The town is hidden away. Its strip of land is patrolled by vultures, guarded by the Pacific Ocean and the leaves of banana trees. To get to San José El Hueyate, one must travel all the way down a single, small road that leads to this stretch of Mexico's Chiapas coast, close to the Guatemala border. This road is flanked by a few scattered homes and, often, agricultural fields on which nothing is being grown. The town begins where a cluster of palapas -- open-sided dwellings with a thatched roof made of dried palm leaves -- appears.
On October 21, 2024, Cindy Bueso, her baby Daniel and her three-year-old daughter Valentina were in one of the first palapas. It was there that the young Honduran said goodbye to her mother and joined a group who boarded a boat bound for Oaxaca. They were never seen again.
Further on, near a tortilla shop, on a fenced-in lot, there is an unfinished concrete building with bars on its windows. It is the most recondite building on the block. Jorge Lozada, Elianis Morejón, Meiling Bravo, Samei Reyes, Lorena Rosabal, Dayranis Tan, Ricardo Hernández, Jefferson Quindil and Karla stayed there for a couple of days, along with dozens of other people. On December 21, 2024, they got into two boats and set out on the ocean. Somewhere near the shore, their trail disappeared.
The group of 23 migrants who left by boat a little further south from Puerto Madero, also never arrived Oaxaca. They vanished on September 5, leaving behind only a final farewell video. In the last four months of 2024, in the midst of a migration crisis in Mexico, in the final days before Donald Trump's return to the White House, at least 83 migrants disappeared. A year later no one besides their families is looking for them.
Mexico's southern border has been, for a long time, a land of poverty. Chiapas, the country's poorest state, has received thousands of those dreaming of a new life in the United States. They crossed on foot, in hopeful caravans. But in 2020, the door was closed and they became trapped between the cruelty of immigration officers and the perils of seeking asylum in Tapachula, a city that is both snare and refuge. The precarious, stratified town of some 350,000 inhabitants has never had the necessary infrastructure to offer work nor dignity to those who wind up sleeping, sick and hungry, in its parks and on its street corners. Still, even back then, true terror seemed far away.
Owners of the palapas can recall a time before la maña -- criminal gangs -- began to cause trouble. It seems remote and improbable now, but up until 2022, the total control the Sinaloa Cartel had over the state had made Chiapas one of the safest in the country. But the group's in-fighting and an offensive by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel turned the borderland into a dangerous territory. The narcos wanted everything. "And the migrants were a gold mine," sums up a humanitarian organization worker.
Illegal human trafficking has always taken place in the area. A family would have a taxi and use it to transport migrants north; or they had a boat and moved them by sea. "Many families here got rich like that," says Israel Hernández, a town legislator from Puerto Madero, the closest beach town to Tapachula. It was an illicit trade, but also small-scale. Two of the biggest risks associated with these attempts were shipwrecks and arrests.
"Until the end of 2023, we received messages from family members in countries of origin to tell us that their loved ones had disappeared. We found 90 to 95% of them at the Siglo XXI migration detention center. Nearly all of them were there," says a representative from the Fray Matías de Córdova Center of Human Rights. The Siglo XXI immigration facility, which is still trying to distance itself from abuse allegations, is one of the biggest detention centers in Latin America and a symbol of the migration crisis. "All that changed in 2024. The people we were looking for could no longer be found at Siglo XXI. We couldn't find them. It is closely linked to the violence that was growing in Tapachula," says the representative.
Last year, conflict between the cartels began to leave visible cracks in the borderlands. Humanitarian organizations consider it an unrecognized civil conflict, which has already displaced more than 10,000 people within the state and left a long trail of crimes. With local authorities implicated in many municipalities, and the federal government missing in action, horror awaited the migrants who crossed the Suchiate River into Chiapas.
No one entered the state without paying a quota. There were two kinds of migrants: those who had come with their coyote -- a service they had paid for -- and those who came on their own, walking, on buses and rafts. The latter were hunted on their passage from Ciudad Hidalgo to Tapachula, on a 19-mile road upon which thousands of migrants were kidnapped in 2024. In these express operations, they were put in cages, told to pay about $50, and remained locked up until the cash was produced. Upon being released, they were given a stamp that authorized their ongoing travel. This became a massive, mandatory system, according to testimonies from dozens of migrants and organizations. The price for those who tried to avoid capture was, in many cases, death. Forced labor or disappearance were the most common outcomes for those who could not pay. The stamp, a black mark resembling a rooster or bird, was key to identifying those who had already paid their dues to the cartel. Between January and August of 2024 -- when Mexico's Ministry of the Interior ended its official tally -- 315,000 migrants entered Chiapas.
In the midst of this turmoil, Camille Villa and her daughter Charlotte arrived, as did the four members of the Calvache family; Doris Godos and her son Julio; Luis Ángel Suárez and Juan Sebastián Martínez; Mohammad Ali and Mohammad Sob; Cindy Bueso and her children Valentina and Daniel; Elianis Morejón and Dairanis Tan; Jorge Lozada and Lorena Rosabal; Jefferson Quindil, Ricardo Hérnandez and Karla; Meiling Álvarez and her son Samei. They came on different dates, and from different countries. They had left the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Jordan, Cuba, Honduras and Colombia. All had made the trip with different coyotes, received their stamp upon entering Tapachula, and arrived at safe houses located on the Chiapas coast. From there, they were meant to have boarded boats bound for Juchitán de Zaragoza, in Oaxaca, a strategic point for trafficking networks, which proceed by land to Mexico City. Their families had paid for them to arrive in the Mexican capital. They did not arrive. It is unclear if they drowned. When asked by EL PAÍS, Mexico's Secretary of the Navy said had not identified any shipwrecks, accidents or rescues in the area during the dates in question. All signs suggest that the migrants were intercepted by organized crime.
Their families had paid the extortion fee, yet had received no proof of life other than a list of 40 names, passports and signatures. Out of all of them, there have only been sightings of Bueso and her children, who were reportedly seen in Puerto Madero. The United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances has issued urgent measures demanding that the Mexican government conduct an immediate search.
But a year after the migrants' disappearance, Mexican authorities have not even called family members for interviews, requested their phones be tracked or examined call lists. EL PAÍS contacted the Chiapas Migrant Attornry General's Office, which has been assigned the case, but by the time of publication, had yet to receive any response. "We have been fighting against indifference and inaction," says Alicia Santos, the mother of Jorge Lozada, from Cuba, expressing a sentiment shared by other mothers and sisters: "We have exhausted all available resources. We have filed complaints, petitioned the authorities, and turned over information. Does the life of a migrant have no value in Mexico?"
That's a brown hawk. That's a blue heron, and behind it is a chiripera. And there's the one that around here they call cuate (because it goes "cua cua cua"), it goes by the "scientific name" of "spatula bird." The boat operator drifts through the mangrove swamp, naming birds. He has worked his entire life in this area, the Barra de San José, where the river flows into the sea, connecting the town to the Pacific Ocean. He has seen many migrants in recent years leave, going north on boats like his. He says he has oftentimes felt sad upon seeing how they are mistreated. Those who take the migrants come into town to load up on gasoline. "They say they are bringing them to Oaxaca," he says.
"You can't say anything to that," he continues. "You just can't -- no, no, no, no, no, no."
"But you don't see them anymore," he says hurriedly, anxious to put an end to the discussion. "Now things are calm when they pass through, though sometimes we feel unsafe because they have told you, 'Someone is causing problems.' But that kind of person is gone. No one knows them, no one knows what their names were."
Fewer than 1,000 people live in San José El Hueyate. It is an isolated and poor town on an isolated and poor coast. "We didn't know that they were going to take her there, because the coyote didn't say anything to us, we didn't know that they were bringing her by boat, she even had the kids with her. If we had known, we would have thought twice about sending my daughter there," says Teresa Barrera, Bueso's mother, on a video call from the United States. The 29-year-old Honduran showed her mother the ocean in their last conversation. "She was nearby, the house is on the shore, next to some palms." EL PAÍS found the location in San José El Hueyate, a home with a roof made of palm leaves close to the sea, reachable via an irregular, narrow road made of sand and trash.
Bueso told her mother that at that moment, there were people "from every country" in the house, but that she was the only one from Honduras. She had formed a friendship with a boy from El Salvador and a Peruvian woman, who was traveling with an eight-year-old girl. "There's 20 of us," she told her mother, as her daughter played on the patio. That was around 11 a.m. on October 21, 2024.
At 3:21 p.m. in her mother's time zone in the United States, Bueso sent her last message: "Mama, I'm going to turn off the phone because we're leaving now." "She never answered again, never. She turned off the phone for safety during the trip, supposedly, on the boats," says Barrera. The family has their doubts about this, because the coyotes, who send proof of the trip along the way, never shared with them an image of Bueso and the kids aboard the boat. These suspicions have been strengthened over the 13 months of their disappearance, as there have been various reports from people who say they have seen them in Puerto Madero. The most reliable of these say that the young woman was working as a waitress at a palapa in February. Still, the people who have gone to search for her have not had any success. "I believe that my daughter was kidnapped, but now, my heart tells me that my daughter is there, in Chiapas, that maybe she is free, but fell into the hands of someone who has her working, possibly to survive," says the mother.
The family, who has filed complaints with the Chiapas Attorney General's Search Committee as well as the federal Attorney General's Office, has yet to receive any real proof. Nor have they seen any advances made by the authorities. Bueso's sister-in-law Perla has been scouring social media and newspapers for months in search of the other people who were traveling with her, Daniel and Valentina on October 21, 2024. So far, she has had no success. She knows that for migrants' relatives who live outside of Mexico, filing a report presents serious hurdles.
Mexico has a Foreign Search and Investigation Support Mechanism in place that requires Mexican embassies to receive reports of disappearances in Mexican territory. However, those diplomatic offices have repeatedly refused to do so, and often make excuses. That is what happened in the case of Rosa Villa, who traveled four hours to Santo Domingo to try and report the disappearance of her sister Camila and niece Charlotte. "They told me that they don't receive these reports, that I have to go to the Dominican Republic embassy in Mexico," Villa says. For families of humble means like hers, paying for the trip to Mexico City just to try and file a report is nearly an impossible task.
The faces of Camila and Charlotte smile from the wall of a restaurant in Puerto Madera. Above their photos, alongside those of a dozen other migrants who disappeared on September 5, there reads a question: "Have you seen them?" The National Guard put up the posters a few weeks ago without asking around for information. They also hung up posters with those who disappeared on December 21. A Colombian migrant who works as a cook in one of the restaurants looks at them and says, to no one in particular, "They came here like I did."
In Puerto Madero, the top beach in Tapachula, the majority of hospitality workers are migrants who arrived and decided not to go north, who settled down and find ways to survive until they get their papers or are able to begin the return trip south. "I want to go back to my country," says the woman wearily. After a year of work, she still hasn't earned the money to pay for a return flight. Neither she nor anyone else is able to say what happened to the migrants who disappeared.
"Here, we find out when the boat operators disappear, they're from the town," says the owner of one of the restaurants. The maritime route to bring migrants north has been used for at least the last decade. "It's a very important alternate route, which has been getting more popular since 2018. It's not a reliable route, in fact it's the worst, generally speaking. We have noticed that when there is a policy change, this route gets more popular as they find ways to get around obstacles in the regular route, which is by land," explains a staff member of a humanitarian organization.
In recent years, many fishermen from the Ocós port, in Guatemala, up to Arriga, which is on the border with Oaxaca, have received instructions. "They've imposed certain rules on them that didn't exist before, areas they can't go, where they can't be in the daytime, at certain hours," explains a researcher. Sea voyages with migrants don't take place every day, nor at all hours, says this investigator, "but rather, when conditions allow. That is, when the tide is right and the all-clear has been given so that they can travel safely." What's more, as fishing activity has declined, some fisherme, out of sheer necessity, have decided to become part of the system, either by transporting people or acting as lookouts, a kind of sea hawk.
All this has made sea voyages the most dangerous option in an area that was already the most dangerous for migrants to cross. Once aboard the boats, the groups have no way to escape. On December 21, 2024, 18-year-old Elianis Morejón put on a life vest at the San José El Hueyate boat landing and sent a message with the numbers of the safe house's guides and cooks to his family, writing, "In case I don't return."
Now, the Suchiate River is deserted and the usually crowded roads of Tapachula and its surroundings seem quiet. An immigration officer acknowledges that traffic has fallen by 90%. In shelters where a year ago, 1,600 people crowded together to sleep on mattresses and on the floor, there are now barely 80 people waiting. Trump's hard-line immigration policy and an apparent offensive by the new Chiapas state government, with security groups like the pakales (self-defense groups in Chiapas), have eliminated migrant trafficking from the public eye.
"We believe that the level of violence has simply been made invisible," say representatives from Fray Matías de Córdova. As others have done before, they warn of the possibility that the dynamics of northern Mexico, with its mass disappearances and clandestine graves, have spread to Chiapas. They ask, what will be found when organized crime has left and it becomes possible to search the seas and shores of this borderland?