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

by Óscar Martínez

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 the police. The national authorities, including a unit of the National Commission of Human Rights (NCHR) that is investigating migration, admit the gravity of the problem. These are the kidnappings that don’t matter. These are the victims who don’t report the crimes they suffer. The Mexican government registered 650 kidnappings in the year 2008, for example. But this number reflected only reported cases. Time spent on the actual migrant routes proves that such numbers are a gross understatement. It would not be an exaggeration to say that in any stop along the migrant trail, in just a single month, there are as many kidnappings as the official national figure for the year. In the first six months of 2009, the NCHR visited Veracruz to record testimonies of kidnapped migrants and logged as many as 10,000 cases, claiming that if they had had more personnel the figure would be twice or three times as high.