an ice cream, and then he’d woo her back to the shop where they’d squirm their pants down. Not long after, he’d forget about her and return to his routine.

Part of El Chele’s success was due to the fact that he doesn’t look like the typical delinquent. Unlike Auner and Pitbull, he’s fair-skinned, and the innocent look of his face matches his boyish brown curls. He doesn’t have calloused hands, and he keeps his
nails clean and clipped, so you can’t tell that he’s already spent most of his young life in laboring. All of it makes him seem like somebody you could trust.

Pitbull, on the other hand, was scraping together his life as best he could. He spent his time in Tapachula, roaming the Zona de Indeco, one of the most dangerous barrios and site of many national and foreign-owned factories. In Indeco—thanks to the giant walls, graffitied with Mara Salvatrucha gang signs, that section off the safer parts of Tapachula—walking the streets is like stepping on a spinal cord, a touchy boundary line between two countries in conflict.
³

Pitbull worked those months variously as a bricklayer, a mechanic’s assistant, and a load-carrier in a market. All of it was under the table and day-to-day. He made a few friends who, as he put it, made him feel like he was living on a tightrope, always on the verge of becoming a nameless dead body lying on the street. It was that same rope on which he teetered in El Salvador when he was weighing whether or not to give in, like most of his hopeless friends, to one of the gangs. As a gang member, he told himself, at least he’d have constant backup, and so be able to make the best of the constant fear.