The Murky Waters of the Caribbean

The coastal region shared by Mexico, Guatemala and Belize is one of the most porous and unknown regions in the southern border of the Americas. Through three feature articles—in Xcalak, a remote Mexican village that lives from the cocaine that flows in from the sea; in Blue Creek, the powerful economic motor of the Mennonites; and in Puerto Barrios, the dark port of Guatemala in the Caribbean—an enigmatic reality rises just a few steps away from one of the world’s most important tourist centres.

I) THE COCAINE THAT FLOWS IN FROM THE SEA
(Xcalak, Quintana Roo)

The last man in Mexico lives in a place located at 18º12’9”N and 87º50’36”W. You can find him right there, living his life on his rooftop. Don Luis’s house faces the Caribbean Sea, and everything else around it, wherever you look, is mangrove swamp. If he walks five minutes to the right, he’s in a different country, but if he walks left for an hour he reaches Xcalak, the first village in Mexico.

Don Luis is a sinewy 58-year-old with dark hair and a moustache who lives in an abandoned house in one of the most absurd borders in the world—a line that splits a 99-kilometre cay in two by means of a military base that is almost right in the middle, leaving a piece of land in the southeast of Mexico that runs down parallel to Belize’s coast. The North, which belongs to Mexico, is an unpopulated area of 62 kilometres, and the South, which is Belize’s, is 37 kilometres, and you wouldn't be able to cram a single tourist more into it.

The last man in Mexico has no electricity, running water, or land access to his house. He has no fridge, television or fan, and just sometimes his old cell phone picks up the signal from Belize. But he knows things that may seem impossible to other mere mortals, such as fishing with a shoelace, desalinating seawater, planting seeds on the beach or using his mouth to extract venom from the Nauyaca—the fer-de-lance, one of the deadliest vipers in the world.

Luis Méndez was born in Mérida (Yucatán) and was a civil servant for the state until an acquaintance suggested he become a warden at the ranch. Three years after reaching the very last corner of Mexico, he has learned that everything that comes from the sea has some use: a piece of string to jump-start the propeller, a shoe sole shaped into a hinge, a bottle-cap to fasten a nail.

Don Luis goes out for a walk every day as soon the sun comes up In the company of his dog Canelo, a brown Hungarian Vizsla. He used to walk along the sand, but they now both saunter over a foul-smelling carpet of Sargassum, the gulfweed that invades the Caribbean and gives off an unbearable stench of rotten egg along the shores.

On the day I go with him, along the brown mass strewn with tin cans, flip-flops, bleach containers, lids and potato chip containers, there are also hundreds of plastic bags the size of the palm of a hand. They're all the same, half-opened and with residues of white dust and sea water.

Don Luis wakes up every morning right across from the world’s second-largest coral reef, but he walks with his eyes glued to the ground. He says he is simply going out to make sure everything is in order, but during our walk I hear a new verb for the first time: playear, to beachcomb—the dogged search for cocaine bricks dropped on the shore by small planes. If you don’t beachcomb in this place, it’s like not being Catholic at the Vatican.

This Robinson of the Caribbean is an affable man that only slips on his shoes to walk down the beach. He can recognize every kind of engine that passes in front of his house simply by listening to its hum, and he goes on to show it:

“A light aircraft goes groooooongggg,” he illustrates in a long-drawn-out way. “But a 15-horsepower boat goes brrrrrrrrrrr, pause, brrrrrrrrrrr, and then another pause to remove the gulfweed from the propeller,” he explains. “The 40-horsepower one goes nyeeeeeeeeee,” he says, moving from side to side with his fist closed in the air as if it were the accelerator. “And the 75-horsepower one...” He makes a noise just like the previous one, but deeper, and with an “o.” And he goes one by one, until he reaches the 100-horsepower one, where he deploys a wide-ranging, guttural orchestra of sounds.

Don Luis can also identify the whistles he can hear coming from the sea at night—the one indicating “they’re coming,” “hurry up” or “let’s go”—and whether it’s done by El Gavilancito (the Sparrow), La Zorra (the Fox), El Pelón (Baldy), El Guanaco (the Salvadoran)...

The last man in Mexico may not have Netflix, but all he has to do is sit at his balcony to watch high-speed boat races, police chases, and clandestine planes flying by. He recalls the scene from yesterday, when he sat down with his wife Norma to enjoy the evening show, and says, “There were so many mosquitos that I had to light up some coconuts so we wouldn’t have to move back inside.”

***
The Caribbean contains 1,061 islands belonging to 32 nations—a region and culture of its own that Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez described as the only country that is not made of land, but water.

Waxing less lyrical, for Mexicans the Caribbean refers to the 1,176 kilometres of coast comprised between Don Luis's house and Cape Catoche on the tip of Yucatán. The coast includes areas such as Cancún, Playa del Carmen, Cozumel and the Maya Riviera—or, in other words, 35% of tourist revenue for the sixth most-visited country in the world—the motor of an industry that accounts for almost 16% of Mexico’s GDP.

For Xcalak, 412 kilometres away from all of this, the Caribbean and the trade winds that communicate them are also their way of life. In the southern end of Quintana Roo, two hours from Chetumal, Xcalak is a spectacular village of palm trees, turquoise waters, two lighthouses and a lagoon. Its urban planning is limited to three streets of sand running parallel to the sea, and three more that cut across them—but if you had to paint a picture of paradise, you’d have to include this community of 300 inhabitants where almost everyone is related and knows each other by their nickname.

Its beaches are also the final destination for anything valuable that falls into the Atlantic—more often than not, the cocaine released by Colombian planes, a method known here as “bombing.” This way, planes send coordinates down to the ground and speedboats head over immediately. They don’t always have time to fish out the entire load, and the bundles that get lost could appear days later, wrapped in brown tape, bobbing along on the water, stuck on the seashore or tangled in the mangroves. There are times when the bricks are thrown out by speedboats arriving from nearby islands as they attempt to erase all evidence and gain speed as they flee from the patrol boats, tossing their cargo into the sea.

Christopher Columbus would never have reached America were it not for the trade winds, those steady breezes caused by the Earth’s rotation that provide smooth sailing to the other side of the ocean and are recreated in the Caribbean. Thanks to these winds, it makes no difference what part of this sea you chuck anything into—sooner or later it will most likely end up in Xcalak. In the stretch of gulfweed that Don Luis looks after, for example, a Haitian doll has appeared, as well as a bottle from the Dominican Republic and a piece of wood with African detailing.

“In this village, beachcombing is a profession we teach the young as one would teach them to fish,” Don Luis explains. “What else can you teach your children if you've devoted your whole life to fishing or selling coconuts, and from one day to the next your neighbour builds himself a house or shows up with a new truck? Here, young people are the first ones to learn that the future doesn't lie in working but in rapidly searching for, finding, and buying a speedboat to keep combing for more. Marijuana can appear one day, but maybe a year or two later you'll find the cocaine that will pull you out of poverty.”

A month and a half ago, in late February, Don Luis had to leave for a few days to visit the city. When he returned to Xcalak, no one had to tell him that a cargo had dropped in his absence. “I began to hear of someone who hired a band, someone else who treated the whole village to beer, one more that showed up with a new motorbike,” he recalls.

***
One of the people that spent all of yesterday fleeing from the Belizean police just across from Don Luis’s house was El Guanaco. It was the dead of the night when Don Luis heard his Yamaha cutting through the bay. El Guanaco is a tough, cagey guy that smokes marijuana non-stop. His nickname correctly suggests he was born in El Salvador, and at 33 he has lived more lives than I have space to describe. He says he left San Salvador when the gangs were about to kill him. He then fled to Belize, where he worked in the fields that belonged to the Mennonites, the ultraconservative Christians that live on the border, until he hid out in Xcalak, the last place where anyone would ask about him.

El Guanaco is athletic and brown-skinned and has several tattoos on his chest and back. But today he is tired of last night’s escapades as he fled with his lobster catch. There is a ban on capturing them in Xcalak, so he dives in Belizean waters, where there is less vigilance. And few guys are capable of doing it like he does. He free dives six meters down at night but leaves the boat’s engine running in case he has to leave sooner than planned. When he comes back up, he spins around in a circle, casting light around him in case sharks arrive.

When he remembers last night’s “movie,” you can tell that what tickles him most is stealing right from under the Belizeans' noses—“But watch out!, they shoot with bullets”, he says with the sluggish giggles of marijuana, referring to the police from the neighbouring country.

So today El Guanaco sticks his oar lazily into the water without taking his eyes away from anything floating around. “It’s time to paquetear; it's the poor man’s lottery”, he laughs again. “You never know when the brick that will change your life will show up. Paquetear —"packaging”, the tireless search for drugs in the sea, and the second homegrown verb I jot down in my notebook.

As he rows his oar with the airs of a gondolier, El Guanaco remembers that day five years ago when he found a beautiful package of cocaine. “It was there, right in front of me,” he says as he points to a patch of sea that is as blue and crystal-clear as any other. “There were three of us and we found 25 kilos that we split up. I got a million pesos ($50,000); I’d never seen so much money together. With that I furnished my house, I bought myself a motorbike and one for my wife...” he recalls. "Normally people go nuts and burn up their money, but I've experienced deprivation and didn’t do that. In the end, the money lasted under a year.”

Besides the winds, the new ally for the Caribbean's waste pickers or pepenadores is gulfweed, which leaves a dense mantle of vegetation on the seashore that makes the place ugly, damages corals, leaves the fish without oxygen and scares away tourism. The algae spreading through the Caribbean is worrying for Mexico, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Florida, but not for those that take advantage of the currents. “The movement made by the banks of gulfweed shows us where the current is going and helps us know where the packages can appear on the seashore,” he says.

El Guanaco received quite a few blows two weeks ago. One can infer from his raw knuckles that he defended himself as well as he could, but it was a beating in every sense of the word. Ten people, including the mayor, kicked him until they had given him a good thrashing, And from what he leaves out from his tale, you get the feeling that he’d tried to be too clever by half. He was working for one of the local drug lords—in other words, charging for beachcombing and for searching the sea for bricks, getting paid up front as he used the speedboat and wasted gas. But he left his boss and began to work for another one.

***
“Cocaine? Crack? Marijuana?” The tattooed grocer’s sales patter leaves no room for doubt as I ask for a six-pack of beer.

In a handful of shops in the village, besides beer they sell “wet” cocaine—fished out from the sea—at five dollars a baggie the size of a fingernail. You can get a similar amount of crack for much less.

In Xcalak, the local recipe isn’t seabream in garlic sauce; it's the method for cooking the damp cocaine that washes in from the sea, a process which the brown-skinned young man explains to me as he sits on a motorbike with a gallon of gasoline between his feet. “Everything is placed on the stove in a big pot and cooked slowly. You have to stir constantly until the water evaporates, without burning it. Then you place it on a board and you begin to cut the cocaine with a large knife. You start breaking up the lumps with a spoon,” he says. To get crack, you cook the cocaine on a double boiler with baking soda. For a kilo fished out of the sea you can fetch around 200,000 pesos ($10,000).

According to the experts, the cartels of Sinaloa, El Golfo and Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) control Cancun, the Maya Riviera and the coastline of Quintana Roo. The Zetas, the cartel that years before spread terror throughout Mexico, have lost power but hold on to small cells in the tourist areas. In the rest of the region, small cartels—almost family-sized—have proliferated and participate in the hustle and bustle.

The merchandise leaving Xcalak is delivered in Chetumal, and from there it travels towards the north or to Cancun—the city with the third-highest cocaine consumption in Mexico, according to the National Addictions Survey. In the other direction, a twelve-hour drive down a good highway leads from the capital of Quintana Roo to Veracruz, and it takes around twelve more to reach Brownswille. In just 24 hours, the kilo of cocaine goes from being worth $10,000 in Xcalak to costing $60,000 in Texas.

The remnants of two shipwrecks peer out from the water in front of the dock. Many ships with  a keel failed in their attempt to reach Xcalak through the coral reef. There's only one point where that can be done, with the boat lined up with both lighthouses, a true course of 283º and keeping the dock on the portside.

On the streets of Xcalak, the remnants of better days are also visible—the years when it had as many as 3,000 inhabitants, a shipyard, and even a dance hall. Back then, enormous quantities of sea snails, turtle eggs, lobster and shark left the docks for export. At the time, Xcalak “was bigger than Chetumal,” says Don Melchor, an elderly man of 75 whose birth certificate Number 2 proves he is the oldest man in town. That lasted until 1955, when Hurricane Janet swept it all away and killed a third of the population. “At the time there were many people unloading on the dock. There was even an ice factory and a movie theatre,” he remembers as he points down an empty street.

Since then, says El Guanaco with a touch of sarcasm, the village lives off three “p’s”: paseantes, pesca y paquetes—tourists, fishing and bricks. Tourists come to practice fly fishing or find the most exquisite diving, and they stay in six hotels priced at 120 dollars a night that employ around 40 people. “But fishing leaves less and less and tourists never arrive, so we have to wait for the sea to make us lucky,” he adds.

“The main activity in this village has always been coconuts, sea snails, and lobster," laments José Miguel Martín—55 years old, the lighthouse keeper—from the very top of the enormous beacon. "But there are long closed seasons, and when it became a Natural Reserve in the year 2000, possibilities became even more limited."

From the lighthouse, just a few meters from the Navy’s headquarters, there is a clear view of the comings and goings of motorbikes driven by teenagers as they carry large gas containers and head towards the runway that runs parallel to the sea, leading to the camps where they spend hours waiting, searching, and cooking. “How can I tell my son not to go when all of his friends are into that?”, the lighthouse keeper says resignedly.

Martín and his lighthouse, the port captaincy, the National Commission for Protected Areas (Conanp) and a navy base with ten marines are the only presence the State has in the place. Ironically, the most feared and hated institution in the village isn’t the Navy, but the Conanp. Its four delegates may lack the means, but they have the enthusiasm to fight for closed seasons, preventing illegal fishing and protecting the coral reef. Since the municipality has no police force, they report every single illegal activity to the Navy. And that, of course, is a big deal. In Xcalak, it’s scarier to fish during closed season that to resell a kilo of cocaine.

According to the Mexican Navy, a plane from Colombia and Venezuela crosses Quintana Roo’s air space every two days. Miguel Ángel Huerta, the general of the military zone of Chetumal who is in charge of monitoring the Caribbean, acknowledged to the media that in the first five months of this year, at least 100 flights operated by drug cartels have been detected.

***

“So, are the village parties big?”, I ask El 75.

“Have you heard of Ibiza?,” he replies arrogantly, swayed by everything that appears on MTV and cable television—the most efficient service in a village without running water. For this 24-year-old, the best party in the world is to celebrate Easter or a neighbour finding a “package” with a three-day drinking binge and firing shots in the air.

Joaquín’s nickname is “El 75” because he has a big head and long legs, like a 75-horsepower engine. The kid tries to be formal in his outings with tourists; he fills the small icebox with water and soft drinks, he carries goggles and flippers, shows them the manta rays and manatees, and offers to shift and move the boat’s Bimini top as many times as they like. But when no tourists arrive, he joins his group of friends “and sifts through el recale.” El recale—the algae amassed on the shore—is the third neologism I write down.

Joaquín explains that his uncle found one of these bricks a few years ago, but that stroke of luck ruined his life. “Since he doesn’t know how to read or write, he was cheated and given just 70,000 pesos. And then he had poor judgement, and he spent it all on alcohol and other crap that left him even worse off.”

"El 75" is deft at handling the GPS, engine, and rope, but what he’s most ashamed of—what truly makes him feel bad—is that he doesn’t know how to use cutlery. With the innocence of a child he recalls that he recently went through the most humiliating moment in his life when, during a family lunch, his relatives realized he didn’t know how to hold the fork or use the knife to cut the meat. But he has other abilities: he can instantly recognize what criminal group the merchandise belongs to, “depending on whether it’s marked with a skull, an AK 47 or a scorpion.”

The Xcalak graveyard lies on the outskirts of town, on a plot of beach sand reclaimed from the mangrove. Every day at sundown, Doña Silvia arrives with a machete and a broom and she sweeps, clips, orders and tidies up the place, because she has two children buried there. In this forgotten paradise, crack costs the same as a bottle of Coke and a bag of chips—and the consequences can be found in the cemetery. Guatemala records one suicide for every 41,666 people, according to official numbers, but in this village with fewer than one hundred graves there are at least four—and all young. “In this grave there's a 22-year-old kid that hanged himself; in that one, a 23-year-old one that hanged himself, too; in that one, another 25-year-old that threw himself from an antenna tower, and that other one....”, the woman points out as she walks among the tombstones in the prettiest, saddest cemetery in the world.

***
I seek out the delegate of Xcalak—a position that is similar to that of a mayor but with fewer powers—for an interview. Nearly a dozen testimonies point toward him and his second-in-command as the drug lords here, in association with his compadre, the mayor of Mahahual, the seat of the municipal government. They say they’re the ones in charge of buying, equipping, and paying for the camps and the merchandise. The delegate tells me he will be out of town, but he refers me to the deputy delegate, who lives on the edge of the village. 

In the shade of the bougainvilleas and the coconut trees, two friendly families are finishing their lunch. They laugh, joke around and dig out any remnants of food from their teeth with a toothpick. One of them is the family of deputy delegate Enrique Esteban Valencia, and the other is the family of the mayor of Mahahual, Obed Durán Gómez. On the checkered tablecloth lie lobster and shrimp leftovers, and four municipal policemen stand guard with their weapons hanging from their necks. Although they have no right to a seat or a family meal, they interact with naturalness with the most powerful men in the region—they’re at ease.

“What do you propose for the gulfweed?” I ask the deputy delegate. “Do you want the government to send people to clean it, as the hotel owners request?”

“They shouldn’t come; that’s not the answer. No, we don’t need anyone coming here,” the deputy delegate answers, clearly not amused at all by the possibility of crowds of strange people arriving to mess up the village’s beaches.

“How do you deal with the drug trafficking problem and the fact that young people are working in this activity?”

“I wouldn’t call it an activity. People are free to go wherever they wish. It’s not a matter that  concerns us—there are authorities for that”, he responds.

“But it’s obvious that many people are involved in beachcombing and that your village is an important entry point for drugs,” I say.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s a subject that doesn’t concern us,” responds the mayor, and his compadre nods.

“And the camps we’ve seen?” I ask.

“I don’t know what information you have, but they’re not camps. People need land to live, and if they don’t have any land, we have to give it to them,” says the mayor of Mahahual.

“Many people connect you with the purchase of merchandise found at sea.”

“They can say what they want, call me a drug trafficker or whatever, but what’s happening is that we’re doing things, and that bothers them,” the deputy delegate protests.

“What things?” I enquire.

“Fighting for our rights, so that we’re not abandoned anymore, and also against delinquency”.

“Do you want more police? Do you want the presence of the National Guard?” I ask.

“Look, we have our own way of keeping watch,” says Obed Durán, who went from being chief of police to mayor of Mahahual four months ago. “And there are three ways of dealing with [people making trouble]. First, they’re given a chance and we take them to a rehab centre without beating them up or anything. If they do it again, they are given a warning, and if they go too far again... well, a sack of lime will help me avoid many expenses,” he says with a peal of laughter so loud that his compadre straightens up and beats the table with his fist.

Evening falls on Xcalak and a light breeze moves the palm trees and boats. The translation of the Latin word alisios describes a “soft and amiable wind,” which the British later translated as “trade winds”. In this case, Xcalak's ease in creating words has managed to refine the term by combining both definitions.

II) MENNONITES: THE FOURTH NATION
Blue Creek (Belize)

The officer from the National Migration Institute (INM) emerges from his office with half the regulation uniform on: the olive-green trousers and a white tank top. The agent looks up and down, rubs his testicles, scratches his grizzled, several-days-old beard and heads back for the testicles. He’s surprised to see someone who is not a Mennonite, or black, or an inhabitant of La Unión.

The immigration office in La Unión, in the state of Quintana Roo, appears on the INM’s database as a two-storey building with air conditioning and a customer service area. In reality, the office—located 1,396 kilometres from Mexico’s capital city—is a combination of dwelling, garage, office, and chicken-coop, where the most advanced technologies are a notebook, a fan, and a hand on the testicles, which is now holding a pen, as well.

“Are you going to Belize? But there’s nothing there,” he asks and answers himself.

What the agent refers to as “nothing” is a country of 370,000 people that speak English and Creole and that recognize Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom as their head of state. At that same time, it’s also where a funeral is being held for Henry, a good guy who died from two machete blows to the head and who was known by his Mennonite friends as “El Happy.”

“There’s no one on the other side to stamp your entrance into Belize,” says the officer, “so if you’re going somewhere close, just go through.”

In the time our conversation lasts, a couple with a bicycle, four women loaded with cleaning products and a young man wearing a Barcelona T-shirt and carrying a box of beer have passed from Mexico to Belize through this heat and fly-laden place without any documents beyond raising an eyebrow. And in the opposite direction, a family of Mennonites and one more Mennonite with his Black driver. Just an eighteen-hour drive from the capital city, in that triple border shared by Mexico, Belize and Guatemala, “your face looks familiar to me” is the way of dealing with immigration records.

La Unión is the last important village in Quintana Roo—important meaning that it has a convenience store, a church, a government office (the INM) and a Navy base—in what is known as the “white trail,” as it’s one of the favourite places in the region for passing cocaine from the Caribbean towards the United States.

A road runs on the Mexican side parallel to the Río Hondo, where there are over thirty communities spread out over 100 kilometres and passports demur to border spontaneity. Hundreds of families go down the shore and cross every day to go to class, visit a relative, fall in love or buy something cheaper, even before it was referred to as contraband.

In Cocoyol, one of those communities devoted to corn and sugar cane, I meet Carmen Martínez, 48, and José Jones, 47, who get off a wooden cayuco in which they rowed from Belize, just a stone’s throw away. From their very name—"The Joneses,” as they introduce themselves—they embody the perfect mestizaje or mixing of races.

José, from Belize, is brown-skinned and muscular; his profession is that of a yerbatero or shaman, and he heals his neighbours with plants and roots from illnesses such as pneumonia, rheumatism and reptile bites. Carmen, from Mexico, is slight, has deep eyes and sells second-hand clothes on both sides of the border. They met when José crossed over to play a game of football. They liked each other, they got married and went to live to Belize because the salaries are better, but they come back to Mexico every day to eat with the family.

“My daughter studied school in English on the other side (Belize) and now works in a hotel in Cancún,” says Carmen, proud of having raised her daughter in a bilingual world.

“No one monitors the crossing” when going from one side to the other, but sometimes the Navy “makes it complicated for you when, for example, you bring a live animal, such as a suckling pig for Christmas, so it’s better to let the soldiers know first,” she explains just a few steps from the military base.

In terms of what she likes about one country and the other, Carmen criticizes the brutality that has made Belizean police sadly famous. “In Mexico there is more respect for human rights. Even with corruption and bribes there is a ritual, but in Belize it’s all the same to them and agents extort you and take your money right in front of everyone”, she says.

Throughout the route, there are myriad unmonitored accesses such as the one on Cocoyol. But if you want “action,” go to San Francisco Botes, suggests another young person that describes it as “the Tijuana of Río Hondo”.

Surrounded by lush greenery, on the outskirts of the Calakmun Biosphere Reserve, San Francisco Botes is a village of 400 people and far removed from Tijuana. However, he’s right when he describes it as the main, unmonitored crossing for goods, animals and people in the area. When I arrive mid-morning to the Botes pier, I feel as if someone had suddenly switched off the music—everyone stops doing what they were doing with this stranger’s arrival: the young man unloading boxes whistles towards the sky, the boatman looks at the floor and the woman unloading merchandise from the pickup returns to her car and shuts the door to avoid awkward questions.

The borders between the poor are practical spaces that have to do with survival, with love or with a suckling pig for Christmas, where everyday life prevails over patriotic symbols. They’re places of crossings and exchanges, where the boatman is the taxi driver from Acapulco or Reynosa; the man that would rather be silent and never ask whether he’s transporting peasants, migrants or guns.

Prudence is the best answer in an area where, in the last year, some ten “narco planes” fell among the sugarcane plantations, according to the local press that keeps a tally of the findings. In this remote setting, the night-time hum of Cessnas, Rockwells or Jets with their lights switched off is a frequent drone above one’s head, accompanied on land by an effective network of collaborators that provide fuel next to secret landing strips. When the Navy found the last plane in March, just a few kilometres from here, there were also two pickup trucks with one thousand litres of jet fuel amidst the underbrush. The most recent, brazen case took place in December, when a plane landed softly around 3:30 in Chetumal’s international airport. By the time airport security reacted, both pilots had already escaped by leaping over the fence and abandoning a 15-passenger Jet Hawker on the runway with a ton and half of cocaine on board.

“Of course you hear planes every day,” says the agent from La Union—who would rather not give his name for fear of retaliation from his superiors—as he leans against the door of his office. “All sorts of stuff happens on this side of the border without anyone doing anything about it. You may not believe it, but the big stuff doesn't cross right here,” he informs me when a man shows up with a box of Mexican beer in each hand, walking towards Belize. “Right there vehicles calmly come and go,” he points with his chin at the dry area of the river he has before him, some 50 metres from the station.

For the border agent, who is ticked off at his institution and at life, the increase in criminal activity in the region has to do with Mexico’s new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Since he took office in December 2018, the president has had his sights set on the Migration Institute, whose secretary Alejandro Encinas described as “the most corrupt body in Mexico”—something akin to graduating magna cum laude in French at the Sorbonne. Since then, 67 public servants have been expelled from the office in Chetumal, and in other places such as Tapachula (Chiapas), the level of decay was such that the government directly decided to close the entire migratory station, leaving hundreds of migrants in limbo.

“We have been humiliated and offended. They have expelled many coworkers without an explanation and  that’s not fair,” he protests. The officer misses those heavy-handed times when there were “surprise operations” and he participated in raids to detain Central Americans. Although numbers confirm that those days are back—in the months of April and May 2019, deportations of migrants were 68% higher than those under Enrique Peña Nieto in the same period the previous year—the agent blames the border chaos on Lopez Obrador’s “open doors” policy and the arrival of migrant caravans that, he says, “spread viruses and disease throughout the villages they cross.”

***

On the other side of the river, on the Belizean side, two huge, shirtless Black officers laugh as they watch a TV show at the customs guard house in Blue Creek. It's an austere, prefabricated cabin with a table, a television set, and a couch that’s falling apart, where both hulking officers watch their favorite episode with their guns and the remote placed on the armrests.

“If you’re just going to be in the Mennonite area, let’s go, let’s go,” one of them yells, mixing languages and waving his hand in the air. Without ungluing his gaze from the screen, the imposing officer opens the door to a new world and one of the most contrasting images of the border.

On one side, La Unión—the last village in Mexico—is chaotic, Catholic, rural, and somewhat grimy; people grow sugar cane and chug down beer as if it were water. On the other side, Blue Creek—the first village in Belize—is conservative, efficient, high-tech, Protestant; people speak old German and it’s impossible to find a drop of alcohol. It’s a disconcerting place that was designed to be otherwise.

Spread out through countries such as Canada, Mexico, Paraguay and Bolivia, Mennonites are a Protestant group that emerged in the 16th century, with over one million believers in Latin America. It is a pacifist current born in what today is Switzerland, Germany and Poland, and they have been persecuted and forced to migrate through countries such as France, Russia and Canada since their break with the Catholic Church and the Lutheran Reformation in 1536.

Blue Creek is not a village per se; it’s a community of over eight hundred Mennonite families that live in American-style houses, with porches and gable roofs, scattered among perfectly sown fields connected by impeccably paved and well-lit roads. In Blue Creek, which is 20 kilometres from tip to tip, there aren’t people wandering around; there isn’t a scrap of paper on the ground or a drunkard or a plaza or a Town Hall or a bar. It’s poultry slaughterhouses and fields of rice, beans, palm oil trees and mahogany as far as the eye can see. In the only shop in town, which also serves a bank and a civic centre, everyone—mainly white, almost transparent, and covered in freckles, and a few Salvadoran workers—greets each as their paths meet.

Blue Creek is twinned with two other Mennonite communities, Shypyard and Spanish Lookout, where around 3,000 families live. They are both ultraconservative and have renounced electricity and move around in horse-drawn carriages.

Few borders in the world can provide as much visual contrast as the one separating the United States and Mexico. In places such as Ciudad Juárez and El Paso or Tijuana and San Diego, masses of sheet-plate houses rise across from golf courses drawn with draughtman’s squares and triangles. Some 3,600 kilometres from that border, at the one separating La Unión from Blue Creek, the image repeats itself: one of the most forsaken places in Mexico lies across from one of the most efficient ones in the world. In this remote corner, Mexican workers flee to the rice fields when they see us arrive, thinking that we’re the Belizean migration authorities to detain them, instead of journalists from El País and El Faro.

Mennonites arrived from Chihuahua, Mexico, to that Caribbean nation almost 60 years ago with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The government of Belize (which was still known then as the British Honduras) gave them over 85,000 acres (almost 35,000 hectares) in the northernmost tip of the country, with lush hills covered in kapok, mango and mahogany trees, of which not a scrap is left.

In exchange for lands and autonomy, they began to produce like mad and today they are the engine behind the country’s food production. Mennonites produce 95% of the poultry eaten in Belize and 80% of the corn, rice, bean and sorghum that reach the table. They live in a parallel, separate world that operates with religious, fiscal and educational independence, where children are taught class in medieval German. They also have their own health system, police, a network of roads and even a small hydraulic centre.

But the power garnered by a handful of families that look like they just stepped off the boat from Central Europe provokes mistrust among the governing class of Belize, which is not prepared  for economic surprises that don’t come from Great Britain. “We’re aware that we spark suspicion and envy and they want to take our independence away from us”, admits Rubén Fonseca, mayor of Blue Creek.

Drug trafficking can be a good argument to put an end to it. The planes that enter through the Caribbean find these perfectly plowed fields the ideal spot to land and stock up and, since January 2019, at least one burned out plane appears in the village every month, Fonseca confirms.

As well as being the mayor, Rubén Fonseca is a shareholder of the powerful Caribbean Chicken company, which produces one third of the chickens eaten in Belize. But he arrives at the interview with his hands dirty from the slaughterhouse, his checkered shirt stained with oil and wearing his work boots. He belongs to the modern Mennonites—the ones that use cell phones, trucks, and download apps—and he’s the father of three blonde children that look like they came straight out of a perfume ad.

Fonseca admits that there are several Mennonites arrested for drug trafficking and that the matter is damaging the community’s reputation. “But that goes beyond us and the governments of countries themselves. When we hear a plane crash, we don’t do anything; we let everything burn and we don’t get involved in that,” he explains in an exotic language that mixes Hollywood English, Spanish learned from the fieldworkers and German from the times of Menno Simons, the founder of their community who died in 1561.

“In the seventies and eighties this was madness,” he remembers with regards to the years in which Mexican drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as the “Lord of the Skies,” and Colombian Pablo Escobar discovered that small planes were the best way of introducing a ton of cocaine into Mexico or the United States, flying low and without lights so as to not be detected by radars. “That ended in the nineties, but now the zone is active again,” says Fonseca, pointing at the perfect two-kilometre road that slices the barley fields like a knife through butter. “Even two planes have been seen to refuel in one day,” he explains.

Fonseca admits that the place is perfect for an operation done in a matter of minutes: the pilot sends the coordinates, a crew lights up the runway with cans and cloths soaked in gasoline, the plane lands and unloads, and in a short time the merchandise is on the Mexican side, on its way to Escárcega and the Gulf of Mexico, one of the main points of passage for drugs and migrants.

Abraham Rempel—another one of the successful men in the community—is dressed in jeans and a worn-out shirt. He is a pilot and the owner of one of the companies that fumigates the Mennonite fields. Rempel recognizes that it is tempting to work for the drug traffickers and knows of several cases of pilots he trained himself who were never heard of again. Rempel explains that two types of planes reach Blue Creek: “The King Airs, which cover short areas and land on a runway less than one kilometre long, and the Jets, which are faster but less autonomous, and need a long runway they can only find here,” he explains in hesitant Spanish.

***

“Happy wouldn't have liked this,” says one of his best friends at his funeral. Wrapped up as he is in a burial shroud, placed in a box, with a grimace whitened with rice dust, 35-year-old Henry’s nickname is the worst, considering he’s the protagonist of a wake. If he were to sit up right now and glance around, he’d see an old lady shooing flies off his face with a feather duster, four more women crying and one hundred men in black repeating a 16th-century mortuary prayer. Thanks to the old women’s taxidermic work, the two machete wedges on his skull can’t be seen.

In 1966, the Mennonite communities in the north of Belize split into Blue Creek and Shypyard, physically close but socially differentiated. The first one, with around 800 families, was in favour of modernity, new technologies and the industrialization of the countryside. The second, around 3,000 families, chose an orthodox line, and not even the electric company has been able to take power to the village.

In Shypyard they use iron wheels, candles as light, wood for cooking, animals for working the fields, and music is forbidden. It goes without saying that in the most boring place in the world there isn’t a movie theatre, a library or a park, and the main crime committed by young people is secretly using a cell phone. “El Happy” had fled from all of this many years ago when he met people that played the guitar and listened to the radio, reminisces his friend as she stands in front of the coffin.

Arriving at the funeral is a journey through time, the perfect set design for a period movie. Dozens of horse-drawn carts await at the entrance. Outside, a bunch of very white, blond, neatly-brushed children dressed with overalls are waiting. They don’t shout or play or run or pull the other kids’ hair. They are dressed in short-sleeved shirts that had extra sleeves sewn on to them, so that today they are long-sleeved. The women wear headdresses and long black felt frocks with stockings, never mind the 40 degrees temperature. Inside, the men in suspenders with their shirts buttoned up to their neck, their cheeks ruddy from the sun and their hands large from working the fields, recite passages from the Gesangbuch, the book of prayers, as they stand next to the body.

Nobody wants to explain what happened to “El Happy.” All they know is he got two machete blows to the head and then was found dumped in an irrigation canal. Whether he was mixed up in drug problems, it was a drunken binge, or sheer recklessness, no one wants to talk about it or look into it, or even know about it.

Meanwhile, the funereal drone enters its sixth hour without changing its rhythm or cadence, and the Mennonite silence spreads its cloak over the community. Its survival depends on it.

III) PUERTO BARRIOS: FEAR ON DRY LAND

(Puerto Barrios, Guatemala)

The cab driver turns the steering wheel of the old Toyota with his arms stiff like baseball bats and without shifting his eyes from the rear-view mirror as we move through Puerto Barrios.

“Look, I’m not in the mood for bullshit,” he mutters under his breath to the passenger.
The door won't close, the windshield has two cracks held together with brown tape, and a bunch of wires peek out from the hole meant for a radio. But Adrian demands that I don’t slam the door, that I pay with change, and that my feet don’t damage the upholstery on a car that looks like it just emerged from Aleppo’s zone zero.

The driver sweats profusely and only moves his gaze from the mirror to rub his face with the sleeve of his shirt. The only friendly gesture of the afternoon is aimed at another taxi driver, with a honk of the horn and the movement of a hand when they cross each other. Caribbean warmth never climbed into this taxi, and the man gets a bit more irked because of what he considers to be an absurd route. And, as a matter of fact, it is.

The two men that just exchanged greetings and honks participated three months ago in a mass beating just a few streets from here, in which two young scoundrels were stoned and kicked to death. On Monday, February 18, 2019, both cab drivers were part of the crowd of between 500 and 700 people that applauded the arrival of the grand finale like the curtain falling after a show.

That moment arrived at nearly nine in the evening, when after receiving any and all imaginable kicks, someone threw a match on the gasoline-doused body of Oliver González. When only the charred trunk of the 18-year-old kid remained convulsing on the pavement, they would approach him to spit on him and yell “Thief!” at him. From farther behind, the less violent ones yelled “Yes we can!” and recorded the scene with their phones.

Meanwhile, the taxi drivers were venting their rage on Víctor Reyes, 19 years old, at the scrum right next door. He had been dragged by the hair, his stomach was jumped on and he had been beaten with a traffic sign and a brick. During the last half hour, the crowd kicked his head like a rugby ball. His father’s arrival didn’t stop the roughly five hundred cabbies, neighbours, and spontaneous passers-by. When the old man grabbed a machete and stood between the boy and the beasts, his son was a dying, bloody wreck. The man’s bravery lasted until someone yelled, “Burn the old man, too!”

Six months ago, the violent Barrio 18 gang arrived in town and began to demand the payment of weekly quotas from cab drivers, explains the chief of police at the station. So, one by one, the union leaders received warnings, always the same way: a guy pulling up on his motorcycle next to the driver, throwing a cheap phone at him as he uttered a single sentence: “Watch it, they’re going to call you on that in a bit.”

After resisting for three months, the town’s one thousand cab drivers finally agreed to deliver the gang a first payment of 150,000 quetzales ($20,000), corresponding to 150 quetzales ($20) per week per car. In reality, the payment was a trap to catch the extortionists when they picked up the money. And they succeeded, and turned them over to the police.

But those that wanted more, those that were asking for revenge instead of justice, began to warm up the taxi’s channel and WhatsApp groups with messages stating that they were going to be released due to lack of evidence. So people began to arrive to the police station and crowd together in front of the metal fence. Things began to heat up more, until the thugs were finally dragged out by their hair and turned over to the mob.

Three months after the lynching, the stifling air and tropical calm have returned to the place. At times, even the vehicle seems to have been invaded with dead calm—until, at a quarter to nine in the evening, the crotchety man slams on the brakes and finally lets out everything he’s been holding inside: “Look, buddy, I don’t go down those streets anymore. And another thing. I can’t work for you anymore. We’re done here.”

Why?

“Because of the time", he says, putting an end to our conversation.

After the lynching, the gang’s answer was to begin hunting down taxi drivers. Through a message on Facebook signed by El Barrio 18, the gang threatened they would begin killing “those son-of-a-bitch taxi drivers one by one” and announced a curfew from seven in the evening, threatening to put an end to whoever circulated after that time.

The threat soon became a reality. Just a few days later, instead of delivering cell phones from the motorcycles that pulled up next to them, it was bullets to the head. An attempt every two weeks has left four drivers dead and two more hanging between life and death. The gang is demanding the heads of the taxi driver leaders. When one of them turned down an interview for this article, he—a man the size of a wardrobe—did so weeping. He had been shut up in his house for three months. “The gang members want to kill me, the police wants to arrest me, and I can’t even work anymore to earn a living”, he sobbed.

Before stepping on the gas and saying goodbye with a grunt, Adrian—who requested his name be changed in exchange for telling his story—wipes off his sweat again. He’s spent the last two hours without losing every motorcycle from sight that appears in the rear-view mirror. Now the passenger is sweating, too. The Finns have more than 40 words for snow and painters recognize 105 types of red. In the most suffocating city in Guatemala, heat also comes in many shades.

***
Puerto Barrios, located on the Caribbean coast of Guatemala, between Belize and Honduras, is the largest city in the department of Izabal, and is a five-hour drive away from the capital. A hostile, dusty city with around 260,000 inhabitants, in the past few years it is constantly listed among the ten most violent cities in Guatemala. It is also the seat of the municipal government for places such as Morales, el Estor and Livingston, where the maritime mystique was buried by more mundane ingredients such as the coming and going of trucks, drug trafficking and corruption. It is a city with a “sickly climate,” as defined by the mission of explorers sent by the government in 1902 to describe this remote place with 40-degree temperatures and 90% humidity.

Puerto Barrios is a flat, sprawling city where almost all the streets end up at the sea. The market is the vital core of an urban spread built with half-finished houses that have metal rods poking out, topped with a soft-drink bottle on the tip. In Puerto Barrios there isn’t a building that is taller than three storeys, or an escalator, and the recreation spots are the Pollo Campero fast-food restaurants and the tiny pier where children play in the shade of the containers that belong to Chikita, the banana multinational. Life in Barrios revolves around two ports—a public one, Santo Tomás de Castilla, and a private one, built by the United Fruit Company, which provides direct employment to some 5,000 people. The main streets are a constant uproar of trucks bringing out bananas, palm oil, and nickel, 24/7, and bringing plastics from Colombia or car wrecks from the United States for resale.

Puerto Barrios could have been an idyllic place, surrounded by jungles, bays, isles with white sand and crystalline waters, but more than half the streets are unpaved and water and electricity disappear just as naturally as the waves come and go. In this gateway of Guatemala to the Caribbean, it's easier to die run over by a 28-ton truck than from a coconut falling on your head.

Barrios is the ugly tip of Guatemala’s only exit to the Atlantic. It is a 148-kilometre stretch of coast between Honduras and Belize, six hours from the border with Mexico, a key place for transfers between Central America and the islands of the Caribbean.

The port’s importance is bolstered by a topography that is as jagged as a madman's encephalogram. An infinite array of entrances and exits from the coast, concealed by palm trees, mahoganies and kapoks, make this place a comfortable place for stopovers and arrivals of planes and boats in the revitalized cocaine route uniting the Caribbean with Mexico through Río Dulce and Petén.

In the mid-eighties, over 75% of all the cocaine seized as it was going to the USA was intercepted in the Caribbean. The region had lost importance since the times of the Medellín cartel, however, when Pablo Escobar used Norman's Cay in the Bahamas as a refueling spot for planes en route to the US.

The volume of drugs passing through the Caribbean fell 10% in 2010, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration. But the US State Department considers that the route is experiencing a second wind and, thanks to the prominence of the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, the flow of drugs has quadrupled over the last few years. The United States considers that nearly 80% of the cocaine it consumes passes through Guatemala, and that the Central American country barely seizes 0.5% of it, according to data provided by president Jimmy Morales, who has described the quantities of drug seized since he came into power in 2016 as a “record.”

That same year, the infamous drug trafficker Marllory Chacón declared in a Florida court that her former associates, the Lorenzanas—one of the family clans that has traditionally dominated drug trafficking in Guatemala—received at least five shipments of cocaine of between one and two tons in their ranch in Puerto Barrios. The drug arrived on speedboats from Colombia after a refuelling stop in Panama. Thanks to that confession, Chacón, who had been condemned to 12 years in a US prison, obtained her freedom in March.

Puerto Barrios is also one of those places criminal groups from the US find easy to choose for introducing weapons to Central America, the most violent region in the world. In 2016 and 2017, the tax revenue agency (SAT) reported the seizure of over ten containers from the US and Panama headed to the port of Santo Tomás de Castilla with guns, rifles, handguns and ammunition, which makes Izabal the second department with the most weapons seized after the capital, according to the SAT.

In the opposite direction, Puerto Barrios is important because it is an exit point for thousands of exotic animals, the third most lucrative illicit business after weapons and drugs. According to the Wild Conservation Society (WCS), a scarlet macaw from Belize or Guatemala—two of the countries with the greatest biodiversity in the world—could fetch up to 3,000 dollars on the black market after a previously agreed online purchase.

“This place’s geography is damn rough and these waters are almost always calm. They’re ideal for moving at night,” says the policeman from Barrios, a mid-rank officer with 15 years in the force, who, weary of having to fix the patrol car himself, comes with me to do a night patrol in exchange for anonymity. Pointing at the Bay of Manabique, he says, "Just in the area we have before us, we’ve counted up to 98 easy accesses for unloading. And yes, more police cars have been purchased to watch over all of that, but not a single motorboat, not a single motorbike,” he adds as he looks at the lights of Puerto Castilla in the background.

During our round we pass through one of the streets of the neighbourhood of El Estrecho, where police officers enter somewhat tentatively—not because it’s violent, but because they don’t even have motorcycles to be able to drive through the mud. Houses are built right up by the sea, there are dirt streets and no basic services, and families spend their time sitting on chairs outside the doors of their houses. With a mixture of resignation and pride, the officer remembers that Puerto Barrios “doesn’t give a damn about what happens in the capital, because here they look toward the Caribbean countries with which they share a border.”

“Is it true that the gangs have arrived, as the official version claims?,” I ask in reference to Barrio 18.

"No,” he replies. “Most are the same gangs as always, with different names.”

***
A few kilometres from Puerto Barrios, in the towns of Río Dulce or Livingston, hundreds of young backpackers from all over the world laugh, drink and fill up the restaurants meant for tourists. But Puerto Barrios has been excluded from the privileged route and spits out its visitors. Few want to stay in a place where one thousand 28-ton trucks pass through and the only decent hotel dates back to the days of Tarzan, so the bravest tourists reach the pier and then escape as fast as they can toward the other end of the bay.

The ship crews, made up of Filipino, Liberian and Chinese sailors, don't even disembark, because they’re afraid of getting mugged. The wheeling and dealing and magic of the wharf with its bars and its brothels was gobbled up by enormous cranes that can empty out a freighter in six hours.

The port of Santo Tomás de Castilla is a miniature city that operates 24 hours a day and creates 2,500 direct jobs and as many indirect ones. Cranes with enormous arms move frantically from side to side, lifting boxes and piling them one on top of the other onto the trucks waiting in a single line.

Since the seventies, the ports of the Guatemalan Atlantic have been used as a cocaine corridor. From here, you can reach Miami in six hours by sea, and drugs would be camouflaged in containers with fruits, green vegetables or shrimp. It was a business basically controlled by Cuban exiles in Miami and Guatemala who had the protection of the army and of a few local entrepreneurs committed to the anti-Castro cause. Drug exports in those years made Guatemalan and Cuban entrepreneurs millionaires. Later, the business remained in hands of small local cartels that opened up to the trafficking of migrants and animals, but who depended on Mexican cartels.

In a warehouse in the port, two narcotics agents look through a container that arrived from Colombia. In its latest report on drugs in early June, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addictions warned about the spike in cocaine shipments reaching its coasts, purer every time, in containers arriving from Africa and the Caribbean.

According to the United Nations, 90% of world trade is moved through ships, but barely 2% is inspected. The organization has set in motion a program to strengthen oversight, aware as they are that ports are the easiest way in.

“We check almost everything arriving from Colombia, Venezuela or Panama," says one of the agents before ordering that the cargo be put back in place, after checking that it only held millions of Styrofoam glasses and plates for serving fast food.

“Do you have a scanner?,” I ask the agent.

"No, not yet."”

“So how do you check almost 1,000 containers that move through here every day?”

"We select suspicious countries such as Venezuela, Colombia or Panamá," he answers.

“How many dogs do you have?”

"Three, but only one is working now. Her name is Molly," he says, referring to the Belgian shepherd playing with a chunk of bone.

Puerto Castilla doesn't have a walk-in freezer for inspections, so insurance companies threaten lawsuits in the millions against the ports in case the cargo is damaged. Subsequently, agents limit themselves to checking tin cans, plastics, and vehicles at a rate of around 10 a day, almost 1% of the total, which also includes containers suspected of fiscal fraud. Of the 40 police officers on the team, eight are on narcotics, spread out over three shifts: two officers per shift to monitor the passage of one thousand containers per day. And Molly.

Experts consider that there is more and more oversight in Mexican ports and that the trafficking of chemical components for producing drugs has been sidetracked to Guatemala. For decades, the port of Santo Tomás de Castilla was operated by the army, and in the last few years it has become the perfect booty for the political class, thanks to the intricate network of businesses, providers, clients and operations moving in the port through which 30% of the country's trade passes. The previous president, Otto Pérez Molina, and his vice president, Roxana Baldetti, were jailed in 2015, among other things for drafting fake contracts for providing the place with cranes, in a case known as La Línea.

“The State isn’t absent here; there's looting, because of course there are [public servants and politicians] here, but they’re here to steal," a union leader who would rather not give her name because of the serious threats she has received explains in her office just a few metres from the port.

***
After a long interview on the marvels of Izabal, the governor lets out a loud sigh. For one hour and four minutes, Erik Bosbelli Martínez, sitting in his wood-lined office, had been explaining that it is the second largest department in Guatemala, that it has been "blessed by God" with the vast quantity of natural resources it holds, that it provides the State with 4% of revenue in mines, tourism and ports, and that it's the only department that has a border with the Caribbean.

As he speaks, the governor is standing beneath an enormous portrait of President Jimmy Morales and another one of himself hugging his wife. But when he explains why five governors have passed through the position in less than three years, the institutional airs evaporate: "It's too conflictive," he sniffs.

In contrast with Mexico, governors in Guatemala are decorative figures with barely any budget. Bosbelli recognizes that the maximum legacy he can aspire to leave behind during his administration is a clean river. Gangs and immigrants from Honduras are the most serious problem he has had to deal with since he accepted the position seven months ago.

“Are the gangs behind the deaths of cab drivers?,” I ask.

"Yes, well, them and the Honduran migrants that pass in the caravans nearby, near Corinto," he answers.

“The migrants or the gang members?”

"Well, they're migrants that want to be gang members."

“But they're different things...”

"Well, yes, best ask the police."

The equivalence drawn between being a gang member and a migrant, a technique used before by US President Donald Trump, provides the perfect excuse for ineptitude.

***
Joseph Conrad portrayed port cities as places where fevers and stories were exchanged, whereas for Maqroll, the sailor penned by Colombian writer Álvaro Mutis, they were the nebulous threshold between the sea and firm land. Important ports are measured through the illustrious personages that lived there. Bowles and Hemingway made Tangiers and Havana immortal, but anodyne ports settle for knowing who passed through them.

Three noted characters have passed through Puerto Barrios in the last century. In 1935, actor Bruce Benett slept here for a few nights during the shooting of The New Adventures of Tarzan. Livingston's Black residents and Izabal's Mayas provided a perfect combination for filming their scenes of savages interacting with the white man.

Nearly 20 years later, in 1954, Ernesto Ché Guevara was in Barrios during his second trip through Latin America. He was twenty-five years old and worked for a few weeks in the port unloading barrels of tar, he confessed to his mother in a letter. El Che wanted to get first-hand knowledge of the renovating airs of socialism of Jacobo Arbenz, who dared expropriate part of the United Fruit Company’s lands, which until then owned 50% of all cropland in Guatemala.

An hour’s drive from Puerto Barrios is the municipality of Morales. To get here you have to follow the route to the Atlantic and take a detour at kilometre 245, by the gas station in La Ruidosa. The service station's door has a bullet hole in the window; it looks like the macabre warning that we have reached the land of the Mendozas.

Morales is a village with little charm, where the only noteworthy elements are the homes of the drug lords living there. However, it is located at a strategic crossroads communicating the coasts of Guatemala and Honduras with inland Mexico, through El Petén. The drug lords concentrate the power in these towns that have no more bars or fiestas than those allowed by them. In other words, very few. Morales has been for the Mendozas what Sicily was for the Corleones, the place from which they have operated their illegal enterprises and run a network of businesses in transportation, construction, and gas stations owned by them.

This is a family clan whose name is pronounced in hushed tones, just like that of the Lorenzanas or the Leóns. In Guatemala, as opposed to Mexico, two or even three large drug families can coexist in the same place, as is the case in Izabal, Petén or Zacapa. On the Caribbean coast and the border with Honduras, nothing moves without their knowledge, and that's why it was the zone chosen as a hiding place in 2011 by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the third renowned visitor that has passed through Barrios.

After the death of the Mendoza family patriarch, his four sons (Obdulio, Milton, Alfredo and Haroldo) took the reins of the business and currently own lands and homes in Morales and Petén. The residences of the Morales stand out from all the rest. The one belonging to Haroldo Mendoza—arrested in 2014, accused of massacre, forced disappearance, and property theft—is an enormous salmon-coloured dwelling with a gym in the lower floor. Obdulio's has a stone facade and a tiled roof with small lanterns. His brother Edwin has a white gate that is half a block long, and Haroldo’s other property is a beautiful house with bougainvilleas, balconies and a tiled roof.

All of these and five more buildings were searched simultaneously during a police operation in 2014. According to Iván Velásquez, the head of the UN's international commission against impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), the structure directed by Haroldo Mendoza "wasn't just any old gang" but "a private army that had the population of Izabal beaten down."

Although the last name still sparks respect and fear, the police officer that accompanies me on the round recognizes they have lost a lot of power and don't have the fire power they used to have or the strong links to political power. The capture of the Mendoza drug lord in 2014, the Chapo Guzmán in 2016, and in 2017 of Sergio Mejía, alias El Compa, who operated the Sinaloa cartel, “has weakened them, and there are new, smaller groups that close their deals over in Colombia," the police officer sums up.

Back in Barrios again, a line of 400-horsepower, 20-wheel Kenworth trucks crosses the port like a buffalo stampede.

Among the dive bars that survive in this decadence is the Medellín, a brothel right across from the port. It’s a place so sordid that calling it a night club would distort the concept. Fifteen drunkards are staring at the dance pole, deafened by the reggaetón music, while European football images appear on the screens. Over at Exa, the other brothel, drinks are 15 pesos more expensive (less than a dollar), because it has air conditioning, explains Virginia, a Honduran prostitute that is around 20 years old. Virginia hates Puerto Barrios but offers a lesson in adaptation when she explains how, last week, she managed to close a deal for oral sex with a Chinese client thanks to Google Translate.

It's almost midnight and I have to find a cab. The surprising thing is that someone arrives, despite the current curfew. In the end, Puerto Barrios, like Conrad's sailors, has no future, but it has a destiny and more literary worth than it would seem.