Óscar Martínez on the Central American migrant trail

ÓSCAR MARTÍNEZ ON THE CENTRAL AMERICAN MIGRANT TRAIL

It’s not fully possible for me to understand why these people tell their lives to me. It’s something to do with the human desire to transcend. — Óscar Martínez

OF the thousands of Central American refugees that ”scar Martínez has talked to over the past decade, the journalist knows that many will be murdered in the course of his reporting — all for the sake of trying to escape their own deaths in El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras.

The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail, his 2010 book first released in English in 2013, chronicles the lives of young Central Americans as they stole rides aboard La Bestia — the dangerous series of trains that crisscross Mexico, on which many stowaways are frequently beheaded or maimed as the locomotives cut though tunnels or make sharp turns at high speeds. But, as Martínez points out, the migrants actually choose the trains because of their relative safety.

In El Salvador, a brutal war between rival gangs, Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13) and Barrio 18 (18th Street) and the Salvadoran police — who function much like the death squads of the country’s civil war in the 1980s — have made the country the world’s most deadly region outside an official war zone. But those who flee the violence get no respite in neighboring Mexico. The country’s reigning drug cartel, Los Zetas, has made a profitable sport of kidnapping and often killing Central American refugees, who opt for the road instead of the train.

“Every day Los Zetas and their allies kidnap tens of undocumented Central Americans, in the broad light of day, and the migrants are kept in safe houses which everybody, including the authorities, knows about,” Martínez writes. “The business logic of the kidnappers is sound: it’s more profitable to kidnap forty people, each of whom will pay between $300 and $1,500 in ransom money, than it is to extort a local business owner who might alert the press or police.”

Martínez will speak in Santa Fe on Wednesday, Nov. 1, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, in conversation with journalist Alfredo Corchado, as part of the Lannan Foundation’s In Pursuit of Cultural Freedom series.

Why Martínez’s writing remains so vital has a lot to do with the intimate stories of love, death, and escape that the migrants entrust to his careful reporting. In his most recent book, the 2016 A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America (Verso), Martínez profiles Kid Hollywood, a gang member who has killed many while serving as a government witness in another murder case. It’s a gripping story that ends with Kid Hollywood’s 2014 funeral. “It’s not fully possible for me to understand why these people tell their lives to me. It’s something to do with the human desire to transcend. And telling your story is transcending, or at least attempting to do so,” Martínez said. “I think Kid Hollywood talked to me for almost three years because I showed real interest in his story and because I was honest, brutally honest. I came to tell him on some occasion that I knew he would be killed and that my story ended with him dead.”

With no college or formal journalism training, Martínez has been reporting continuously on his native El Salvador since he was seventeen. Since 2008, he has written at length for El Faro, an online magazine based out of San Salvador that has chronicled the lives of Central Americans for nearly 20 years. In 2011, he co-founded a division of the magazine called Sala Negra (Black Room) that investigates crime and violence. For his impressive feats of investigation, which have brought him death threats and police arrests, he was one of four winners last year of the International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Beyond the sheer physical courage of his reporting, Martínez has honed an image-driven, deadpan writing style to convey the murderous surreality in which his countrymen live. Here he is depicting an El Salvadoran’s slog through Mexico, where robbery is a given, rape is a constant, and murder an ever-present danger — Tapachula, a Mexican town on the border of Guatemala, “smells of fritters and lead.” Or there is simply the language of prey and predator: “A migrant passing through Mexico is like a wounded cat slinking through a dog kennel: he wants to get out as quickly and quietly as he can.”

His own story, he said, is proof positive that anyone can become a journalist with enough hard work and deep reading to develop their own talents. “I read since I was a child, from comics, cartoons, books of any kind. I learned from an early age, thanks to my parents, that before bed, one should read. I believe that journalism writing and its techniques of investigation, is learned mainly by doing, and not in any classroom. This is more a trade than a profession.”

At nearly every speech or reading he gives, the journalist is beseiged by questions about his personal safety and why he continues in this line of work. While he wishes more attention was actually paid to the El Salvadorans fleeing death that he writes about, he does have an answer for his interlocutors. “I, like other colleagues on my newspaper, have been escorted for months or have had to leave the country with our families because of threats. Increasingly, El Salvador closes ranks around you. There is violence on the one hand — that of criminals — and also on the other, that of state security forces,” Martínez said. “The last few times we have had to issue alerts or leave the country has been because of threats from members of the police.” While reporters at El Faro work in teams to maintain constant contact, he admitted that the safety is often illusory. “In this country, if someone definitely wants to attack you, sooner or later they will succeed,” he added.

Despite the ongoing danger of his occupation, Martínez cannot imagine leaving El Salvador or ever taking up another line of work. “Because I’m useful in this violent piece of the world. Because I understand it and can explain it. Because I think trying to be useful to others is the only decent way to go on this planet. Because I think journalism is about lighting the dark corners of the world. Because I think the north of Central America is one of the darkest corners of the world,” Martínez said. “Because here I am surrounded by brave colleagues who I learn from every day. Because those colleagues created El Faro and I think El Faro is the best newspaper where I could work. Because here there is so much to tell, and I think that I can tell those missing stories.”

details

▼ Óscar Martínez in conversation with journalist Alfredo Corchado, a Lannan In Pursuit of Cultural Freedom event ▼ 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 1 ▼ Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St. ▼ $5-$8; 505-988-1234, to www.ticketssantafe.org