The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail

The preliminaries

• Almost all of the undocumented migrants in this book come from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras–one of the poorest and most violent regions in the world.
• Central America hasn’t gotten over the horrors from the 80s to the early 90s, when they endured relentless civil wars.
  • The wars involved indescribable massacres, carried out by elite army battalions, backed by U.S. money, led by those trained at the U.S. School of the Americas. 
  • With thousands of families torn apart, there rose a generation that knew nothing else but how to take up arms.
• “The Beast” is a freight train that starts its route in southern Mexico and, via a network of connecting train, winds its way up to the U.S. border. Hundreds of thousands of migrants ride on top of the train, fleeing their dangerous homelands.
• An infamous gang known as Los Zetas formed in Mexico in 1999 by a narco-trafficker. It has proliferated, and is considered the country’s most organized and dangerous group of assassins.

Fleeing brothers – southern Mexico

• The book begins by tracking brothers Auner, Pitbull, and El Chele, three migrants who never wanted to come to the U.S.
  • Pitbull saw two men shoot his friend in a street–he identified the men, and soon the family received death threats, and their mother was shot through the head in retaliation. The death threats kept coming.
    • Auner, who is 20, does not know anything about the men he is running from. Because of the threats, he left El Salvador, his wife, and two-year-old daughter.
  • Martinez listened to the brothers discuss next steps: either stay on The Beast like stowaways or take buses through mountain towns and hope that they can avoid checkpoints. This latter would take them through the Oaxaca jungle, studded with checkpoints and migration authorities.
    • In contrast, the voyage by train would have the brothers clinging onto the back of the roof for at least six hours and they would have to hide in ditches, waiting for the next train.
    • The risks of traveling through the mountains, to avoid Los Zetas, are still considerable. Of every 10 migrants from Central America, six are apprehended and mugged by Mexican migration authorities.
    • They decide to go through the mountains, and Martinez joins them.
  • There are many scammers and bandits throughout the path. Migrants are the perfect prey because they’re always hiding from authorities.
  • The brothers are not just migrating, they’re also fleeing.
    • After going through the jungle, they’ll start the ride on the back of The Beast, straight ahead into the region of assailants and assassins, and where migration authorities have been expanding their reach and capacity.
• After the brothers leave, Martinez keeps contact with them but then the communication cuts. A few days later, he reads about a massive kidnapping along the road, where at least 35 Central Americans were captured by Los Zetas.

La Arrocera – Chiapas (southern Mexico, borders Guatemala)

• One of the most dangerous parts of the migrant trail through Mexico is La Arrocera, where there is only a very small police force.
  • 160 miles long, it is a network of 28 ranches scattered among thick overgrowth. Something horrible happens to nearly every migrant here, brought on by bandits or gangs–rape, assault, attacks, or death. 
  • For the most part, these victims are only written about once they’re dead. Journalists and human rights organizations condemn and take the stories they hear in migrant shelters to court, but the only people who really know what goes on  in La Arrocera are the migrants and the perpetrators themselves.
    • Sometimes, coyotes even lead migrants straight into the hands of the bandits they secretly work for.
• People can make a lot off of assaulting migrants, as some can carry several thousand pesos on their bodies. Additionally, bandits are better equipped there than cops, and there are even authorities that cooperate with the bandits.
• When talking to one officer at a particularly rough part of the road, the officer pointed to a cluster of trees and said, “They separate the women from the group and take them over there to rape them.”
  • Migrant women play a certain role in front of their attackers, as second-class citizens. Martinez speaks with one woman at a shelter, who was 20-years-old and pregnant when she traveled through La Arrocera.
    • She said the people she was with had told her they were also migrants and convinced her to walk with them, but then three of them raped her, and when her son aborted between her legs, the bandits killed him and beat the woman until she lost consciousness.
  • Few think about the trauma endured by the thousands of Central American women who have been raped here. Who takes care of them? Who works to heal their wounds? 

Prostitution rings – Chiapas (southern Mexico, borders Guatemala)

• “The trade” in southern Mexico traps thousands of female Central American migrants, far from their American Dreams, in prostitution rings.
  • This border region is known for prostitution and is highly dangerous–some of the brothel owners have threatened to murder journalists who’ve tried to interview their female workers.
  • Modern human trafficking is a complex system of everyday lies and coercion.
• Many of the women have no previous schooling, are fleeing from severe family dysfunction, physical and sexual abuse by family members, and they often arrive at brothels as little girls. Traffickers tend to target women between 10 and 35 years old.
  • He talks to Erika, who is a 30-year-old Honduran woman.
    • When she was 5, her job had to sell fish and firewood in the streets. If she didn’t sell anything, her “boss” would whip her until she had open sores on her back. Then the woman would cover the sores with salt and order her brother to lick it off. Erika would get parasites in the sores, and on one of those sore-licking days, her brother died, and she’s convinced that those parasites that killed him came from her sores. As she got a little older, she was constantly raped by her boss’s son.
    • When she was 14 , she left Honduras and her twin babies behind, and ended up at one of these brothels.
• There are two principal reasons why women stay in these border towns:
  • First, they make more money than they could make in Central America.
  • Second, shame. Traffickers tear up a woman’s papers and tell her that if she doesn’t obey, they’ll send her family pictures and tell her whole village that she’s a whore.
  • The National Institute of Statistics and Geography has stated that there are roughly 20,000 boys and girls enslaved or being exploited by sex traffickers in Mexico.
    • Unfortunately, the law does not properly define trafficking, or explain to authorities how it should be fought.

The Beast – Oaxaca and Veracruz (northwest of Chiapas, but still considered southern Mexico)

• This is where migrants hop on The Beast–a large train that winds its way north.
  • Migrants are frantic with worry about how to get on the train, when it arrives and when it leaves, jumping on the wrong car, focusing on the ladder as the train moves, how to duck rail workers, how to avoid assaults, what happens if they fall asleep, where the best place is to tie themselves to the roof, and how to know if an ambush is coming. 
  • Passengers cling to metal beams on top of the train, dodging wires and branches, shivering in the constant currents of the wind.
  • Assailants hop on the train whenever it stops, to hide among the migrants. Sometimes the conductor, in collaboration with the assailants, slows the train down enough so they can jump on.
    • These assailants are usually ranchers who live near the tracks. But there are also kidnappings of women, which are orchestrated by highly organized gangs.
• He talks to a 37-year-old peasant, who left his Caribbean village to work in the U.S., saved money, and came back home to build a home for his family. But then a hurricane came and destroyed everything, and he ventured north again.
  • Many migrants have stories like this–unable to make money at home (due to many reasons beyond their control), they attempt to make money in the U.S. and come back to help their families.

Kidnappings don’t matter – Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Tabasco (north and northwest of Chiapas, but still considered southern Mexico)

• The extent to which Los Zetas took over the area is remarkable and alarming. They’ve monopolized crime–kidnappings, extortions, murder, drug trafficking, retail, pirated movies, migrant guides. These crimes are all part of the same enterprise, and whoever wants a job, has to work for Los Zetas. And it’s better to keep quiet and take what Los Zetas pays them. 
• This region is one of the worst legs of an already extremely dangerous journey.
  • Every day, Los Zetas kidnap Central American migrants, who are kept in safe houses which everybody, including the authorities, knows about.
  • It’s more profitable to kidnap 40 people, each of whom will pay between $300 and $1,500 in ransom, than it is to extort a business owner who might alert the press or the police.
    • Otherwise put, these are the kidnappings that don’t matter, because these victims won’t report anything to the police.
• The scope of criminal gangs has increased in recent years.
  • Each kidnapper covers about 15 ransoms (which makes people think that money-wiring companies must know who they’re dealing with).There are cases of 100 people being held in a single house.
• How is it possible that the kidnappings are still happening when the local governments, the media, the Mexican government, and the U.S. government all know exactly what’s going on?
  • In both 2006 and 2007 there was an uptick in the incident reports of crimes committed not by bandits but by the authorities themselves: military, police, and even migration officers.
  • In his years of covering immigration as a reporter, one of the most outrageous examples of impunity he’s come across was Hotel California in Tenosique.
    • It’s known by every authority as being Zetas turf, where they keep kidnapped migrants. It’s just down the street from the Migration offices, which are next to the train tracks where numerous mass kidnappings have occurred.
    • It’s a conservative estimate that 40% of all state police units have been bought by Los Zetas.

The border wall – Tijuana (northern Mexico, borders the U.S. next to San Diego)

• As the border wall and security technology have expanded, it decreases the amount of area left where there are no walls. This means that many people (migrants, narcos, and bandits) are crossing at the same place.
  • This funneling has changed everything for the migrants. Before, about 30% of the people in the shelter were deportees, and the rest were on their way to cross. Now about 90% are deportees.
  • The border keeps mutating due to the funnel effect: one tightening route drives migrants to new routes already saturated with narcos and coyotes–which either sets them up to be killed in the middle of a gun-fight between narcos, or makes them vulnerable to kidnapping and ransom demands–and the whole border, little by little, becomes tighter.
  • Of the nine border sectors designated by Border Patrol, the San Diego sector is the smallest, just 60 miles. Yet it has the third highest number of agents, around 2,500, and from October 2007 to February 2009, Border Patrol apprehended 54,709 undocumented migrants.
• What’s left for the migrants, bottlenecked into the desert, are the dunes. They now have to walk as much as three days across the desert, risking heatstroke and dehydration and crossing paths with narcos.

Border Patrol

• Border Patrol has a sweeping technology system to monitor the border, with ground surveillance, infrared technology, helicopters, and more.
  • In 2008, around 18,000 agents guarded the border. 
• Border Patrol’s mission is to gain operational control over the area. After 9/11, the mission changed–the priority is to detain terrorists (they’ve never reported the detention of a terrorist along this border), and migrants are a second priority.
  • The agent said that all they want is operational control, since sealing the border is a pipe dream that politicians sell. Maintaining control, ceding space, and clamping space, is all that can be done.

• How the U.S. government’s extreme vigilance after 9/11, and the arrival of drug fighting, created ghost town after ghost town along the border
• To cross the Rio Grande, you either pay a coyote or you drown–bloated bodies trapped along the rocky banks prove how desperate people are to cross
• Stories about airplanes from all over the U.S. land in El Paso every Friday, where undocumented migrants step off–most do not speak Spanish and have no family in the country at all
  • (Saul, a 19-year-old, was deported to Guatemala, a country he didn’t know. He tried to search for family but that ended disastrously–he was nearly shot)
• Narcos and their tactics: for instance, arcos do not want journalists around not because they’d get caught, but because the fees would go up–vans transporting migrants were originally charged 500 pesos per migrant, and were upped to 1,000 pesos
• Coyotes and their worries: they work under constant risk, repeating over and over again this lethal journey; a good coyote no longer has good options, and most have to pay dues to Los Zetas