After he was deported from Mexico back to El Salvador, the problem for Arnovis was that he couldn’t be there.
He was scared, ashamed, tired, hungry, and only had fourteen dollars in his pocket. Before calling his family to tell them that he hadn’t made it, he spent a night in a scuzzy motel, La Estación, on the outskirts of Jiquilisco, where he recognized the crisis point he had reached. He had been on that knife-edge since he had received the first threat, but he was at home and in a rush then—with family and all its distractions—and then he was on the road, and then in detention, so this was the first time, as he explained it to me, that he really had the space to think. What conclusion did he come to? That it wasn’t worth the risk, that he was as good as dead if he went back to Corral, and as much as he wanted to go back and see Meybelín and Mirna, along with the rest of the family, he didn’t want to be dead. That was what he came to after a few hours in that dingy motel: that he needed to try for el norte again.
When I passed by La Estación, months after Arnovis’s revelation, I wanted to stop in and take a look. I told one of the cleaning women I was thinking of staying there, and she let me poke my head in one of the rooms and glance into the bathroom—it was so small you’d have to keep the door open to use the sink. The room smelled like warm bleach, and instead of a bar of soap on the towel folded on the bed, there was a condom. A room cost six dollars for three hours, or ten dollars for a night. Arnovis told me that they were price gouging me as a gringo, that he only paid eight dollars for his night of reflection.
The next morning, he called his brother to tell him he was back in El Salvador, and that he needed to leave again.
Arnovis always had sandals growing up—even if he often didn’t bother to put them on—but didn’t always have shoes. By the time his mother took him on a resupply trip off the island for the first time, at eight years old, he had already started working with his father. By the same age he was doing actual wage labor for which the family grew to depend on him. Using a wooden plow his father carved himself—and which still leans against Arnovis’s shack—he guided two oxen to plow the family milpa of corn and beans. By the time he was ten he could plow a hundred-furrow field by himself, earning twelve dollars. Ten of those dollars would go to his family, and, with what was left, he would buy himself clothes and save up for belt buckles—he was growing a small collection. One of his favorite buckles bore an embossed skull with wings over a background of crossed pistols. His mom showed me a picture with him proudly thrusting his hips forward to show off that very buckle. He was wearing a cowboy hat, and they estimated that he was eleven at the time of the photo—already a working man.
Besides plowing fields, he also worked as a scarecrow for his grandfather. He would spend entire days completely alone in remote fields clapping away birds or trying to peg them with pebbles with his slingshot. I asked him what he thought about as he spent long hours alone. He had no phone, no books, and nothing but the sky and the silence to stare back at him. He told me that he talked to himself on those days, speaking about what he saw. A few times, when we were together, I caught him mumbling quietly to himself, and wondered if it was a habit he had developed while aiming his slingshot.
When he was in sixth grade, at thirteen years old, he took a year off from school to work full-time—a common practice on the islands. His older brother, in Kansas, attended even less school and to this day can’t read or write. Arnovis learned construction and bricklaying and began working with his dad at the turtle hatchery. I didn’t really have a childhood, he told me. I didn’t have a chance to act like a kid. I was always with my dad. If my dad went to the store, I went with him. If he went to work, I went to work.
When he returned to school the next year, he sank back into his studies. He liked school and had a penchant for drama, performing Juan Gabriel songs to great hilarity. His mom laughed her deep body-shaking laugh as she told me about a time he dressed in full drag and sang in a school production. When he graduated from primary school in ninth grade, nineteen years old and sporting a thin goatee, he already had a sweetheart, Mirna, and everything seemed in order. They moved together into the one-room house that Arnovis had built himself.
When Mirna got pregnant, the first thing Arnovis wanted to do was go back to school, and he enrolled in classes. But when Meybelín was born, reality hit him quickly, and the needs of his young family drove Arnovis to leave school, again, to concentrate on work. Maybe he wasn’t going to be able to get through school and get a good job, but he would, he promised himself, do whatever he could to give his daughter that chance.
Short and muscular, Arnovis often strolls around the property shirtless, half in and half out of his sandals, kicking around in the dirt. He has a soft, susurrus voice—with a shadow of a lisp—except when he laughs and a high-pitched whoop chirrups out of his chest. When he tells jokes, which is often, his lisp intensifies and he speaks rapidly, the words tumbling over each other. His excitement typically grows and propels him toward the end of the joke—I often had to ask him to repeat punch lines.
The local slang in these parts is often marked by the emphatic fillers hn! or haah! Almost everybody has a nickname, or multiple nicknames and diminutives—Gordo, Negro, Jo, Joa, Chendo, Che, Ceci. So, for such a rare, three-syllable name as Arnovis, it was surprising that I almost never heard anyone call him anything but Arnovis. (The Spanish pronunciation is with the hard-rolling r, and the last syllable is pronounced veese.) The second time I visited Corral de Mulas, his hands—thick with work—were covered in small cuts and splinters from working with the branches of thorny mongollano trees, which served as the posts for a barbed-wire fence he installed. He shrugged off the scratches when I asked about them, and then showed me his shoulder, where he had stacked the branches to carry. The scab running from his clavicle, up his shoulder, and down his back, was as thick as tire tread.
The first day I met him, as we were talking Meybelín came up and, impishly catching my eye, whispered in her father’s ear, Coco. She had been pestering him all morning for another coconut. She’s addicted, Arnovis said to me. Meybelín seemed unsure if being a coconut addict was a good thing or a bad thing, and pursed her lips thoughtfully, her right cheek dimpling. When I told her I’d like to become a coconut addict, she smiled, revealing a dark spot on her left front incisor. Most of that morning Meybelín had appeared almost in a daze, displaying a sort of wariness that seemed to go beyond typical youthful timidity. She would freeze sometimes if someone asked her a question, and would only be shaken back to the moment when her father called her name: Meybelín!
Arnovis is extremely close with his family. He and his father often sit together in the evening to talk and occasionally work together in the corn, bean, or cashew fields. He and his mother laugh and gossip together, and he and his sister love to rib each other—Ale has a hard punch, and if Arnovis jokes too hard about her suitors, she delivers him resonant, closed-fist wallops on his arm—and they all often fall into hammocks with each other, with Meybelín or Pedrito or Jason, the little ones, piling on top and hooking their limbs into the tangle. Trying to get a sense of what life was like before he couldn’t live it, as Arnovis once described it to me, I asked what he liked about Corral. He replied with descriptions that sounded like bucolic personal dating ads:
Before, when I could leave the house, I would look at the volcanoes, or go swimming in the bay.
I was on the community water rescue squad, and I once saved a child from drowning.
At night, when it was still safe, I would stroll with my family on the street in the evenings, visiting with neighbors, watching the shepherds bring their cattle back home.
It seemed a little twee, I thought, a calloused mind remembering halcyon days, but then one early evening when I was visiting, as the sky deepened to a gloaming indigo and the breeze finally started cutting the heat and I was swinging in a hammock between two coconut trees, I saw a young shepherd boy pass by on the street. Balancing on his bike, instead of pedaling to propel himself, he was hitching a ride by the tail of his last cow as they made their way home. He raised a hand to me and waved.
Arnovis hadn’t wanted to leave. He never wanted to take the one-way “highway” out of Corral. He had wanted to finish building his house, add another room, work his plot of land, and harvest his corn and beans and cashews for his family. He had wanted to fish, watch his daughter grow up, and hang in his hammock in the evenings or stroll down the street to visit neighbors. Sometimes, he told me, when he was in flight—in a detention center or on the top of a train—he would think about what he would be doing if he were back at home. I would be together with my family, he said, relaxing after work, maybe watching television. That was the life he wanted. It was not the one he got.
After one night in the concrete-and-tile sex motel of La Estación, after the call to his family to tell them that he had failed, that he had been deported back to El Salvador, and that he didn’t even have enough money to spend another night at the motel, an uncle who lived in the nearby village of Salinas de Sisiguayo came and picked Arnovis up. He would spend the next eight days without leaving his uncle’s house, waiting for his brother in Kansas to gather the funds so he could try to go north again. Meybelín and Mirna came to spend a few days with him. He told me he was in a daze that whole time, pacing around the house, hardly taking anything in. His aunt and uncle thought he needed to disguise himself better this time, so he could slip by immigration officials: he should look more like a Mexican on a bus trip than a Salvadoran fleeing for his life. His uncle found him a pair of black Adod dress shoes and gave him a thin, long-sleeved collared shirt.
His brother arranged for him to go with a coyote, putting him in touch with someone he would meet at soon as he crossed into Mexico. His brother also had his friend wire five hundred dollars, and then Arnovis was off again, dressed, as he put it to me, like he was on his way to church. This time, he felt, he knew what was coming. Or at least there was less he didn’t know.
I love you, he told Meybelín again. Be good … I love you. She cried again, and for this departure, Arnovis didn’t have a helmet to hide his own tears.
Instead of heading straight north from Guatemala City he headed northeast, toward the jungle, the Petén.
It’s a beautiful, hot, green drive along bursting curves and broken roads. You get the sense that you only need to turn your head, and the jungle brush would sprout up and gulp down the road before you looked again. This is one of the green hearts of the Mayans, where there remain pyramids and ruins from the ancient city of Tikal, or Yax Mutal, settlements dating back to 1000 BCE and where urban populations peaked, between the sixth and eighth centuries, at over one hundred thousand. Today, the Petén is a hot spot for narcos, after the source of cocaine shipments heading north shifted from the Caribbean to Central America in the 1980s and ’90s, and, during the Guatemalan civil war, the United States propped up drug-trafficking military officers. In 1991, five years before the war ended, parts of the Petén were declared to be off-limits for development, according to the Law of Protected Areas, and even indigenous locals who had been living in the newly “protected” areas were forcibly removed by the military. The Nature Conservancy, an American NGO, used funds from USAID to purchase another huge swath of land in the Petén, which is now restricted for both developers and locals. Supposed efforts to combat climate change have incentivized companies to plant more African palm, as they are given tax breaks and reduced tariffs for investing in projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But, as journalist Martha Pskowski has pointed out, cultivation of African palm “has been environmentally devastating in Petén.” As agricultural barons squeeze out more indigenous people, they are replacing jungle with huge monocrop farms and engaging in what critics are calling ecocide: in 2015, a massive overflow from palm oil oxidation ponds spilled into the Pasión River, killing tens of thousands of fish and threatening dozens of indigenous villages. According to Pskowski, “from 1982 to 2010, Petén lost over 1.3 million acres of forest, during a time period when palm production expanded by 110,000 acres”—all of it further pushing people to take to the migrant trails.
A fellow migrant had warned Arnovis to have a fifty-quetzal bill ready to pay off the cops who would inevitably shake him down. When his bus halted at a checkpoint in the middle of the humid sting of the jungle, a cop ordered him and four Honduran men to get off and line up on the side of the road. Arnovis and his fellow travelers had their fifty quetzales already folded behind their IDs. The cop took their IDs, gave them a perfunctory glance, and then handed them back. Muy bien, he said, pocketing the money. Get back on the bus.
I asked Arnovis about that moment. It was the first time he had ever bribed anybody, and he said he was nervous. The last time he’d been lined up by a police officer he got a smack to the head and a gun drawn on him. He hadn’t known if the bribe was going to work, or how it was going to work, but afterward, he told me, it felt like an accomplishment. I had to fight so hard to survive, he said. It makes you mad, but, at the same time you realize you’re strong. You’re stronger than you imagined. Think about it, somebody could tell me, If you don’t leave right now, tomorrow you’re going to be killed. And I could leave. I put on my shoes and leave. I don’t know how to get there, but I get there.
When he arrived to La Técnica, on the border with the state of Chiapas, he learned that the system of coyotes and smuggling services was operated through the hotels. You just show up at the hotel, as he explained it to me, and they ask you, Are you going north? (Everybody is going north.) You have to pay half up front, one hundred fifty quetzales, and then the other half before you get on the boat.
Early the next morning, in Técnica, he joined a group of migrants gathered around a row of narrow lanchas: pregnant women, old people, little kids, and other young men like him standing in the humid, predawn darkness. Arnovis thought they were going to divide up into the different lanchas, but they all piled into one, all thirty of them, or maybe more than thirty, he guessed. They were packed in tight, and the lancha was riding low, the gunwale almost level with the tepid brown river water. And then we just took off, he said, riding so fast. I think we rode for about four hours, and then we stopped in a little village close to Villahermosa. It was an indigenous village, almost nobody there spoke Spanish.
About eight months after Arnovis crossed into Mexico for the second time, I tried to trace his footsteps, finding the isolated spot along the Usumacinta River where, given his descriptions, I approximated the point where he crossed. After a bumping, zigzagging tuk-tuk ride down a broken, narrow dirt road, I met a fifteen-year-old lanchero named Alberto. He looked no older than twelve, but he’d been working that river, he told me, since he was a kid. He would charge twenty pesos to motor me to the next village upriver. A woman and her young son were waiting patiently in the lancha, and after coming to terms that we’d be his only passengers for a while, the young lanchero pushed us off the bank, pulled hard on the motor cord, and pointed the bow north. The sun was knifing down from the open pan of the sky, and I dipped my hand into the opaque warm water, splashing my face and neck to palliate the burn. Alberto told me how, sometimes, without warning, there are periods when dozens and dozens of migrants come and need rides upriver, and then, also without warning, hardly any migrants will come for weeks at a time. The locals, he told me, can cross the border back and forth away from the official port of entry; nobody ever asks them for papers. We dropped the woman and her son off, and then I paid another twenty pesos for Alberto to take me downriver, back to Guatemala. After I disembarked, I took a few photos and sent them to Arnovis, asking if it looked like where he’d crossed.
Pretty much, he said.
One of the most notorious perils of traveling to the United States from Central America or southern Mexico is the Beast, the system of freight trains to which migrants cling to get a free but dangerous and sometimes deadly ride north. Arnovis rode the trains, by his count, at least four times. His coyote had found him again in Palenque, where he had also met a young woman, twenty-six, who was traveling with her sixteen-month-old daughter, Valeria. The way it worked, the coyote explained, was that he himself wasn’t going to ride the trains but would meet his pollos, or chickens, in the destination cities, where they would pay him for places to sleep and for dealing with the cartels. Since Valeria was so young, however, and since Valeria’s mom was so nervous, the coyote asked Arnovis if he would look after them, offering Arnovis a discount for doing so.
Once, the three of them had to jump on the train when it was already rolling. Arnovis had Valeria in his arms, and her backpack on his back. Valeria’s mother climbed aboard first, and then Arnovis ran behind her, jumped up with one arm, and handed up Valeria.
How dangerous was it? I asked. What were the odds you could have dropped Valeria?
I wasn’t going to drop Valeria.
Right, but it’s a hard maneuver—to get on a moving train with only one hand while holding a child. It’s possible you could have dropped her.
I wasn’t going to drop her.
Arnovis told me about a few times when, heading north through Mexico, the coyotes got wasted. They’d pound cheap beers and gas station mezcal and then get high, and all the migrants would watch them nervously, not knowing where the ribaldry would lead. One night, in Mexico City, when there were only a couple other migrants in a safe house and they were waiting a few days to head north, the coyotes got so drunk they blacked out. They had weapons, food, a television, and probably some cash, as well as cell phones. Having made friends with them, they had let Arnovis out of the locked room the other migrants were confined to. He could have made off with the loot, but he didn’t. They trusted me after that, he said.
And that was helpful for you?
Everything helps, he said. It’s survival.
But why does an asylum seeker even need to crawl onto the top of a freight train, gain the trust of a coyote, swim across a swift river, walk through the jungle or the desert, and languish for days with little food in a cramped safe house run by murderous young men? Isn’t there a more orderly and safer way to ask the United States for protection?
Journalist Danielle Mackey, in a 2017 article for HuffPost, wrote about the bureaucratic morass that was failing desperate Salvadorans, even after the United States had worked with the United Nations to supposedly make it easier for asylum seekers to apply for protected status. The program that emerged, the Protection Transfer Agreement (PTA), was intended to let asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle of Central America get “pre-screened,” sent to safety in Costa Rica if they were found to be eligible, and then eventually shipped on to the United States or another receiving country. Six months after the launch of the program, Mackey reported, it had only assisted a single family. All the other applicants had been delayed or denied. The problem is that it takes too much wait time for an agency to process a claim, conduct the prescreening, and send info back and forth from Central America to the Department of Homeland Security. And time is what asylum seekers don’t have. As Mackey puts it: “Death threats here have short grace periods.”
In 2018 I spoke with an official in a small office in a Honduran city about the state of the PTA in Honduras, which had been initiated a year previously. (The official demanded complete anonymity before agreeing to speak with me, even asking that I not name the city we were in.) At the time of the interview, though an NGO partner had identified approximately eighty potential asylees, not a single Honduran had been granted protection. Twenty-five of them had been deemed inadmissible because of a prior deportation, a criminal conviction, or having been merely charged with some sort of gang affiliation. The rest of the nearly sixty cases were either stalled out or denied for unknown reasons, the official said. The whole program is choked by such secrecy that the actual applicants didn’t even know to what country they were applying for asylum: the officials explain to claimants that there are multiple participating countries, though only the United States has signed on—ostensibly—to receive Honduran asylum seekers. “If everybody knew about the program, half of Honduras would show up at our office,” the official told me. But it wasn’t just fear of being overwhelmed with applicants. If the American taxpayers or American politicians—or Donald Trump, as the official quipped—knew about the program, it would probably get shut down.
This model—transporting potential asylees to temporary safe places—has precedent. In the United States, it’s known as the “Guam option,” after thousands of Vietnamese were transported to the US territory of Guam during the Vietnam War to await processing and resettlement in the mainland. In the 1990s, the United States also sent Iraqi Kurds to Guam for processing, and the United Nations currently has a similar emergency waiting room in Romania for hopeful refugees worldwide.
The danger and difficulty involved in staking an asylum claim is not exclusive to one particular region. The sea journeys tens of thousands of Africans and Middle Easterners take every year are, though extremely dangerous, effectively the only way for most people to make asylum claims in Europe after Hungary and other Balkan countries walled and fenced off entry to Central Europe, and the European Union offers few other avenues of relief. Melissa Fleming, the chief spokesperson for the UNHCR, expertly captures the extreme danger of making an asylum claim in Europe in her book A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea. She tells the true story of Doaa, a young Syrian woman hoping to find safety in Europe with her fiancé when their boat is sabotaged at sea—piratical smugglers had rammed their boat, and of the five hundred passengers, only a handful survived. The rest were chopped to pieces by the propeller, or drowned. Doaa watched as her fiancé weakened, slipped away, and sank into the sea. Incredibly, she survived for four more days, floating on a small inner tube with two young children—neither of whom were her own—balanced on her chest. The scene calls to mind a line from American poet Ocean Vuong, from “Immigrant Haibun”: “That a woman on a sinking ship becomes a life raft—no matter how soft her skin.”
Doaa said she was “outraged that the bottom of the sea was the only place five hundred refugees, including the man she loved, could find refuge.”
“No person fleeing conflict or persecution should have to die trying to reach safety,” Fleming writes, and yet, every year, thousands die drowning in the sea (in 2016, over five thousand migrants died just while crossing the Mediterranean) or dehydrating in the desert, falling under the wheels of the Beast, or getting kidnapped and buried in shallow graves as they look for safety.
The town of El Ceibo is a relatively easy spot to skirt immigration authorities and cross from Guatemala into Mexico. But it’s still a two- or three-day walk from there to the first migrant shelter—which is maybe better termed a refugee camp—and only a short first stage of the extended journey through Mexico, which has long been an inferno for Central American migrants and refugees.
In continuing to trace Arnovis’s journey, I caught a combi, a taxi van, to El Ceibo for fifty quetzales. The vehicle was parked in the hectic shade of the central market in Flores, Petén, right on Lake Petén Itzá. I asked the driver’s assistant how close to the Mexican border they could drop me off and then—hesitantly—asked him if he knew how I could get across. I’d never queried a coyote before and was nervous, but it was just part of the job for him. He asked me if I needed a guide or just someone to explain how to go it alone. I told him I wasn’t sure but probably wanted a guide. Okay, he said. He’d call a guy. I asked how much? Another fifty Qs.
And it’s safe? I asked.
Of course it is.
We headed west and slightly north for about five hours, passing through a landscape of hillocks and humps, an infinite variety of green-on-green rolling hills occasionally cut by the gray of the sputtering road or the brown spill of a river. Bananas, African palm, the occasional swollen ramrod of a ceiba trunk, vines and thick underbrush broken by small towns with open-air sundry stores, fried-chicken stalls, and the inevitable tire-patch shops—vulcanizadoras—at each end of town. The AC-less combi took a break halfway through the trip, and most of the passengers, myself included, assailed a vendor to buy Cokes and fried bananas. I was nervous the whole ride and, as if the details could somehow protect me, I tried to memorize faces, clothes, roads, and passing place names, taking multiple screenshots of my GPS location on my phone. I can still see the elegant line, like a chevron, shaved into the back of the driver’s closely buzzed hairline, and the brightly colored threads on the ripped fake designer jeans of the driver’s assistant, and his attached earlobes with little glimmering dots of fake diamonds. These are the specifics, I told myself, that could singularly identify someone. These are the details that convince a listener, a reader, or a judge. And I thought of Arnovis, on a similar bus, similarly nervous, and wondered how long your nerves can sustain that level of alertness, how long before you start to relax, or acclimatize, or fray. By the end of the fourth hour I had pulled out the novel I was reading, The Unnameable, and found Beckett’s visions of anomie and solitary misery eerily relevant and still, somehow, supremely beautiful.
At the turnoff to El Naranjo, the driver’s assistant eyed me and called back, Mister! The combi came to a quick stop and I was pointed to a van that would take me the rest of the way to El Ceibo. I boarded it and rode for another twenty minutes, until the young driver stopped to pass some cash to a woman at a roadside motel, and then pulled up close to the borderline. The few other passengers got out, and six tuk-tuk drivers crowded around me.
You don’t have papers? they asked, seemingly gleeful to catch a gringo in such a predicament. Fredy, the man the assistant driver had called, and who had been waiting for me, shoved through the crowd and told me to come with him. I didn’t move. It took some explaining, but I finally laid out that I was a journalist and wanted not just a clandestine crossing, but a clandestine crossing that went round-trip. He said it would be no problem, and we peeled away from the other drivers. The cost was fifty Qs, which is what everything cost that day. Fredy’s friend, Gerónimo—another tuk-tuk driver—offered to tag along, and I accepted, wanting all the company I could get.
Is it safe? I asked again.
Of course.
Fredy and Gerónimo, both twenty-one, were thin and thinly mustached eager young men in sandals, shorts, ball caps, and T-shirts. Fredy led the way, insisting on wearing my larger backpack. Gerónimo went next, and I followed behind with my small pack as we stepped off the road and onto the narrow cowpath cut into the weeds and high grass.
I asked as many questions as I could think of. How many migrants a day? Where are the migrants from? What about Mexican authorities? What about narcos? Drugs? Locals crossing over? Gangs? Robberies? Snakes? US presence? Do people talk about building a wall? Their answers were short, and mostly some version of a little, un poco. There are poco narcos, poco robberies, poco crackdowns, poco locals, poco gangs, a wall is occasionally discussed, and they had heard of US officials sneaking around. Just un poco, though. Fredy and Gerónimo worked with a group of fifteen or so young coyotes/tuk-tuk drivers who guided, they estimated, between thirty and fifty migrants a day. It used to be a lot more. Before the migra got so strict, Fredy said, they used to guide over a hundred a day.
We broke into the woods and started climbing a steep, shadowed path. The shaded jungle seemed further shadowed by the clouds of mosquitoes. A pair of curraca birds squawked and bolted out of a bush. Breathing in the thickly humid air, trying to keep my wits, trying to keep up with my guides, I noticed about a dozen mosquitoes were riding on Gerónimo’s back. I wanted to reach forward and swipe them off, and almost did, but wasn’t sure how he would take the gesture. We had hardly met, and he was, un poco, my coyote—I didn’t know the etiquette of the relationship. I thought, too, as we were walking, of La Arrocera, the notoriously dangerous path in the neighboring Mexican state of Chiapas that migrants take to skirt immigration checkpoints. Óscar Martínez described migrants he spoke with spotting a human skull in La Arrocera and recognizing that it was the site of a murder. “Bones here aren’t a metaphor for what’s past, but for what’s coming,” Martínez writes. I thought I had the advantage—if we, or just I, suddenly needed to run—of being in shoes, while Fredy and Gerónimo were both in sandals. I thought of the mosquito bites I was going to be scratching that night—they were sucking out blood right through my shirt. And then we broke back out onto the street, already in Mexico. My forty-minute journalistic jaunt, my tousled nerves, constituted, comparatively, an infinitesimally small portion of the long, impossible journey that migrants take.
I still had a day ahead of me—a return walk, which included spotting howler monkeys in the canopy above us, finding the water crossing that Arnovis took to get north of Tenosique, and hitching a ride to the next town—but, later, as I crossed the border for the third time that day, crossing legally into Mexico, all I had to do was flash my passport, open my bag, and, further north at the military checkpoint, smile and offer a quick explanation of my comings. And then I had a hotel to check in to, a torta to satisfy my hunger, a shower to rinse off the sweat, and a glass of rum to calm my nerves. The migrants taking that same mosquito-clouded “jaunt” were barely, barely, getting started. Most of them would have to continue the walk for another thirty miles north through the jungle bogs to the shelter in Tenosique. There were signs posted at bus stops throughout town, reminding people that if their lives were in danger in their home countries, they had the right to ask for asylum. In Mexican novelist Emiliano Monge’s terrifying and moving Las tierras arrasadas (recently translated into English by Frank Wynne as Among the Lost), a group of Central Americans cross at a similar—maybe the same—spot into southern Mexico and enter into a landscape of horrors. In the novel, Monge tells an Inferno-esque story that draws from both Dante and interviews he conducted with Central American migrants. One passage reads: “For those who have come from other lands comes the gnashing of a thousand fearful teeth.”
The howler monkeys, too, Fredy told me, crossed the border back and forth. Nobody, he said, making a joke, checks their papers.
In 2018, the United States tried to convince Mexico to join it in a “safe third country agreement,” in which the two nations would regard one another as safe places for asylum seekers to make claims and, for those in need, receive protection. At its core, the agreement was really about the United States further foisting refugee protections onto Mexico, precluding any potential asylum seeker who passed through Mexico of making a claim for US protection. In 2004, the United States and Canada signed such an agreement, meaning that for the majority of Mexicans and Central Americans who cannot get to Canada without passing through the United States first (due to what are called “carrier sanctions”—heavy fines and penalties imposed on airlines for selling a ticket to someone who doesn’t have a visa), their only option for asking for asylum was to do it in the United States. The problem, however, is that Mexico is not a safe country for asylum seekers. The horrific mass murder of migrants in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, in 2010, in which seventy-two migrants were slaughtered, is but a high-profile example of the country’s systemic violence; many tens of thousands more migrants have been killed, kidnapped, tortured, enslaved, raped, robbed, or disappeared. And, despite facing systemic discrimination, if an asylum seeker does decide to make a claim in Mexico, they have to face bureaucratic obstacles nearly as formidable as the physical dangers. Aldo Vega, a Mexican human rights attorney working at La 72 migrant shelter in Tabasco, told me about a case of agents from the state attorney general’s office who had actually kidnapped an entire family.
After the Trump administration made repeated threats and ultimatums in the summer of 2019 to embattled and outgoing Guatemalan president Jimmy Morales, Guatemalan officials agreed to sign a “safe third” agreement, despite the Guatemalan congress deeming its passage illegal. Next in line, with direct threats of the suspension of aid, were both El Salvador and Honduras. If Mexico isn’t a safe country for asylum seekers, Guatemala is even less so: in 2019 the country only had twelve people working in its asylum office, and approved a total of only twenty claims the year before. Meanwhile, between 2017 and 2018, nearly fifty thousand Guatemalans fled their country to apply for asylum in the United States. El Salvador, meanwhile, had only a single official processing asylum claims. And, in 2019, calling Honduras a “safe country” for anybody is like calling a minefield a nice spot to have a picnic.
Two days after I crossed the border from Guatemala to Mexico, I spoke with Gerber Iván Lima Gomez, a thirty-year-old Guatemalan man who had fled Guatemala City after months of persecution, the firebombing of his house, and the discovery of a note left on his door promising his murder. Gerber was thin and back-hunched and wore a purple tank top when we sat down together in orange plastic-and-metal elementary school chairs near the outdoor kitchen in La 72. He had worked for ten years for a public health NGO, specializing in LGBTQ youth, and had to flee when a local gang tried to recruit him to start selling drugs to his own clients. He told me that he had fled immediately—after finding the note with the death threat—and wasn’t even able to go to his house to pack clothes. He had taken the same path from El Ceibo I walked a couple days before, but he did it at night, and it took him much longer. His guide made him pay two hundred quetzales up front, four times what they charged me. The coyote walked with a single flashlight, and Gerber had trouble seeing, slipping repeatedly on the muddy path. The mosquitoes were atrocious, he said, and when he tried to slap at them on his neck, face, and arms, he only slipped more. At one point, the guide stopped in the middle of the darkness, turned off the flashlight, and told him that if he didn’t give him another two hundred quetzales right then, he was going to abandon him in the jungle. Gerber dug into his sock, fumbled with his cash, and forked over most of what he had left. A little while later they came out of the darkness and were only a few hundred yards away from the port of entry. His guide, who had completed his job, turned around and disappeared back into woods. He got lucky after that, snuck through the checkpoint on a bus, and then found his way to La 72 migrant shelter, where he would spend the next thirteen months fighting for asylum in Mexico.
The shelter, named in honor of the seventy-two migrants who were murdered in the San Fernando Massacre in 2010, feels like a small village: there’s a women’s building, a LGBTQ building, a family building, a kids’ building, administrative offices, a medical office, a psychologist, a concrete soccer court, clusters of tables and chairs around which people mill and do laundry and line up for services and food, or lie on the concrete to catch up on sleep. La 72’s chapel—the cross on the wall has a mass grave painted on it—is for overflow, with about fifty thin mats stacked along the wall. Some nights, well over one hundred migrants and refugees sleep in La 72.
Gerber’s case was approved in February of 2018, but he wasn’t informed that it had been approved until two months later, in April. When we spoke in early September of the same year, he was still waiting for his final residency card and work permit so he could travel freely to support himself. In the last thirteen months he had lost significant weight, gotten seriously ill from eating undercooked meat, felt consistently stressed, anxious, and sleepless, and claimed he had to deal almost constantly with discrimination and incompetence from UN officials, Red Cross officials, public health officials, Mexican immigration officials, and fellow migrants in the shelter who tried to help him or said they were trying to help him. He told me he still feared for his life, and, if he ever actually received his papers, he was hoping to make it to Mexico City.
I don’t think I’ve ever come across someone so visibly exasperated by bureaucratic runaround, deteriorated physical health, and a perilously nagging fear of death. After he finished his story, Gerber’s jaw dropped and he sank further into his hunch. At one point he seemed to be about to laugh at his predicament, but, instead, a sob gulped out of his throat. He told me about a doctor he visited who, when Gerber presented with symptoms of salmonellosis (from the undercooked meat), told him—noting to him that he was gay—that he had HIV, probably even AIDS, and he should start treatment right away. Having worked for ten years in sexual health, Gerber knew he didn’t have HIV or AIDS and, stricken by the display of vile ignorance, thanked the doctor and left. He later filed a complaint. Given the limbo that such discrimination had placed him in, I asked him why he wouldn’t just head north himself, take the train, go to the United States.
The train, no. Just no, he told me. It’s not for everyone.
Considering the dangers of riding on top of a cargo train, it should be for no one. No one can say how many lives the Beast has claimed over the years. There aren’t statistics for how many people fall off and are mutilated or killed by the metal scream of the wheels. One of the Honduran men Óscar Martínez profiled in his book The Beast, Jaime Arriaga, barely survived getting bucked off, and was able to tell his story only thanks to his almost superhuman will to drag himself and his barely attached leg to the next town to ask for help. Jaime had fallen asleep, briefly, and was then rattled off the train. He was run over, thrown into the air, and run over again.
And the wheels aren’t the only danger: bandits, immigration authorities, police, and even train operators are also a threat. It’s disturbingly unclear which institution poses a bigger danger to migrants riding the Beast: Los Zetas or the Mexican police. Or maybe the correct answer is the one I heard from another migrant I spoke with, who said, of the police and gangs in Honduras, They’re the same thing.
A few years before I met Gerber, after hearing so much about the train and reporting about incidents occurring on the train, as well as translating The Beast with Daniela Ugaz, I decided to ride it. I boarded one night and took the train from Ixtepec, Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, to Medias Aguas, Veracruz, close to where, a few months later, about a dozen cars would derail. But that night I feared the humans aboard much more than the prospect of the train skipping the tracks. And I was, in a few ways, much more prepared than most of the migrants riding with me—I had a couple layers, a hoodie, good shoes. Plus, a very solicitous cook, Cayetano, at the migrant shelter/refugee camp Hermanos en el Camino, had insisted I take a rope he had found for me, to tie myself in so I wouldn’t be shaken off or slip off if I fell asleep. Still, some of the migrants, assuming—correctly—my feebleness and naiveté, took it upon themselves to look after me, even making sure I had a piece of cardboard to absorb the cold of the steel.
I watched and occasionally got smacked as the many tree branches occasionally flashed darkly and clocked unsuspecting riders in the head or foot or flank, the rushing air working its way down our collars and up our sleeves. After the initial nervous thrill of departure, the cold and the anxiety settled in. There was also a long moment of lingering, building fear: maybe a half an hour outside Ixtepec, after the train suddenly slowed and came to a halt. There were zero lights or signs of civilization around—the stars were brilliant, but there was no moon—and the surrounding blackness and absolute quiet after the rough clacking of the train made it seem like we had been deposited into outer space. I had heard and read about attacks and ambushes that occur on these trains: the engineers will coordinate with the cartels to extort or kidnap migrants riding on the back of the Beast. No one said a word—if they had, I would have heard it in that absolute silence—or barely even seemed to move for the twenty or thirty minutes that we were stopped there in that unpeopled, sky-startled jungle. And then suddenly the train lurched again—the domino noise of the cars thudding against their couplings coming thud-thud-thud-thud-thud from the front—and, slowly, powerfully, it started crawling forward.
On top of the train that night, one of the long-term shelter volunteers who was also riding told me that the vivacious, quick-smiling, often-dancing fourteen-year-old Salvadoran refugee, Lupita, who had been staying at the shelter and had charmed the entire place as she waited the months-long wait for a Mexican humanitarian visa, was eligible for that visa because, slightly further south on her journey, in Chiapas, she had been gang raped.
Mexico is not a safe country for migrants. And the dangers of the journey in Mexico are not happenstance. Just as the United States instituted a policy of Prevention Through Deterrence in the southwestern US borderlands, pushing migrants to the outermost desert and the most dangerous crossing corridors, so has it outsourced the immigration enforcement gauntlet structure by the funding and training of the notoriously abusive and deadly immigration and police forces in Mexico that regularly violate human rights. With increasing insolence and repudiation of international protocol, the US government is purposefully making it harder for all migrants, asylum seekers included, to make any petition—for human rights, asylum protection, or residence—to the US government, a deliberate deterrence strategy that flies in the face of the 1951 Convention.
Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen and Nikolas F. Tan, writing in the Journal on Migration and Human Security about the deterrence paradigm, describe how “restrictive migration control policies are today the primary, some might say only, response of the developed world to rising numbers of asylum seekers and refugees.” Gammeltoft-Hansen and Tan explain how in the past thirty years the world has seen a dramatic increase in the introduction of measures to stymie, deter, and deny asylum seekers, by laying out three deterrence strategies: one, the “procedural door,” which includes the introduction of time limits for making an asylum claim, as well as safe third country agreements; two, the physical blocking of potential asylum seekers by building or expanding walls and fences and even interdicting arriving asylum seekers en route; and three, the cooperation with transit or origin states, as demonstrated by the European Union working with Libya to stop migrants, Australia working with Indonesia, and the United States with Mexico.
So: a Central American asylum seeker cannot take a boat or a plane because of carrier sanctions; travel by bus in Mexico is increasingly restricted by checkpoints (during a four-hour bus ride from the Guatemala-Mexico border to the airport in Villahermosa, I hit five checkpoints); and prescreening programs such as the Protection Transfer Agreement are pathetically ineffectual. All of which means, if asylum seekers from Central America are going to make a claim, they have no real option but to pass through Mexico “illegally,” forcing them into dangerous and deadly terrain and an increasing reliance on smugglers who often work in concert with paramilitary criminal organizations. Itamar Mann, in his book Humanity at Sea, calls deterrence “a polite term for the idea that some migrants must suffer to prevent other migrants from seeking remedies.”
Deterrence, too, was the idea behind the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” and family separation policies: make migrants suffer so much, the logic goes, that other migrants will hear about it and not want to come. I asked a number of migrant aid workers in Central America if they thought that the family separations were having a chilling effect on adults who were thinking of traveling with their children. Most recognized that the conditions on the migrant trails have long been dangerous, and parents don’t even consider subjecting their children to such conditions without recognizing that the alternative could be even worse. Family separations do nothing to mitigate the push factors. All they do is amplify the human misery. Some of the migrants I spoke with hadn’t even heard about the separations. Those who had—like the parents who took advantage of the Kindertransports in the 1930s—were trying to save their children’s lives.
Draconian deterrence policies push asylum seekers onto the horns of a horrible dilemma, but it is the immediate fear of death that typically overrides the fear of flight. If you are on a burning boat, you’re probably going to jump into the water even if you don’t want to get wet, even if the water is cold, and even if there are sharks swimming beneath. If you make it into the water, at least you have a chance.
In 2018, the Canadian Council for Refugees, along with other groups, challenged in Canadian federal court the designation that the United States could reasonably be party to the safe third country agreement. Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada, succinctly captured the concern: “Canadians have watched with mounting anguish as the cruel assault on the rights of refugees and migrants, including babies and children, has deepened rapidly in the United States.” At face value, it seems clear that the United States, like Mexico, is not a safe country for asylum seekers.
Despite multiple layers, a skullcap, and a patch of cardboard, despite the fact that it was summer in southern Mexico, I was still cold on top of the Beast. Arnovis took the train in central Mexico, at a much higher elevation, in November, and with nothing but a T-shirt and thin button-down collared shirt, and he had Valeria in his arms. He was also running for his life, not engaged in a privileged gallivant borne out of journalistic solidarity, or whatever it was I had been doing. To keep warm, Arnovis turned a black plastic bag into a vest, but the metal of the train, he told me, was still so cold it burned. They rode, and they waited, they froze, and they starved. Finally, after the last leg to Monterrey, Arnovis and Valeria and her mother took a bus to Piedras Negras, where they met El Suri. Since Valeria’s mother had already paid in full, El Suri took the woman and Valeria right to the border to cross. Arnovis was still waiting for the last payment from his brother. He called—the money, his brother assured him, would come in a few days.
During that wait at the safe house, Arnovis got another call, this one from Florida. It was Valeria’s father, calling to tell him that his wife and daughter had safely arrived. Arnovis told me that he felt a special pride when he heard that news. He had helped bring Valeria to safety. Now, if only he could get there himself. A few days later he got the call from his brother: the money was sent. He went and told El Suri. About an hour later, they realized that there was a problem. El Suri hadn’t received anything. Arnovis’s brother’s friend had wired the money to the wrong coyote.