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

by Óscar Martínez

I tell Ortiz, of NCHR, that right in front of us there are loads of kidnapping victims; that people are getting kidnapped blocks from his office, right where the train rails snake through town. But he’s not surprised. Kidnappings are his daily bread. “The scope of the criminal gangs,” he explains, “has increased by about 200 percent. We have many reports saying that their modus operandi is the same here as in Tierra Blanca. Each kidnapper covers about fifteen ransoms. Which makes me think that the money wiring companies must know [based on the number of wires a single person receives] who they’re dealing with. We have trustworthy reports that municipal police have detained migrants and handed them over to the kidnappers.” “I have three testimonies,” I tell him, “where someone who was kidnapped claims that another from his group who managed to escape came back after having been beaten, saying that he went to the local police to report the crime. And the police, instead of investigating, sent him straight back to the kidnappers.” “Yes,” Ortiz responds, “it’s not that we don’t know about these cases. We know that the migrants get delivered. We haven’t heard about exactly this type of situation, but we know that the police are involved, that there is co-participation.