Three Cameroonians have died in Mexico. They drowned 11,000 kilometers from home and less than 2,000 from their destination: the United States. Shortly after they died, they began to reveal truths with global dimensions. And they have not stopped since. I came across their deaths almost by accident.
I had just arrived in the city of Tapachula, in southeastern Mexico, when I learned that a boat had capsized off the coast that spans the border between the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca. At 7:30 a.m. on October 11, a fisherman spotted some clothing scattered across an area of deserted coastal dunes near the town of Puerto Arista, Chiapas, and alerted local rescuers. When they arrived, the rescuers noticed a trail of footprints leading some 400 meters inland. This was where they found the first body, which had been hastily covered with handfuls of grass uprooted from the hills of sand.
The Mexican Navy and the State Attorney General’s Office of Chiapas arrived shortly thereafter. They found a transit document from Costa Rica, which the authorities used to identify the dead man: Emmanuel Cheo Ngu, 39 years old, from Bamenda, Cameroon.
Out of the shrubs that crown the sand dunes emerged eight castaways, ravaged by the trauma of the catastrophe, by thirst and mosquito bites, who gave themselves over to Mexican officials. Seven men and one woman. All from Cameroon. They were taken to a nearby hospital. “The woman was pregnant,” one of the local rescuers, a man named Francisco Álvarez, would tell me two days later. “All of them had been badly beaten.” Their coyotes had abandoned them.
In the afternoon, the fishermen found another body: Atabong Michael Atembe, 32 years old, also from Cameroon. The sea had deposited his corpse in almost the same place as the others: a small sandbank scattered with mirror pools of water left behind by high tide, so shimmering as to be mistaken for mirages; and dunes, which at high noon, cast against the blue sky, produce a landscape from the dreamworlds of Dalí.
I arrived after a half hour drive along a deserted beach, aboard an ATV driven by a local teenager who offered to serve as my guide.
We found clothes still lying on the sand, the only evidence of the shipwreck. I wrote in my notebook: a pair of women’s pants; two dresses; a brown sock; a bar of soap; a sweater; another pair of women’s pants; a plastic sandal; a small pair of children’s pants next to a black T-shirt of similar size; a red, adult-size T-shirt, a pack of Kotex pads; a plastic bag full of white grain, like coarse salt, with medical instructions in French; a bottle of liquid soap; three panties: one red, one pink, one blue; a package of cotton balls; a pink sock; two bras: one black, one blue; a pair of turquoise-blue pants; two pairs of toddler-size jeans; a pink T-shirt next to a pair of pants and a towel of the same color; a purple bra; a pair of ochre-colored jeans; a green sweater; a blanket with red and yellow heart prints; a green plastic bottle; a girl’s gray T-shirt and a pair of torn-up jeans, turned inside out; a black T-shirt with a white Eiffel Tower print; a children’s thermal sweater. Mexican authorities said all the survivors were adults. But this is what I found.
The Pacific Ocean spit another body out on a beach called Cachimbo, in the state of Oaxaca. Some fishermen found it the next day. Also a man. Also from Cameroon.
What were these Africans doing here, so far from home? From what port had they set to sea?
When I arrived in Puerto Arista, I had already spent a month looking for a new maritime migration route, under the assumption that, if the Mexican government, acquiescing to pressures from President Trump, had reinforced its southern border with thousands of National Guard troops, migration along the coast must have increased. The shipwreck of the Cameroonians appeared to confirm my suspicions: human smuggling was happening at sea. But that was at the tail end of a journey I had started four weeks earlier, in search of migrant boats off the coast of Guatemala. And what there, on the southern side of the border, was something else entirely.
I. Clouds in His Eyes
First, I went to Ocós, an obscure and neglected corner of Guatemala on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, near the mouth of the Suchiate River, which for years has been a den of drug traffickers and coyotes.
Not much is known about the place, and hardly anyone seems to care about it. Not the journalists I spoke to in Guatemala City, not the politicians, not the prosecutors —no one I asked could give me any up-to-date information about what happens there. That place? —all anyone would tell me in the weeks before I went— you don’t go there. Access is tightly controlled; not even the police can enter. Why would you want to go there? Eso es territorio de bananeras y de narcos — nothing but banana plantations and drug traffickers. Allí no se va. You don’t go there.
But if you do go, I discovered, you find yourself transported not only in space but also in time. You travel back some 70 years to the era of the all-powerful United Fruit Company. Driving the dusty, 20-kilometer dirt road into Ocós is like entering a novel by Miguel Ángel Asturias: the banana plantations, the business tycoons, the peons, the misery, the hoarding of land and resources. Only two things seem to have changed: the land no longer belongs to the all-powerful United Fruit Company, but to all-powerful Guatemalan landowners; and now, their neighbors are drug traffickers. Ocós is an Asturias novel, but with narcos.
I went there in the company of a campesino who joined me from Guatemala City. He is originally from La Blanca, a collection of rancherías and hamlets nestled among the banana plantations, which until five years ago was part of Ocós. Now it’s an independent municipality. The small town that surrounds the new municipal hall, which serves as the main meeting place for the community, is one of those places where you can count the streets on both hands, and where the bookstore doesn’t sell books, only pencils, notebooks, rulers, compasses and monographs of national heroes. The town welcomes visitors with a sign that reads, “Welcome to La Blanca, the capital of green gold.” Green gold refers to bananas: the product that drives the economy of the region, where the fruit is rarely left to ripen to its familiar yellow.
We make our way through the banana orchards and emerge in the village of Chiquirines, home to a handful of campesino families who live among the plantations, surrounded by them, so close that the pesticides sprayed from the planes fall on their roofs, on their yards, on their animals, and on their skin.
Narciso Dueñas lives in one of these homes. He is a skinny but solid man, whom the local villagers call Don Chicho — a dark man with lustrous, smooth skin, who has lived his whole life, all 55 years, in Chiquirines. He sits in a plastic chair on a dirt floor, between the brick walls that delimit the entrance to his home, which is located a mere 15 kilometers from Mexico but a century’s worth of history behind Latin America’s capital cities. Next to Don Chicho and his plastic chair sit two sacks overflowing with olotes — dried corn cobs. These are the family’s leftovers, which serve as food for their pigs or are sold to anyone who needs to fatten their livestock. Chicho’s wife Irma sits to his right, on a tree stump, because the two plastic chairs they to their name don’t suffice when there are guests. They have a little bit of water now, she says, because it’s the rainy season. But the well will dry up during the long summer, which is due to start next month.
Don Chicho Dueñas says he has recovered his sight, but it’s hard to believe him. He searches for my eyes as he speaks, but doesn’t always find them. He ventures some explanations: “The arm on my glasses broke so I can’t wear them... My sight is recovering, little by little... I can’t read, but I can see everything else...”
The retina of Chicho’s right eye detached one blistering hot day in 2016, as he was walking through a banana orchard carrying a tank on his back and spraying pesticides in the hundred-degree heat. A week later, the other retina detached.
“I was really good at spraying herbicide,” he says, looking straight through me. “We’d spray 10, 15 tanks a day. ‘You have to keep going,’ they’d tell me. ‘You have to keep going. You have to keep going.’ I took pills for the fevers and pain because I couldn’t stop working. In the packhouse, I had to work with chlorine. And then my retina detached. They sent me to cut fruit until it detached and I couldn’t see anymore. I told the boss I couldn’t see anymore and he looked at the cloud in my eye and sent me to a doctor he knew in town. But the doctor charged me. The company never paid me my social security even though they took it out of my wages every month. The doctor told me I’d lost my eye from working too much with the chemicals. We had to sell the animals and take out what little savings we had so they could operate on me. Now I can see,” he says. But it’s hard to believe him.
The family sells the animals that Irma raises, and the olotes, and the hammocks that Chicho weaves as fast as his blindness allows him. When he lost both eyes, he had to stop working. His son dropped out of nursing school to sell his back to the banana plantations. He’s young, and strong enough to carry banana stalks, to spray herbicide, to build irrigation dams and pack fruit. To keep going. The company his father worked for refused to hire him. Instead, he finds jobs wherever he can: short-term stints working other people’s land. Sometimes he finds two days of work, sometimes three. Sometimes nothing. He wants to leave Guatemala. To go north. Here, he says, there’s no alternative to misery. “Here,” Irma says, “people earn less than they eat.” And people here don’t eat very much.
Chicho says that now, he can’t even maintain his own subsistence plots because the banana companies have diverted all the rivers, dried up the pampas, and put up dams and dikes so that in the summer, the bananeras steal all the water and in the winter, they flood everything and turn the fields to swamps. It’s not just Chicho who says this. There are hundreds of lawsuits and testimonies from all over rural Guatemala, from the Pacific to the Caribbean, from the coasts to the jungles, that say the same thing.
Chicho takes me around to his backyard, where chickens scatter into the brush and mud. I hear the planes overhead spraying insecticide. At the far end of the yard, where the boundary of his property is marked with sticks, you can see the wall of the dam. It forms a channel more than two meters deep and two meters wide, which runs the length of the entire property on the other side of the road, which belongs to the banana company. The plantation is right here, just two meters from his home. The plantation where Chicho lost his sight. From here, we see dozens of sprinklers spraying water into thickets of fruit trees, their stalks laden with the green gold that, in a perfectly calculated process, will slowly mutate to a perfect yellow as it makes its way north to the produce aisles of grocery stores and supermarkets in New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago... Don Chicho watches the sprinklers flooding the orchard with the water he lacks. River water, diverted to feed the plants. “I dug my grave in those banana fields,” he says.
As recently as three years ago, Guatemala’s Ministry of the Environment warned that more than 50 rivers in the country’s southern coastal region alone had been diverted by agro-industrial companies for the cultivation of sugarcane, African palm and bananas. In the Ocós area, like in the rest of Guatemala, the two largest industrial agriculture conglomerates are Grupo Hame, owned by the Molina family, and Banasa, owned by the Bolaños family. Both groups do business with the big U.S. fruit distribution companies: Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte. Both receive generous tax exemptions. And both profit not only from banana exports, but also from the cultivation of African palm, sugar cane, rubber and coffee.
In this corner of Guatemala’s southern coast, banana fields grow adjacent to large palm groves. Grupo Hame also sells palm- and cooking oil, and is the second largest exporter of palm oil in Latin America. This, despite the fact that major multinational corporations like Nestlé and Cargill have suspended their multi-million-dollar contracts with the group. Cargill’s corporate website specifically states that its contract was suspended due to allegations of “human rights violations” and “environmental degradation.”
“HAME” are the initials of the conglomerate’s founder, Hugo Alberto Molina Espinoza, who started the business as a single refinery that operated in partnership with the all-powerful United Fruit Company. He died in April 2019. Over the years, his company has not only received complaints for river diversion, but also for ecocide, tax fraud and non-compliance with labor laws. Here, in La Blanca and Ocós, 11 communities have denounced Hame and Banasa for diverting the Pacayá and Mopá rivers. A Guatemalan judge resolved an injunction in favor of the campesinos, but the rivers have yet to return to their original channels.
Felipe Molina, Grupo Hame’s CEO, agreed to take my call. We talked for less than five minutes before he said he was in a hurry and left me to speak with his managers. But I was able to ask him about the accusations against his company. “Activists resort to making hasty accusations without having any first-hand experience and without asking for explanations,” he said. “Denunciation is not synonymous with conviction. People make a lot of noise about denunciations. But what is substantiated and what isn’t?” When I mentioned the rulings issued by the Ministry of Environment and other institutions involved in regulating labor rights and taxes, he told me he was in a hurry and referred me to his managers. Before he left I asked him about the arrest, a year and half ago, of one of his brothers, who had been accused of tax fraud by the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). “Yes, there are accusations against members of my family, but that’s all they are: accusations,” he said. The case is still open, with his brother attending trial as a free man, but the CICIG, which has been besieged by both the Guatemalan government as well as big businessmen like Molina, was forced to cease operations in August 2019.
In La Blanca, I also met with Porfirio Escobar, a tough, 64-year-old campesino with two big calluses for hands a penchant for refusing to smile. He lives right on the banks of the Pacayá, one of the rivers diverted by the banana plantations. Right now, during the rainy season, the Pacayá looks more like a small stream than a river. Escobar gives me the lay of the land: here, the river was once teaming with fish, because the channel was fed by the pampas, and in the winter the fish would migrate from the pampas to the river. In the nineties, the banana and palm companies arrived. They gradually depleted the land. “By May 2005 everything was gone, ruined by all the changes the plantations had made to the environment,” Porfirio says. “The dams, the diversions in the river… That day, the water breached the banks and flooded everything. It destroyed all of our crops. Then in October, Hurricane Stan came and swept away what little was left.”
In the yard outside his house, Porfirio’s wife heats water over a wood fire. Today they will eat fish soup. Nearby, on a wooden plank, a dozen scrawny mojarras are waiting in a bucket, blanketed in a cloud of flies. A few of the fish still open their mouths, their heads barely visible through the swarm of insects. The woman shoos the cloud away and picks up a mojarra, still alive, and slices open its belly with a razor blade to scoop out its guts. “It’s the most we could get from the river today,” Porfirio says. “They took away the fish we depend on. They took away the land we depend on. Now we only harvest one round of crops a year.”
Behind him, a chicken collapses. It’s dead. When Porfirio notices, he grabs it by the neck and yells over to his other family members, asking if someone fed the animal something bad. No one answers. At the far end of the house, Porfirio’s son is watching an episode of Law and Order on an old TV set.
I ask Porfirio if any migrants still pass through the area. No, he says. He hasn’t heard anything about Central Americans crossing in boats in a long time. He only knows about the local migrants, the ones who leave: “The young people all left. Old men and women left too, because of hunger. Us, we’re stuck in the middle, with plantations on one side and narcos who buy up the plantations at high prices to launder money on the other. All of them steal our land. A while back, they hired a local kid to transport some cargo, if you know what I mean. He took his first trip. Then he took another, and another, a little longer each time. He started to make a lot of money. He built his house. He bought a truck, bought a little car… just like a Tigres del Norte song. When he got too rich, they sent someone to kill him. That’s how it goes. If I start working for them, then my son will follow. He’ll make good money. But then what? No, it’s better to break your back working the land. But the narco isn’t the problem here. The narco is only a problem if you mess with the narco. Here, the real problem is the banana companies.”
We load our car onto a big wooden platform with an outboard motor —an improvised ferry— and cross the Río Naranjo to explore what’s left of the municipality of Ocós. Docking on the other side, we make our way as everyone makes their way here: on roads that cut through banana orchards. It’s the same Asturian landscape. The same dusty streets trafficked by container trucks with Chiquita and Dole logos. The same landing strips for aerial fumigators. The same misery. Every year, Guatemala’s African-palm industry generates some 400 million dollars in export earnings. Bananas bring in even more. Hardly any of it seems to reach the families who live on the side of these dusty roads.
When I stayed on the line with Grupo Hame’s managers, they told me that the Pacayá River had dried up because of climate change. They admitted there had been “failures” in the past, but said that now they conduct environmental impact studies and strive to reduced water consumption. Their practices have improved, they said, since cancelling their contracts with Nestlé and Cargill — a decision they hope to eventually be able to reverse.
I asked them about their definition of “development,” given that in the areas where they produce their wealth, the people live in such poverty. Development? They contribute to the communities they operate in, they said, by hiring ten thousand employees from the region. They also invest in health and education for their employees. The real problem, one of the managers told me, is the absence of the state. And on this point, even the president of Guatemala, Jimmy Morales, agrees.
A few days after my conversation with Grupo Hame’s executives, Morales presented Felipe Molina with an award in memory of the CEO’s father. Speaking at the event, the president announced the opening of consulates in other African-palm producing countries, as well as the construction of roads in Guatemala’s main plantation zones. Then he asked the agro-industrialists for their help: “There’s a lot of talk about how the state doesn’t have a presence, but the state has very limited resources, as you know. If you could help us implement social development projects there, your efforts will be warmly received, the country will thank you for them, and history will remember your contributions.” Listening to his speech, I couldn’t stop thinking about the era of the United Fruit Company, which built the railroads and schools and clinics and customs offices and then demanded that Guatemala reward them for their efforts with legal reforms and tax exemptions in their favor. That was seventy years ago.
II. The Route of Mr. Ngu
Emmanuel Cheo Ngu left his home in Bamenda on July 30, 2019, with his wife Antoinette and their four children. He drove seven hours south to the airport in Douala. There, he said goodbye to his family and boarded a plane to Quito, Ecuador.
Mr. Ngu worked as a teacher at a public secondary school in Cameroon’s anglophone region, where, for the past two years, separatist forces have battled the francophone government of Paul Biya, who has presided over a dictatorial regime since 1982. The conflict has left nearly 2,000 people dead and over half a million displaced.
Antoinette, Emmanuel Ngu’s widow, told me over the phone that her husband had decided to flee because he believed he was going to be killed. His best friend, a colleague named Oliver, had been beheaded last May. Ngu was caught in the crossfire of the conflict. He received death threats from the separatists and the dictator’s forces had beaten him to the point that one of his fingers was permanently disfigured. They left him so badly wounded that, months later, the scars would be used to identify his body.
Ngu’s is not a unique case. In the courtyard of the Siglo XXI migration station in Tapachula, Mexico, near the Guatemalan border, I encountered thousands of Africans fleeing dictatorships and corrupt regimes supported by European governments in exchange for protecting European corporations that profit from extracting resources from that “dark continent”— or fleeing other problems with their origins in colonial governance.
All of the African migrants I met had horrific videos on their phones documenting the conditions that compelled them to leave: a group of men beheading a woman; teenagers being executed by men in uniforms; public lynchings; indiscriminate shootings of civilians — images that confirm what international press correspondents and human rights organizations report.
Europe has closed its doors to African migrants. They drown by the thousands trying to cross the Mediterranean in small boats, or wind up trapped in detention camps or enslaved in Libya.
As a result, thousands now cross half a planet to attempt to reach the United States. This, in broad strokes, was Emmanuel Cheo Ngu’s plan: to make it to the United States and request asylum. Both his mother and his two sisters live there. But journeys are not made in broad strokes. Not the journeys of migrants.
Emmanuel made the long passage with his 19-year-old cousin, Forché Takwi. Their first flight was from Douala to Istanbul, where they stopped only to change planes. Their last stop was in Panama, but they couldn’t get off the plane because they didn’t have visas. Instead, they flew to Ecuador, then travelled all the wat back to Panama by land, on the dangerous roads reserved for those who cannot arrive by air, because they are not Europeans or Americans and they don’t have visas.
They arrived in Quito on August 2 and traveled by bus to the small port city of Turbo, on Colombia’s northern coast. There, they boarded a small motor boat that took them to Capurganá, Colombia’s easternmost beach destination on the Caribbean, near the Panama border. It’s an isolated town, inaccessible by land, that survives mainly off the adventure tourists who shun the sites promoted by travel agencies and arrive in the same boats boarded by Emmanuel and Forché. Capurganá is also the gateway to the Darién Gap.
Forché Takwi describes their journey:
“We knew the route because some friends had told us about it. It’s the one that all Cameroonians use. In Capurganá, we paid some people to take us. Four nights and five days walking in the jungle. On the fourth day, we were attacked by thieves. They came out of nowhere. They surrounded us. They stole all our money. Two thousand dollars. One thousand from Emmanuel and one thousand from me. One kid refused to give up his money and they shot him on the spot, just like that. He was a young boy from Cameroon who we’d met just a few days earlier, in Capurganá. The guides told us to leave the scene immediately, to not attract any more trouble. So we grabbed our backpacks and went on our way. We didn’t even have time to find out who the boy was. We just left him lying there like that. He was dead. We left.”
As soon as he arrived in Panama City, Emmanuel Cheo Ngu called his wife, Antoinette. He didn’t tell her about the dead boy or the mugging in the jungle. He just told her that the most dangerous part of the journey was over.
He also sent her some photos from his trek through the jungle, which she forwarded to me. In one of the pictures, Mr. Ngu is standing in the middle of a group of other African migrants. He is wearing a Barcelona jersey, shorts over athletic leggings and, for footwear, a pair of Crocs. By all appearances, not the most appropriate attire for crossing one of the most inhospitable places on the planet.
Other Africans I spoke with in Tapachula agreed that the Darién is the worst stretch of the journey. Migrants are completely exposed to the whims of gangs, traffickers and thieves. Everyone is robbed. Some women are raped. Everyone has either witnessed or heard stories of people murdered and left behind in the jungle. The nameless dead, but with families back in Africa waiting to hear from them. I was told this was also the route travelled by the second man who drowned: Atabong Michael Atembe.
Like the migrant trail from Central America to the United States, the route used by Africans through the Darién is haunted by deaths and disappearances. Some migrants are even more screwed than others: the Africans who travel that long road through Mexico do it after surviving the Darién Gap. For Central Americans, the Guatemala-Mexico border is the beginning of hell; for Africans, it’s the last stretch out of it.
Mr. Ngu and his cousin Forché paid for the rest of the trip with money they borrowed from other Cameroonians. They crossed the Suchiate River by raft on September 16, six weeks after their departure from Bamenda. They were 11,000 kilometers from home as the crow flies. But between airplanes, buses, boats and walking on foot, they had traveled a total of 22,000 kilometers, or more than 13,500 miles.
Daniel Ortega and His Sinister Time Machine
They registered at the Tapachula migration station and requested papers to travel through Mexico. Since they come from countries with no diplomatic representation, Mexico considers Africans to be effectively stateless. Like other migrants, it grants them temporary stay permits that prohibit them from leaving Chiapas, Mexico’s southern antipode to its northern border with the United States.
After several weeks sleeping outdoors in tents set up on the grounds of the migration station, Forché left by land, heading north guided by coyotes. Emmanuel Ngu decided to stay.
Antoinette recalls a telephone conversation she had with her husband at the time: “He told me something that scared me: he said he had learned that police in Mexico are very corrupt, that they couldn’t depend on them for protection. He had been stuck in [southern] Mexico for almost a month, and the authorities still wouldn’t let them leave and travel to the capital. He said they were being held hostage, and that Mexico was not a safe country. He told me he was heading north, but he didn’t tell me how.”
On October 10, a few hours before boarding that fateful boat, Emmanuel Cheo Ngu sent a voice message to Antoinette on WhatsApp. They were celebrating 10 years of marriage and marking 70 days of separation. “Despite being so, so far away, I can’t forget our anniversary. 10 years of highs and lows... Thank you for being there. For being a good wife and a fantastic mother. For proving to the world that I had every reason to marry you. With commitment, focus and faith we can do anything we want to. Now is probably the right time. God was probably waiting for the 10 years we’ve been together, and from now on, things will start working out. Let’s have faith and make it happen. Let’s make our love so strong that the world will see us as an example.”
Then, he announced their wedding anniversary in a Facebook post that included some family photos. Below the post were 42 reactions from his contacts: congratulations, blessings, happy anniversary... The 43rd comment abruptly interrupts the thread with a short sentence: “He no longer exists.” The next one simply reads “Rip,” and another asks why his name is showing up in Mexican newspapers. This is how Antoinette learned that her husband had died: on Facebook. This is also how Cecilia Ngu, a 25-year-old police officer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, found out. Without knowing exactly where she was going, Cecilia Ngu flew to Chiapas to search for her brother.
III. The Corrido of Ocós
I went to Ocós because I knew that migrants left from there in boats to get dropped off in Mexico. But it had been a few years since I had heard any stories from smugglers or Central Americans who had left from there, and I wanted to see if the route still existed.
There are only two ways to get to Ocós: by land, travelling the only road south from Tecún Umán, or on a floating platform like the one that ferried our car across the Naranjo River from La Blanca. Victor Peña, the photographer who accompanied me, maneuvered his camera discreetly as we descended the western bank of the river: this was narco territory.
We made our way through the banana orchards and then took a path, which doesn’t appear on the map, that parallels the Suchiate River and is so narrow and uneven that we were barely able to follow it. The path ends near the mouth of the river, in a hamlet appropriately named Los Faros because the last lighthouses in Central America are located here: two rectangular concrete blocks painted the colors of the Guatemalan flag. This is also the far northwestern edge of the small town of Ocós, with its line of empty houses facing the sea and its suspicious silence.
Ocós is a beach without vacationers. A ghost town. But neither its silence nor its apparent calm invites restful contemplation.
In the rainy season, the sea becomes a swamp polluted by the rising waters of the Naranjo and Suchiate. We walked a couple of kilometers along a small spit of sand, barely passable at low tide, to the mouth of the Suchiate. There was no life on the beach: no crabs, no snails, no starfish. Nothing. The closest things resembling life were the logs and tree branches that the river had carried to the sea and the sea had returned to the land. That, and a small dead dog that must have drown, thrashed by the crashing waves, minutes before we passed by.
I skirted around a big pile of garbage: a mountain of soda and water bottles, syringes, shards of glass, shoes, bags, and all kinds of plastic products. (Incidentally, Panama’s first beach on the opposite end of the isthmus, La Miel, is also carpeted by trash spat out by the sea. Central America begins and ends in garbage dumps).
The beach estates in Ocós look abandoned, but if you venture a second glance, you’ll notice signs of suspicious life: houses surrounded by high walls and on each corner, concrete turrets with no windows save for small peepholes, and in each peephole, eyes that follow your every move. And security cameras, in case the eyes don’t see.
This, for many years, was the stomping ground of Juan Ortiz López, better known as Hermano Juan or Juan Chamalé, one of the most powerful drug traffickers in Central America. He got his start smuggling migrants into Mexico on the rafts that cross the Suchiate, then expanded to trafficking merchandise — traditional borderland activities. When he was arrested in March 2011, Chamalé was the country’s number one cocaine trafficker: the head of the Guatemalan branch of the Sinaloa Cartel.
It worked like this: planes coming from Ecuador, Venezuela or Colombia would drop packages of cocaine into the sea, then Chamalé’s boatmen would ferry them to shore in Ocós. From there, they would send the drugs, again by boat, to Mexico, or transport them by land to Tecún Umán.
Upon learning of his arrest, hundreds of Guatemalans, who saw Chamalé as a benefactor, demonstrated in front of the Supreme Court of Justice in the capital to demand his release. His partner fell captive before he did: Mauro Ramirez, alias Lobo de Mar. Both men were extradited to the United States to face trial. That year, the so-called Ocós Cartel disintegrated. But it never fully disappeared.A small scrap of the cartel was left in the hands of Wilson Wilfredo Luarcas, alias El Primazo, who had served as head of security for the now extradited Lobo de Mar. El Primazo’s role was limited to coordinating the boats to collect the packages at sea and transport them to Tecún Umán. From there, other people in Tecún Umán would smuggle the product into Mexico.
El Primazo was arrested and imprisoned earlier this year. He requested his own extradition to the United States, because, he said, another prisoner —known as El Taquero for his skills with a knife, even though he had never so much as cooked a hard-boiled egg— wanted to murder him in jail.One day in March, El Primazo’s brother, Donis, who worked as a liaison for the cartel in Tecún Umán, crossed over to Mexico to have lunch. While he was there, four sicarios ambushed and assassinated him. The video of the crime was widely circulated in Guatemala. Nevertheless, a small organization remained in Ocós to manage the boat operation.
The area’s other criminal network, the migrant smuggling one, was dismantled in 2015. Recently, I spoke with a Guatemalan prosecutor who participated in the operation. “We had to enter by air, sea, and land, because it’s a very dangerous area,” he said. “It was a joint operation with the police and army. Since there’s only one road in, everyone in town knew that a major operation was happening as soon as we passed through Tecún Umán. It was like a movie: no one knew who we were coming for, so on our way there, we passed half the town trying to leave in their cars.” The crew of smugglers had two hotels where they would keep migrants until conditions cleared to set sail. Twelve people were arrested during the operation.
We didn’t know whether migrant smuggling was still happening in Ocós, but we knew drug trafficking was. A local journalist confirmed it:
“When I hear about deaths in Ocós, I wait half an hour.”
“Half an hour for what?”
“If no one calls me in half an hour, then I’ll head down.”
“Who calls you?”
“Los señores. They’ll call to tell me not to cover the story of the death. And yeah, if you’re a journalist who works here, you know not to go.”
“Have they called you many times?”
“Fourteen.”
We spent our first four days in Ocós looking for boats, but we never found any. On the fifth day, we went back with a local who for obvious reasons asked not to be identified by his real name. I’ll call him Luz. The experience I’m about to describe reminded me of one of those intricate electric train model sets, where the train passes through a town and then disappears into the mountains and then loops back around again; those models with buttons that turn on different lights that illuminate the places you already saw, but didn’t notice: one button lights up a tavern where two sailors drink beer; another illuminates a cave on the side of the mountain, with a big cat that watches over the valley. Press another, and the inside of the train station lights up, revealing passengers pulling suitcases and buying tickets. Everything you had already seen, but in a different light.
Once by one, Luz pressed those buttons for us in Ocós. “See those cars going that way? The one in front is a narco, the one in the back is their security... This path to the right leads to another path that runs along the river. Don’t ever go down there. Oh, you already went? Uy, that’s where they dump the bodies. Boats? You didn’t see them? Come on, I’ll show you.”
Luz brought us to a bridge that crosses a small stream. We stopped and he pointed south, to a spot about 10 meters away. “See those bushes? Over there behind that tree... Don’t you see them?” We saw them. There were the boats. Barely visible through the undergrowth, white and blue. In front of the municipal hall, we took another small dirt street that brought us out to a pier. Three shirtless boys were leaning against a tree, resting. One was smoking. When they saw us, they sat up, alert, and one of them made a phone call. We stayed there for a few minutes, without getting out of the car. Then we turned around to leave, and a black pickup truck came barreling straight at us. It swerved to let us pass and we drove away.
“It’s like Pablo’s Colombia here. If you don’t obey, you’ll wind up full of lead. If you obey, they’ll help you out,” says Luz.
“What does it mean to obey?”
“It means don’t fuck with them. And they won’t fuck with you.”
We continued on Luz’s guided tour. We passed by some large deserted buildings and he told us their stories. This house over there, that one belonged to an evangelical pastor who was imprisoned for drug trafficking. That church over there, they used its basement for storing drugs. That building over there —an unfinished three-story structure near the town plaza— that one belongs to a woman arrested for money laundering. She was trying to build a big new restaurant.
“And the other restaurant, that one by the beach with its doors wide open but where we haven’t seen anyone for the last five days?”
“That place belongs to Doña Edilma.”
“But it’s empty.”
“Yeah. No cooks, no waiters, no guests. That’s how it is here.”
“But the doors are wide open…”
“And who would steal from her? From Doña Edilma?”
Edilma Navarijo was the mayor of Ocós when the municipality still included La Blanca, between 2008 and 2016. She and her husband, Carlos Preciado, enjoyed years of remarkable economic success prior to their entry into politics. Some in Ocós still remember when they were young sweethearts: Carlos peddling an old bicycle, barefoot, and Edilma riding on the handlebars. Their years of economic prosperity allowed them to rapidly acquire land and build homes and businesses.
Sometime around 2007, Edilma Navarijo de Preciado began an extramarital affair with a man who had his own black legend in Guatemala: Víctor Soto Diéguez, head of investigations for the National Civil Police, implicated in the massacre of inmates at Pavón prison, and in the cover-up of the murder of three Salvadoran representatives to the Central American Parliament. From then on, Soto Diéguez was a frequent visitor to Ocós.
The extramarital relationship divided the Preciado Navarijo family to such an extent that Carlos, the wedded couple’s eldest son, wound up campaigning against his own mother in the mayoral elections. She won. Shortly after, in a confrontation that has yet to be clarified in a court of law, the mayor’s husband and another of their sons were shot to death. Soto Diéguez ended the day nursing a gunshot wound as well. In Ocós, everyone says the police chief is responsible for the deaths of the Preciados.
Vivian Preciado, the daughter of the mayor and the murdered man, was arrested for helping Soto Diéguez, her father’s alleged killer, cover up the crime. The police chief was spared from a conviction, but was eventually sentenced to 33 years in prison for his involvement in the extrajudicial executions at Pavón prison. Ever since, Edilma Navarijo travels frequently to the Guatemalan capital to visit him in prison.
Luz pressed those buttons for us as well. When we passed by Edilma Navarijo’s house, he pointed it out to us: “She was here with Victor Soto when her son, Carlos, came and shot up the house. Soto got really pissed and decided to go to over to their house. Keep driving this way, we’ll go see the other house. Carlos still lives there... here it is. So, he showed up here with his men and they shot up the house. Apparently, there was a family meeting happening, and he ended up killing the man and another one of the sons.” I asked Luz if the incident had made the news. Yes, he said. That day, it seems, the local journalist had managed to cover the story.
In January 2020, Edilma Navarijo will assume office as mayor of La Blanca. At the moment, she lives with two of her children, who are also politicians. Carlos, the one who ran against her, was elected mayor of Ocós. Vivian, the daughter accused of helping Soto Diéguez cover up a murder, is a congresswoman representing the department of San Marcos. In this land of drug traffickers and banana plantations, the Navarijo family is the new political dynasty.
Edilma and her daughter are members of the National Change Union (UNC), whose candidate for president, Mario Estrada, was arrested this past April in Miami, two months before the election. The DEA had recorded a meeting between Estrada and emissaries from the Sinaloa Cartel in which the candidate had promised, if he won the elections, that he would hand over control of Guatemala’s police and customs agency to the cartel. In exchange, Estrada asked for 12 million dollars to finance his campaign and for another small favor: that the cartel assassinate Thelma Aldana, a presidential candidate who was leading him in the polls. Fortunately for Aldana, the Sinaloan narcos were actually undercover DEA agents.
Two weeks before his arrest, Estrada hosted President Jimmy Morales at his private ranch. Defending the visit to the public, Morales said that they had met to coordinate a peaceful and orderly post-election transition.
I tried to contact Congresswoman Vivian Preciado Navarijo and, through her, to speak to her mother, Edilma. I never received any reply. Now we were standing in front of the house of her brother, Carlos, the mayor-elect of Ocós. The windows were open, and it looked like someone had just left the study. We knocked and rang the doorbell for than 10 minutes. No one answered.
There is another mayor in the area, some 20 kilometers upriver: Erik Súñiga, alias El Pocho, mayor of Tecún Umán and the strongman of the southern territories. Reports published in the Guatemalan daily elPeriódico describe Súñiga as the heir to Juan Chamalé and the godfather of the Sinaloa Cartel’s operations in the region. In other words: the boss.
All things illicit —drugs, contraband, smuggled migrants— pass through Tecún Umán. Súñiga has set up a system of cameras that register who enters and leaves the city, and in this way, he monitors and controls the only road in and out of Ocós. He doesn’t have to worry about political adversaries or rivals: he has none. And the majority of local residents support him. Luz explains: “The gangs started taking over Tecún Umán and were causing a lot of problems. But it’s not an issue anymore. Erik took care of it. He also took care of the thieves. Tecún Umán is a safe place now.”
A Texas court requested his extradition in April. “He has aided and coordinated the transportation of several tons of cocaine through Guatemala to Mexico,” the DEA investigation that led to the indictment read. But in Guatemala, mayors have immunity. An impeachment process has been opened against Súñiga, but it has yet to move forward.
The big question in the border town is what its mayor will do in January, when his term ends and he loses immunity. He was unable to run for re-election because the Supreme Electoral Tribunal annulled his candidacy as a result of the extradition request. But then something happened that was worthy of a narcocorrido: there was no time to find a replacement for Súñiga, so his candidacy was left vacant, but there was also no time to reprint the ballots, so even though everyone in the municipality knew he was no longer running and had been indicted on drug trafficking charges in the United States, they voted for him anyways. Súñiga will leave the mayor’s office in January, but his party representatives will assume the position in his stead.
[Editor’s Note: In December 2019, Súñiga surrendered to DEA agents in Guatemala and was extradited to the Eastern District of Texas to face drug trafficking and money laundering charges. He died of cancer before his trial.]
We left Ocós convinced that the maritime route from Guatemala no longer exists here. That the border —dynamic and ever-changing, adapting to realities dictated by migratory flows, organized crime and political decisions— had once again moved.
Several migrants in Mexico told me that people now cross the river with almost complete freedom, on the usual rafts. I was able to verify this myself when I crossed the bridge, en route to Tapachula. In the traditional places where migrants used to cross from Ciudad Hidalgo, there are new guard posts staffed by Mexico’s recently created Guardia Nacional. Their purpose is simply to stop migrants from disembarking from those specific locations. Now, people cross farther upstream instead, out of sight of the National Guard, which turns a blind eye because one way or another, they have to let people pass. They cross where Emmanuel Ngu and Forché Takwi and Atabong Michael Atembe and the three thousand Africans I encountered in Tapachula crossed.
But if the Cameroonians were already in Mexico... Where did Emmanuel Cheo Ngu, Atabong Michael Atembe and the third man who drowned leave from? Why did they board a boat that would take them out to sea for hours, at night, on choppy waters? I asked myself these same questions, of course, when I first heard about the accident in Puerto Arista. When I crossed the bridge two days earlier in Tecún Umán and entered Mexican territory, the thought of writing about Cameroonians had not even crossed my mind, nor had I yet heard their names: Atabong Michael Atembe, Emmanuel Cheo Ngu, Emmanuel Cheo Ngu.
IV. The New Border
On October 12, nearly three thousand migrants left Tapachula in a caravan bound for Mexico City. On the road to Oaxaca, they marched together: Salvadorans, Hondurans, Cameroonians, Haitians, Ghanaians, Cubans, Mauritanians, Congolese, Venezuelans, Sierra Leoneans, Angolans, Eritreans...
They were inspired by the Central Americans who one year earlier had marched en masse to the U.S. border. But the Mexico of late 2019 was not the same as the Mexico of 2018. If the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador had once preached humanism and solidarity with Central Americans, and had offered work permits for anyone who wanted one, now that same government was turning its southern border into Trump’s wall, and Mexico was footing the bill. López Obrador created the National Guard to prevent the passage of migrants.
All roads out of Tapachula, save the one leading to Guatemala, are tightly controlled by Mexico’s National Guard and Federal Police. This is where the new border between Mexico and Central America is today.
In Huixtla, security forces blocked the passage of the caravan; they detained hundreds of people and forced them to return to the migration station, to their tents covered in black plastic, exposed to flooding; to a place where they are forced to walk two kilometers to a river to bathe, urinate, and defecate because the Mexican government won’t even provide them with port-a-potties; where they depend on NGOs for food and clothing; where every day they endure insults and rejections from a city whose capacity to welcome migrants has been exhausted. Where they don’t want to be, either, because their destiny is elsewhere.
“I’m not surprised by the corruption or the smugglers or the migrants. What surprises me is the hatred I’ve seen directed against them in recent weeks,” says Luis García Villagrán, director of the Centro de Documentación Humana, an organization dedicated to the defense of migrants. Villagrán estimates there are approximately 50,000 migrants currently in Tapachula, constituting roughly 10 percent of the local population. Fifty-thousand foreign visitors and not a single tourist.
Witnesses say they saw Emmanuel Ngu at the migration station a few days before the shipwreck. One morning, he disappeared. “He was on his way to Puerto Madero. That’s where they leave from,” a Cameroonian told me. The same place mentioned by a prosecutor in Puerto Arista, Chiapas who had been investigating the deaths of the Africans. And the same place identified by local media that reported on the incident. Puerto Madero, Chiapas. This was the launch point for the new maritime migration route.
Just 30 kilometers from Tapachula and bordering a Mexican naval base, Puerto Madero is a small town of fishermen and run-down restaurants offering fried fish and the chance to take a dip in small wading baths they call swimming pools. We visited the two fishermen’s cooperatives. At one of them, hundreds of shark fins were drying in the sun on a piece of black plastic. The fishermen said they knew nothing about the shipwreck that everyone up and down the entire coast of Chiapas had been talking about. In fact, they said, they had never seen an African in Puerto Madero at all. Nor anywhere else for that matter. They had never seen an African. They had never seen a Black man.
In Puerto Madero, we encountered no police, no prosecutors, no immigration agents and no National Guard soldiers.
As for the survivors of the shipwreck, Mexican newspaper Animal Político reported that Mexican authorities had taken them all to Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state capital, and locked them up in a facility known as La Mosca. A migrant advocate who had managed to speak to the survivors told the newspaper that none of them could remember the name of the port they had left from.
On October 14, I reached out to Cecilia Ngu, Emmanuel’s sister. She was about to board the plane with her brother-in-law, Walters Feh. We arranged to meet in Tuxtla. Before she hung up, she told me: “But don’t believe what the Mexican newspapers say. I’ve seen the photos. I can assure you the dead man is not Emmanuel Cheo Ngu. That is not my brother.”
When she landed in Tuxtla Gutierrez, Cecilia Ngu had saved a news story from a Oaxacan paper on her phone. According to the report, authorities in Oaxaca had also identified the third dead body, the one found on October 12 on the beach in Cachimbo, as Emmanuel Cheo Ngu. In other words, one body in Chiapas and another in Oaxaca had both been registered by the authorities of each state as the same person.
But Cecilia didn’t need news reports: the body in the photos from Oaxaca was definitely her brother. Emmanuel Cheo Ngu was the third dead man. Not the first.
We picked Cecilia Ngu and Walters Feh up in Tuxtla and hit the freeway to go find Emmanuel’s body. “He never even told me he had left Cameroon. Over the past few months we’d been messaging on WhatsApp, but he didn’t tell me anything,” Cecilia said. “Now I know he was trying to get to Minneapolis, to join us. If I had known, I’d never have let him get on that boat. We’re mountain people, we don’t have any business at sea. Emmanuel couldn’t swim.”
Cecilia wanted to go to Cachimbo to honor a Cameroonian tradition: to bury her brother, if at all possible, in the land where he was born, but with a handful of earth from the place where he had died. A storm prevented us from going beyond Ixhuatán. She had to settle for collecting some wet earth from the town nearest the place where her brother had lost his life.
We were told that Emmanuel Cheo Ngu’s body had been taken to Ixtepec, a municipality in Oaxaca and a stopover on the migrant trail. We slept there. In the morning, we went to the morgue where they had performed the autopsy. No luck. A few hours earlier, his body had been transferred to a private mortuary because there is no cold storage in Ixtepec and the corpse had been decomposing in the open for several days.
The Fiscalía de Atención al Migrante de Ixtepec, the state agency in custody of Emmanuel Ngu’s body, confirmed that it had been transferred to a funeral home in the municipality of Matías Romero, some 70 kilometers away. Before we left, the Fiscalía showed Cecilia some photos taken of her brother’s body on the beach. For the first time during her entire journey, the Minneapolis police officer broke down. She recognized her brother immediately in that bloated, decomposed body, suffused with the pallor of death that had overtaken him in some far-off land. Cecilia Ngu had arrived just in time to rescue him from his final abandonment: a mass grave. We got back on the highway and headed to Matías Romero.
The Reysan Funeral Home in Matías Romero looks like a David Lynch fantasy. The entrance is adorned with orange and black ribbons, pumpkins, plastic goblins, scarecrows and witches. Next to the door, a chained-up raccoon struggles to thrust itself past the three-foot radius allotted by its leash. Inside, a wooden rocking chair, long past its prime, and two plastic seats serve as the reception area, which faces two rows of coffins on display. A spider monkey with a broken hip struggles to move between the chairs. Two cages with parrots keep the monkey entertained.
The funeral home doubles as the residence of its owner, Araceli Valdivieso. Living in a transit zone has made her a specialist in migrants. When a Central American dies or is killed in the area, Valdivieso is often the one who transports the remains to the country of origin. Tomorrow, she told us, she would be leaving for Nicaragua with the body of a migrant killed over his love of a woman. But it’s one thing to transport a body by car to Nicaragua. Africa is another matter.
Cecilia and Walters entered the room where Emmanuel Ngu’s body had been prepared for burial. She searched for the scars on the deformed corpse in front of her. There they were: the mark from the wound on the right ankle and the nail that never grew back on the big toe of the left foot. The vestiges of the violence in Bamenda that pushed Emmanuel toward his final journey. The reasons for his departure are still visible on an otherwise almost unrecognizable body, stored in a strange funeral home in small-town in Mexico on the other side of the world. A solitary death.
Standing next to the deceased, alone as a family, Cecilia and her brother-in-law played messages sent by relatives to bid Mr. Ngu safe travels, to tell him they would be waiting for him at home, that one day he would return to the town where he was born and raised and from whence he was forced to flee. That they would be there to welcome him when he returned.
When he returned in a crate provided by Araceli Valdivieso.
Before leaving the funeral home, the dead man’s relatives confessed that they would need time to come up with the funds to pay for the transfer of the body. Araceli Valdivieso reassured them: “It can stay here as long as you need. I’ve had bodies here for as long as eight years. Just imagine...” She also offered to cremate it. It’s cheaper to transport the remains in an urn, she told them, and there’s less bureaucracy. Cecilia Ngu refused: “Our custom is to bury the dead. If there’s no body, there’s no death. No one in Bamenda will believe that some ashes are the remains of my brother.” We went back to the prosecutor’s office in Ixtepec to request the death certificate. There, I said goodbye to Mr. Ngu’s sister and brother-in-law.
Two weeks ago, I called Cecilia Ngu in Minneapolis. Emmanuel’s body was still at the Reysan Funeral Home in Matías Romero, stuck behind bureaucratic red tape. I asked her if she knew anything more about the shipwreck. “No,” she said. “I asked the Mexican authorities to let me speak with the survivors. Only they know what actually happened. But they wouldn’t let me talk to them.”
The sea route that claimed the lives of the three Cameroonians appears, at least for the time being, to be closed. The migrant routes are changing course once again. And not only in Guatemala and Mexico: ten days after Emmanuel and Forché landed in Quito, the Government of Ecuador announced that Cameroonians and citizens from 11 other African countries would now require visas to enter its territory.
On October 22, several Mexican newspapers reported that the director of Mexico’s National Migration Institute (INM), Felipe Garduño, had inaugurated a photo exhibit recognizing the contributions that migrants have made to Mexico over the past century. At the opening, he was asked about the Africans stranded in Tapachula. “Even if they’re from Mars, we’re going to deport them! We’re going to send them back to India, to Cameroon, to Africa!” Garduño said. Then he inaugurated the exhibition.
Two judges in Chiapas stopped Garduño’s interplanetary deportation scheme. In response to six lawsuits filed on behalf of 350 African migrants, the courts ruled that Mexico had failed to comply with federal laws by preventing the migrants’ free transit out of Chiapas; and that, being stateless, the Mexican government was obligated to protect them.
The ruling set a legal precedent that covered not only the plaintiffs but all Africans stranded in Tapachula. In less than three days, Mexico had issued two thousand permanent residency permits.
I should mention one last thing: I saw the list of Africans who sued the Mexican state. One by one, they recorded their names in numbered sequence. Number 112 belongs to Atabong Michael Atembe. He signed his name just six weeks before he died. He is the second drowned man.
The name Emmanuel Cheo Ngu does not appear on the list. But it’s safe to assume that if, like the two thousand Africans who now have permanent residency, he were still alive and in Mexico, the professor from Bamenda would call Antoinette and tell her, in his measured and optimistic voice, that he was determined to continue his journey north.
But to say it like that implies a cruel conclusion: that the three Cameroonians were killed by their impatience. A more accurate assessment would place the blame on the state, echoing the ruling of the courts: they died because the Mexican authorities failed to comply with their own laws. If Mexico had followed the law instead of succumbing to pressures from the U.S. president, neither Atabong Michael Atembe, nor Emmanuel Cheo Ngu, nor the other victim whom the State of Chiapas still believes was named Emmanuel Cheo Ngu, would have needed to get on a boat in the first place. All three men would still be alive today.
*Translated by Max Granger