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

by Óscar Martínez

On September 30 in Ixtepec, Oaxaca, quite far from what is considered the most perilous leg of the journey, I meet Gustavo and Arturo. They are sixteen and eighteen years old respectively, both from El Cimarrón, Puerto Barrios, a Caribbean port town in Guatemala. When I meet the boys they are already on their way home. Earlier, while riding the train north around four in the morning outside of Orizaba Los Zetas kidnapped the boys. “Okay motherfuckers,” someone yelled at them, “if you run we’ll shoot!” Seven armed men took them away. They were locked up for three days, beaten, and repeatedly threatened in a closed room. Their ransom was set at $500. “They beat us,” explains Arturo, “and said that if we didn’t give them our family’s phone number they’d cut out one of our kidneys.” His kidnappers, he told me, held up a horse branding iron heated with a blowtorch and threatened to brand him with a Z. Arturo recognized a chubby guy who had befriended him back in Arriaga, and to whom he’d mentioned that he had family members in the United States. The kidnappers told the boys that the day before they were seized, they had released thirty other migrants. “Overhearing their conversation, it seemed that they were a new group joining forces with the Zetas,” Arturo said. The kidnapping business had been going well. New agents were in demand. One night, the boys saw a few of the kidnappers return to the safe house bloodied and bruised. One of them explained: “There were about a hundred...