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

by Óscar Martínez

estimated eight out of ten migrant women who attempt to cross Mexico suffer sexual abuse along the way, sometimes at the hands of fellow migrants.

La Arrocera is what the migrants call the 262-kilometer route through southern Chiapas, from Tapachula to Arriaga, where they climb onto the trains. They avoid the highways and roads because of checkpoints variously manned by the Migration Authority, police and army

“Bones here aren’t a metaphor for what’s past, but for what’s coming.”

The story that follows is the escape of Auner, Pitbull, and El Chele, three migrants who never wanted to come to the United States.

Auner knows nothing of the men he runs from. Back home, he left behind a slew of unsolved murders. Now, blindly, he runs and hides. He feels he has no time to reflect. No time to stop and think what connection he and his brothers might have with those bodies on the streets.

The infamous gang known as Los Zetas was formed in 1999 by the narco-trafficker Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, founder of the powerful Gulf Cartel, arrested in 2003, and a US prisoner since 2007. Cárdenas originally created Los Zetas to act as his organization’s armed wing, composed of thirty-one elite Mexican army deserters—some of

whom had trained at the US-led School of the Americas—but the group expanded and evolved, becoming increasingly, violently autonomous. By 2001, the group had already added to its brutal money-making repertoire the mass kidnappings of undocumented migrants for ransom money. By 2007 it had broken away to form an independent cartel. In 2009 the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) called the Zetas, simply, “Mexico’s most organized and dangerous group of assassins.”

Of every ten migrants from Central America, six are apprehended and mugged by Mexican migration authorities—a potential catastrophe for these guys who pocket, as if they were jewels, the $50 their father sends from the United States every four days. They use this treasure to buy their once-a-day ration of tortillas and beans, which they eat quickly, hidden in thickets,

And getting caught by the Mexican authorities doesn’t just mean returning home with their heads down and their pockets empty. Their return could cost them their lives, as could riding atop the train, which continuously throws migrants off its back, dismembering or maiming so many. Just today I learned

He escaped from the gangs that closed down his bakery. They were imposing an unpayable extortion tax: $55 a week or he’d be killed. The entire company went to ground, then fled. Now one of them has already returned to El Salvador in a black bag.

Being in a country like El Salvador, the cops drew all the obvious conclusions: a young man in the middle of a crime scene—a gangster for sure. The kid was the first they questioned. “Which gang are you in?” “None, you fuck,” spat Pitbull, with typical grace. “You’re with the 18’s like your friend they killed, aren’t you?” The

the cops know most of the gang members by clan, by name, by nickname, and even by rank.

this kid with a shaved head and a silver earring was Jonathan Adonay Alfaro Alváñez. He was a brickworker, farmworker, carpenter, plumber. A jack-of-all-trades. He was Johnny. He was Pitbull.

“I don’t have a clue which sons-of-bitches are threatening us.” Nothing. Not even a clue. Pitbull flees, but he doesn’t know from whom.

He’s just an eighteen-year-old kid steeped in the violence of one of the most dangerous countries on the continent.

William, José, Miguel, Carlos, Ronal, Unidentified, any of these could have been Juan Carlos. All of these young men were murdered in Chalchuapa in the same month. And even if one were to know the facts of the murder, I have a hunch that, like the facts of so many other migrant murder cases, the details would be so scarce they’d simply disappear. Evaporate. It’d be as if nothing had ever happened.

Fleeing, it seems, isn’t always a somber procession. At least not for Pitbull.

The three brothers, Auner, Pitbull, and El Chele, had never been close to one another, but recently their lives have forced them together.

Part of El Chele’s success was due to the fact that he doesn’t look like the typical delinquent. Unlike Auner and Pitbull, he’s fair-skinned, and the innocent look of his face matches his boyish brown curls. He doesn’t have calloused hands, and he keeps his nails clean and clipped, so you can’t tell that he’s already spent most of his young life in laboring. All of it makes him seem like somebody you could trust. Pitbull, on the other hand, was scraping together his life as best he could.

his time in Tapachula, roaming the Zona de Indeco, one of the most dangerous barrios and site of many national and foreign-owned factories.

In Indeco—thanks to the giant walls, graffitied with Mara Salvatrucha gang signs, that section off the safer parts of Tapachula—walking the streets is like stepping on a spinal cord, a touc...

He made a few friends who, as he put it, made him feel like he was living on a tightrope, always on the verge of becoming a nameless dead body lying on the street. It was that same rope on which he teetered in El Salvador when he was weighing whether or not to give in, like most of his hopeless friends, to one of the gangs. As a gang member, he told himself, at least he’d have constant backup, and so be able to make the best of the constant fear.

“I know it’s a bitch getting into that, but I was just like all those other kids. We were street punks who didn’t go to school, just wandering around, trying to live the best we could, looking for a good time.”

They started stealing bicycles from kids, grabbing women’s purses. They found most of their prey outside of schools, in middle-class neighborhoods, around the markets.

Pitbull’s looks didn’t help him any: his hair on end, his head always thrown back, his eyes always squinting like he’s about to attack someone. Plus he has that insolent thug walk, that hard, body-teetering limp.

But then, after a few more days, he started figuring things out. The other kids spoke the same language as he did. He overheard words like perrito, chavala, boris, chotas, and he started to feel at home. It was gang slang. Mara Salvatrucha slang. Pitbull turned back into the reckless kid he was. Speaking the language opened the door to the dominant gang in the prison.

The Mara Salvatrucha leader was El Travieso (Naughty Boy), an eighteen-year-old Guatemalan who’d been locked up for four years, since he was fourteen, on account of three murders.

Next in command was El Smokie, with two black tears, and “MS” tattooed on the inside of his bottom lip. Then El Crimen (The Crime), also Guatemalan and also with two black tears. Then finally t...

What does it take to survive as a young man? According to Pitbull, it takes recklessness.

It gives him “reputation.” And what’s the best way to gain that reputation? Earn a few tears under your eye, learn to run in the game, learn to make the rules, rather than lose your shirt and pants in a prison shower room.

So how did they turn out so differently? Maybe a few more minutes spent one day at the corner store or at a soccer game, maybe a punch doled out by their father in a moment of despair. It could be something that subtle, as random as the drop of a pen.

Migrants are the perfect prey because they’re invisible, always hiding from authorities.

Their job for the gang was to stand guard, but they spent most of their time on the post getting high.

It was a dizzying scene, the stuff of violence-torn barrios, where members of different gangs openly fight on the streets. Doña Silva’s shop isn’t in one of those barrios. It’s in a neighborhood known for its children’s soccer games, for teens chitchatting and mothers working their corner food stands. The peace here is only seldom interrupted by the violence. This violence, though, has lately been encroaching.

They were together again, not by choice but by necessity. They helped each other out, and yet all the while they carried on with that cool affect particular to campesinos, leaving little room for comfort or future plans made together. Then, one night, not too long after he had arrived, Auner was walking home after a day of work, pondering his future, ambling that slow pensive amble that would befit a man ten years older, when he received the call from his uncle. “Auner,” his uncle told him, “they killed your mom.”

Doña Silvia Yolanda Alváñez died aged forty-four from two gunshot wounds to the head, one through her forehead and the other through her left temple. The murderers were two men. The getaway vehicle was a bicycle: one man pedaling, the other riding the back pegs. They stopped in front of Doña Silvia’s store where she was washing silverware on the sidewalk next to her brother. The two men walked past the brother and surrounded Doña Silvia. Then each of them shot her in the head. THE

“Just thinking the same thing over and over.” “Your family?” “My family.” “What about them?” “God. Just hoping the threats against us don’t turn against them. Those people are damn crazy. They didn’t even say who they were coming for. They only said, for the family.” Auner explains to me that by family he means only his two brothers, their older sister who stayed behind, his wife, and his two-year-old daughter. The rest of them, he says—his grandfather, his uncles, all of those who didn’t say a word or do a thing about his mother’s death—aren’t worth a dime to him.

Death isn’t simple in El Salvador. It’s like a sea: you’re subject to its depths, its creatures, its darkness. Was it the cold that did it, the waves, a shark? A drunk, a gangster, a witch? They didn’t have a clue.

received the same anonymous note. It was sent to their relatives, but addressed to the brothers. “Someone wants to kill you,” their uncle told them. “Someone told me they’re gonna kill you three and then the whole family.” That was it. The tip-off as anonymous as the threat itself. The brothers felt the purgatory of their country, they felt the force with which their country spit people out or dropped them dead (twelve murders a day in a country with only six million people). They packed their bags and started north,

Because poverty and death touches them all: the young and the old, the men and the women, the gangsters and the cops.

he had to run, that he had no other choice, that for some people in this world there are not two or three different choices. There is only one. Which is, simply, to run.

Staying on is all that matters when The Beast, La Bestia, a popular name for the train, is on the move.

Like he was anybody walking through any neighborhood, he just walked right on in. And what happened to him is what happens to any kid who doesn’t know what he’s doing in Central America, who thinks any neighborhood is just any neighborhood. A group of thugs turned out of an alleyway and beat him straight to hell.

“I’m Saúl,” Saúl said, breathless, “I just got deported. And, I swear it, I’m your son.” The man, as Saúl recounted it to me on top of the hurtling train, opened his eyes as wide as possible. And then he exhaled, long and loud. And then a look of anger swept over his face. “I don’t have any kids, you punk,” his father said.

He publicly recognized him as his son, and so bestowed to him a single thread of life. “We’re not going to kill this punk,” Guerrero announced in front of Saúl and a few of his gang members. “We’re just going to give him the boot.” And then he turned to Saúl.

see you in this neighborhood again, you better believe me, I’m going to kill you myself.”

Pride and violence, she had learned, are never a good mix.

Since her second husband’s death, Olga started thinking about her gun as a way to escape that hurricane of violence. “I’m going to kill myself,” she would say to herself. “I’m going to kill myself and my daughters and my dog, and then we’ll have nothing left to fear.”

Violence, as Saúl well knows, can come from your own blood. Violence, as Olga Isolina says, can thrust you into depression. Violence, as the Alfaro brothers know, can terrorize you, especially when it has no face.

The difference between fleeing and migrating is becoming clearer to me. Fleeing takes speed. The boys know how to flee. Migrating, though, takes strategy, which the brothers don’t have.