The bad news reached the Tuilelén village, in the rugged mountains of San Marcos, Guatemala, before noon.
"Don Ricardo: our children are dead, burned, without a trace and with nothing."
It was a call from father to father, but also from coyote to client: from some point on the border between Mexico and the United States, the guide to whom Ricardo García Pérez had entrusted his first daughter, confessed that of that young woman of 20 Years that he always made jokes and had traveled through Central America selling Chinese products to help his family, only ashes remained.
The pollero's own son, who was in the same group, was also among the deceased.
It was Saturday, January 23rd.
The news began to talk about the discovery of 19 burned bodies on a rural road on the border between Tamaulipas and Nuevo León, a territory in northeastern Mexico that in the last decade has become a cemetery for migrants.
That there were Guatemalans among the victims was then just a rumor.
But for parents like Ricardo García Pérez, who less than two weeks ago had accompanied their children from their remote communities to the coyote's house in the municipality of Comitancillo, the lack of signals from the group for days and that call were enough.
They were sure that the people who were in those charred white trucks, whose photos were already circulating on social networks, were them.
And that with the massacre the bet for which they had invested what little they had and for which some had even pawned their land also vanished.
“My daughter was not murdered as a thief or a criminal, or as a drug dealer.
My daughter was murdered as a fighter, ”Don Ricardo now says on one of the slopes of the Tuilelén village cemetery, while he is building the tomb of Santa Cristina García with the help of several family members.
Despite the shock of having lost the second of his eleven children less than a month ago, the man - small body, shiny black hair, skin burned by work in the fields - has not lost his smile or calm.
“I have to follow her example.
She was kind, loving, smiling, "he explains.
When the Mexican authorities return her remains to this municipality in western Guatemala, the young woman will rest in one of the colorful pantheons, among the graves of two other migrants who also lost their lives in the Tamaulipas massacre: her neighbor Iván Gudiel, 22 years old, and Roliberto Miranda, a 24-year-old computer science teacher who had two children and a third on the way.
Ricardo Pérez, the father of Santa Cristina, rests in the cemetery of the Tuilelén village, where he prepares the grave in which he will bury his daughter when the body is repatriated from Mexico.
The support of the community is being essential to help families cope with the tragedy.
A group of residents of Comitancillo pray in front of the altar in honor of Santa Cristina, who died at the age of 20.
Up to his home in the Peñaflor hamlet, relatives and friends arrive every day to accompany his mother, Doña Olga (on the left of the image).
Santa Cristina Pérez was the second of eleven siblings.
Among his dreams was to be able to operate on his sister Angela, who was one year and four months old, and who was born with a cleft lip.
The homes of most of the migrants who were victims of the Comitancillo massacre are made of adobe, have dirt floors and consist of two buildings: a room where families sleep, usually very large, and a kitchen.
The news of the murder of the migrants has generated a wave of solidarity.
Thanks to the donations received, Santa Cristina's parents have been able to forgive the debt they contracted to pay the coyote.
In addition, a doctor has offered to operate for free on his little sister.
The news of the murder of the migrants has generated a wave of solidarity.
Thanks to the donations received, Santa Cristina's parents have been able to forgive the debt they contracted to pay the coyote.
In addition, a doctor has offered to operate for free on his little sister.
To pay for their daughter's trip to Florida, where a family friend was waiting for her, Don Ricardo and his wife Olga Pérez had asked for a loan that they guaranteed with the deeds of their house, a house with adobe walls, a tin roof and dirt soil on top of a hill.
They also gave the title to the four ropes of land that surrounds it - the equivalent of two soccer fields - where they grow the corn that the family feeds on.
With the 25,000 quetzals they raised (about $ 3,200, 2,650 euros), the couple was able to pay an advance to the coyote and buy Santa Cristina clothes, shoes and a new cell phone for the road.
The money they gave the guide was not even a quarter of the 110,000 quetzals he was asking for for the journey (more than $ 14,000).
But they believed that once their daughter arrived in the United States, she could pay her debts, just as migrants who have left their community for the north have done for decades.
On January 12, when she said goodbye to her mother and her ten siblings, the young woman was calm.
Smiled.
For months, persevering as he was, he had insisted on his parents to support him financially with this trip.
Before leaving the four-bed room where the whole family sleeps, Santa Cristina said she didn't want tears and promised that as soon as she got to the United States, things would change for everyone.
His plan was to work during the day to pay off the debt, and at night to operate on the cleft lip of the youngest of his sisters — Angela, aged one year and four months.
and to intervene on his father, who suffers from eye problems.
Also, he wanted his family to have access to a better home.
Her father accompanied her to the center of Comitancillo, where the trip was to begin.
“I am not going to die.
I'm going to work, ”he reassured him when they said goodbye.
"His last words were: 'If the Saint comes to the United States, your life will change,'" remembers Don Ricardo.
At the coyote's house, Santa Cristina met with the rest of the group that headed to Mexico the next day.
Among them were his cousin Marco Antulio, a 16-year-old adolescent who was the oldest of nine siblings, and his neighbor Iván Gudiel, 22, recently married and with an eight-month-old son, who dreamed of being able to send money to his mother for diabetes to be treated.
Also in the group was Marvin Tomás, known as El Zurdo, a promising left back of the local team Juventud Comiteca, from the Guatemalan third division.
At 22 he studied at the university on weekends and was the economic pillar of his family.
He also wanted to build a better home for them and ensure that his mother, who had become a widow shortly before he was born, could have surgery for the hernia that she has suffered for more than ten years.
But with the wages of 50 quetzals a day (less than $ 6.5) for working in the fields or with what he earned in temporary jobs as a bricklayer, he could only live a day.
Like them, the majority of those who joined the trip were under 25 years old - some were even minors -, came from large families and fled from the lack of opportunities in Comitancillo, a municipality (of about 60,000 inhabitants and to which Tuilelén belongs) where almost 90% of the population lives in poverty and more than 26% in extreme poverty.
About 20% of its inhabitants have emigrated to the United States, a country that has become a kind of emergency exit for millions of Central Americans since the 1980s due to the violence and political and economic instability in the region.
Currently, it is estimated that there are more than 3.5 million citizens of that origin in the United States.
Interview with the relatives of the murdered migrants Marvin Tomás and Santa Cristina García.PHOTO: HECTOR GUERRERO |
VIDEO: EPV
The origin of the migrants who were murdered in Tamaulipas was not different from that of thousands of Guatemalans who undertake the same journey every year.
If they had not been the victims of a massacre, their deaths would have gone unnoticed in the eyes of the world, as their lives often do.
Many of the remote villages and hamlets from which the migrants, whose names escape even the omnipresent eye of Google, are accessible only by ATVs or by walking for hours on dusty and steep mountain trails.
There, most families survive on the little they produce - mainly potatoes, corn and beans -, raising chickens and turkeys, herding cows and sheep, or what they earn working in the fields or in construction.
The signs of existence of the Guatemalan State are few, contrary to what happens with remittances.
Among the traditional adobe houses, one can distinguish the
block
and concrete
houses
built with the money sent by the migrants.
“People in the United States have built houses, they have bought a car.
They are not rich people, but they can now raise the family, ”says Olga Pérez sitting in the same room in which she said goodbye to Santa Cristina, where now there is an altar with photos, flowers and candles.
Her youngest children, who have not been to school since the pandemic began, play around her.
For her daughter and the group of migrants who left Comitancillo, leaving was the only possible bet for a better future;
a bet that was truncated about 60 kilometers from the United States.
From the time they left their municipality until they were assassinated in northern Mexico, ten days passed in which they communicated several times with their families in Guatemala and with those who were to receive them from the other side of the border.
The day after leaving, some called from Tuxtla Gutiérrez, in Chiapas.
Days later, they spoke to them from Puebla.
Then, Santa Cristina told her mother and a relative in Lynn, Massachusetts, that they had been robbed and that their mobile phones and most of the money were taken from them.
But she was happy because on the trip she had made friends with the other girls in the group, with whom she could have a separate room from the men wherever they stopped.
“In the last call he made me he said: 'I am living pura vida.
The coyote who brought us is keeping us well. '
Then he showed me with the camera a TV that he had, a private bathroom, the shower and the food, and he said: 'Today I am happy, ”recalls Óscar, 21, Santa Cristina's older brother.
After that conversation, some migrants communicated once more with their families from San Luis Potosí.
Then they told them that they were close to crossing the border and that they would call them as soon as they could.
They never communicated again.
Tamaulipas, migrant cemetery
The border between Nuevo León and Tamaulipas is a mosaic of family farms, sorghum fields, oil wells, and mesquite trees.
And among them, the ants: hundreds of trucks and trailers that cover the Monterrey-Reynosa-Nuevo Laredo route and that disguise one of the most lucrative activities on the border, the passage of migrants.
The trail of the group in which Santa Cristina was going was lost in San Luis Potosí, 600 kilometers south of Monterrey.
Their bodies were found on an isolated road in the Santa Anita ejido, in Camargo, 200 kilometers northeast of Monterrey, already in Tamaulipas territory.
They were found shot and charred, abandoned in the middle of nowhere, three days after a woman reported the disappearance of her husband.
For more than a decade, Tamaulipas has been one of the most dangerous steps for migrants.
In 2010, a criminal group murdered 72 Central and South Americans in San Fernando, along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
The following year, authorities found almost 200 bodies in clandestine graves in the municipality.
Most were from migrants.
In 2012 they left the dismembered bodies of 49 people, among them migrants, in Cadereyta, near Monterrey, at the exit of the road to Reynosa.
The government then denounced that Los Zetas were behind the massacres.
In the case of the 72 migrants from San Fernando, a detainee, an alleged member of Los Zetas, declared that they had been killed to avoid being recruited by the Gulf Cartel, their rivals on the border.
He said they had been given the option to join his group and that most refused.
And that was why they had been murdered.
The reasons were never clear, neither in the San Fernando case nor in the Cadereyta case.
But there was always the suspicion that the criminals had counted on the direct or indirect complicity of the local authorities.
A decade later, suspicion has turned into certainty in Camargo's case.
In early February, 11 days after the bodies were found, the Tamaulipas Prosecutor's Office reported that at least 12 police officers from an elite group were involved in the massacre.
The prosecutor avoided giving details about the role of the agents in the massacre.
But he said they were charged with murder, abuse of authority and falsehood in their reports.
He also suggested that the police themselves had tampered with the crime scene.
The absence of shell casings in the area caught the attention of investigators from the start.
Who would bother to pick up the shells after such a bloodbath?
Two vans were found next to the bodies, one of them a Toyota Sequoia that has become another controversial point in the case.
In December, the National Institute of Migration (INM) had intercepted that same vehicle during the rescue of dozens of migrants in a house in the Monterrey metropolitan area.
The fact that the trafficking networks were able to recover a truck captured in an operation raised suspicions about corruption at the institute and, simultaneously, about its level of impunity.
The detail of the truck and the progress in the identification of the corpses revealed that the Comitancillo group traveled in that last section with at least two
local
guides
.
One was the owner of the Toyota.
This information, along with that released by the prosecution, has fueled the hypothesis that the police officers had mistaken the guides and migrants for a criminal group and attacked them with bullets.
Then, discovering their mistake, they would have collected the caps and set fire to the vehicles in which they were traveling.
Although the authorities in Mexico have not reported on the route that the group of migrants could take, the truck and the location of the bodies indicate that at some point they passed through Monterrey.
Tamaulipas Government sources told EL PAÍS that the most logical thing is that from that city they have taken "towards General Bravo and Doctor Coss and then they already grabbed the gaps."
"The gaps" is a precise concept and also a metaphor in this area: lonely roads, often dirt roads, which are part of an invisible circuit.
Silent routes that locals avoid.
On a Tuesday in early February, at the only food stand in the Plaza de Doctor Coss - a town of 500 houses where the Secretary of Security was shot to death in November - the taco vendor explains that many people are leaving there. to live in Texas "because of insecurity."
Passing through the square, a municipality worker puts date the phenomenon of violence, "Here since 2009 is all dangerous war with
them
."
He also says that he did not see the Camargo migrants, but if he had seen them he would not say so.
And yes, they probably passed by.
"They", like breaches, is a concept that is as precise as it is ambiguous: it is organized crime, drug trafficking, the Northeast Cartel - a split from Los Zetas - the Gulf Cartel.
Mafia.
Criminal groups that use these roads to traffic weapons, drugs, people, "or everything that one can imagine," details the official of the Government of Tamaulipas.
The neighbors of Doctor Coss explain that one of the most used routes from there to Camargo is the one that passes through Ejido La Canela, the only paved one up to the border with the United States in addition to the federal highway and the highway.
The further one advances along that route, the graffiti for and against the Northeast Cartel and the Gulf Cartel will take over the traffic signs, the billboards, the walls of houses and even the asphalt with greater determination.
Near La Canela, an abandoned security checkpoint, a rusted vehicle and white zetas painted on the ground greet drivers.
In this same area, the Army reported a few days later, five gunmen were killed in a confrontation.
The military said that, during a helicopter tour, they spotted some tarps in the middle of the field: a narcocamp.
The gunmen, according to this version, attacked the aircraft with a 50 caliber rifle, but they responded and killed five.
In the shelters in Monterrey and Reynosa, the Camargo massacre has impacted migrants, although not to the point of thinking of returning.
At Casa Indi, near the center of Monterrey, the person in charge of receiving those who arrive, Marcos Antonio Castro Zelaya, 43, unsuccessfully searches for the names of the migrants from Comitancillo in his registry book.
But they don't appear there.
Zelaya, as they call him in the shelter, is Guatemalan and has tried to understand what will happen to his compatriots.
He talks about his own passage through Camargo years ago and details the complex range of agreements and payments between the coyotes and the local mafias, which here they call keys, to overcome problems on the route.
And then he tells the adventures of a group of Hondurans to illustrate the dangers of the border.
“One day a boy appeared here and began to tell them that he could cross them through Ciudad Acuña [in Coahuila] for 500 pesos each, about $ 27.
I told them: 'Be careful, because sometimes they take you to the evildoers so they can extort you ”.
The migrants agreed, but the coyote did not take them to Acuña, but to Nuevo Laredo.
One of the group noticed and they escaped into the bush.
"The life of the migrant is very ugly," concludes Zelaya.
In Reynosa, the massacre scares hundreds of migrants who are waiting for the Trump-era border knot to loosen, but not so much as to retrace a thousand-kilometer path.
At the Senda de Vida shelter, Miriam Morales, 29, says she has lived there for two months with her seven-year-old daughter.
He says that he left with his guide from Chiquimula, in Guatemala, but later in Mexico he changed coyote four times.
He passed through San Cristóbal, in Chiapas, Puebla and San Luis Potosí.
At that point on the road, she says, they put her in a trailer "with a hundred other people" and took her to Ciudad Miguel Alemán, west of Camargo, on the border.
They were in a hotel for three days and when they finally got out and crossed the Rio Grande, it didn't take the Border Patrol two minutes to grab them.
"They're waiting for us".
Morales knows about the Camargo migrants on Facebook.
"It's a shame to see it," he says, "I didn't know they did that to people."
In any case, the fear is not enough to shake one of the few certainties he has: he will not return to Guatemala.
Your bet, like the rest, is all or nothing.
The two lives taken from Édgar López
Prayer of the migrant: “To leave is to die a little.
Arriving is never final ”.
On the day of the Tamaulipas massacre, Édgar López y López had his birthday.
He turned 50 that January 22. Unlike the rest of the migrants, he was not looking for the American dream;
He was returning to the United States to regain his life, which was taken from him on August 8, 2019 when he was detained in the largest raid in a decade in that country, which ended with nearly 700 arrests.
That day, immigration police officers (ICE) broke into several chicken processing plants in Mississippi.
Édgar worked in one of them.
He was arrested and charged with using a false identity.
After spending almost a year in detention centers, in July 2020 he was deported to Guatemala, a country he had not been in for more than 22 years.
In Mississippi he not only left his job, but his wife;
her three children, ages 23, 22 and 11;
a grandson whom he loved with devotion — 4-year-old Miguel, who called Edgar dad — and another six-month-old whom he will never meet.
He also left his parish, Santa Ana, where he participated assiduously as a community leader.
“He called every day.
He wanted to come because here is the family, here are the grandchildren, ”says his widow, Sonia Cardona, by phone from Carthage.
Half of Édgar López's life remains in that southern American city.
The other, the one told in the Mam language, is in the Chicajalaj village of Comitancillo.
The house where he lived for the six months from when he was deported until he tried to get back to the United States wears a black tie.
His four sisters now take turns accompanying their father, Don Marcelino, a 94-year-old hunched over who can no longer hear and who wanders around the courtyard of the house with lost eyes.
“He was desperate to go back, but he didn't tell us he was leaving,” says his brother-in-law Margarito Orozco.
Before migrating for the first time, in the late 1990s, they both worked as merchants in Guatemala City.
According to his widow, López had already been deported from the United States once, in 1997, but he returned and that made it difficult for his lawyers to get him out of the detention center after the 2019 raid, despite the fact that he had a settled and exemplary life in that country .
In Chicajalaj they don't know much about his life in Mississippi.
They say he called from time to time and sent money for medicine when his dad was sick.
One day they found out that he had been arrested in a raid and a year later they received him back in Comitancillo, where he dedicated himself to working the family's corn and bean crops.
On days off, when he met with his sisters and nephews, he would tell them that he missed America.
“He said that he was very happy there, with his family, and that he was very sad for his grandchildren, for his children.
He showed me the photos of them on his cell phone ”, affirms his political niece Berta Lisa López.
That was the reason why Edgar couldn't take it anymore and turned to the local coyote to return.
The immigration policies of the Donald Trump administration had robbed migrants like him of all hope, even though they had led faultless lives and were front-line workers.
Since he assumed the presidency of the United States, Joe Biden has proposed an immigration reform that establishes that essential workers, such as those at the chicken processing plant that employed Édgar, be legalized as a priority.
But the promise was too late for him.
Two days after Biden's inauguration, Edgar met his death in Tamaulipas.
From that day on, and until her body was identified, Sonia Cardona received calls from extortionists from Mexico who tried to take advantage of the tragedy and asked her for money in exchange for turning her over to her husband.
Marvin Tomás, 22, migrated to the United States to be able to operate on his mother, Ángela López, for a hernia that she has suffered for more than a decade.
The woman was widowed shortly before he was born.
The young man was known in Comitancillo for being the left back of the local soccer team and was the economic pillar of his family.
Now her mother and the three sisters she lived with are surviving thanks to the help they are receiving.
Marvin's mother waits with the relatives of other victims of the tragedy for the delivery of donations sent in the central park of Comitancillo.
Marina Feliciano, the sister of Huber Feliciano, who was also included in the list of victims, is waiting for help.
The 16-year-old, the only deceased who has not yet been identified with DNA, was an orphan and worked as a laborer to help his family.
In the support networks for families affected by the tragedy, Guatemalan migrants in the United States are playing a fundamental role.
It is estimated that 20% of the population of Comitancillo, in the department of San Marcos, has migrated to that country.
Remittances are essential for the local economy.
Marvin Tomás' family has erected an altar in his honor in the corner of the room where the footballer slept on a mattress on the dirt floor.
His cousin and teammate Raúl Florencio remembers him as a young man who “despite having almost nothing, walked through life as if he had everything”.
Marvin Tomás' family has erected an altar in his honor in the corner of the room where the footballer slept on a mattress on the dirt floor.
His cousin and teammate Raúl Florencio remembers him as a young man who “despite having almost nothing, walked through life as if he had everything”.
One day after receiving the call from the coyote, in Guatemala, the relatives of the migrants who had left Comitancillo traveled to the capital to take DNA tests that would facilitate the identification of the charred remains.
They never had any doubts that their loved ones were among the dead, but the road to official confirmation and the repatriation of the bodies has been long and painful, and it is not over yet.
To pass that wait, in their houses they erected altars and put ties to remember the dead: black where the adults lived;
targets for minors.
Over the days, the identity of 14 victims from Guatemala has been officially confirmed (it is estimated that there are 15, and the rest possibly Mexican) and Mexico announced the arrest of policemen involved in the Tamaulipas massacre.
For their relatives that does not change anything.
The only consolation they have now is to receive the remains to close the duel.
"I only ask God that my daughter can come here to her land to be buried," laments Olga, the mother of Santa Cristina.
“Bring the remains to me because it hurts.
She is still suffering, ”he says.
Watching over the remains of her son is also the only thing that Ángela López, the mother of Marvin Tomás, the Juventud Comiteca player, is waiting for.
“We are just waiting for the body to be brought to me.
The cemetery is close, ”says the woman, sitting next to the altar that has been raised in the exact place where her son slept, on a mat on the dirt floor.
When his remains are repatriated, El Zurdo will be buried next to the Las Flores village, where he lived with his mother and three of his five sisters, and a few meters from the municipal stadium, where he dreamed of succeeding as a soccer player.
Credits
Drafting: Lorena Arroyo |
Pablo Ferri
Text Editing: Eliezer Budasoff
Video and images: Mónica González |
Hector Guerrero
Video Editing: Adriana Kong
Visual editing: Héctor Guerrero
Design - Web development: Ruth Benito and Alfredo García
Frontend: Alejandro Gallardo