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

by Óscar Martínez

It was the very last car that ran over his right leg. The tailwind then spat him off the tracks, onto the hillside, like something regurgitated. “I felt fine,” Jaime said. “It didn’t hurt.” Most mutilated migrants say the same thing. At first it doesn’t hurt. Later, though, the pain nearly tears apart the muscles in your face and a sudden and intense heat shudders into your body so fast you think your head’s going to explode.

He tried to climb up the mountain using two sticks as crutches, but the long loose threads of his skin kept catching in the thorn bushes. With his pocketknife he tried to finish the job, cutting off his train-chewed leg. He couldn’t manage. He tore off a strip of his blood-soaked pant leg instead, and used it as a tourniquet.

If you fall off, especially in desolate sections like that between Ixtepec and Medias Aguas, nobody is going to find you. You’re going to make it by yourself or you’re not. It’s that simple.

“The train will ruin you. Then you’ll never get to the United States,” Jaime said. “It’s better to arrive late than never.”

The surest sign that there’s a mass assault on a train, a migrant once told me, is when a flashlight moves over the tops of the boxcars.

Train assailants, except in the kidnapping of women, which are orchestrated by highly organized gangs, are petty criminals—ranchers who live near the tracks. They’re townsmen, hardly armed, with only .38 calibers and machetes. But they’re also ruthless,

Saúl lights a cigarette and loudly repeats, “Fuck it, if it’s a robber, let him come. We’ll give it to him!” It’s Saúl’s fifth try at getting back into the United States after being deported a month and a half ago. There, he was part of the 18th Street Gang. He got involved in some petty assault crimes, which is what put him in jail before he got deported. Five

Despite being the young, tough guy he is, he can’t go back to his country because the other big Latin American gang, the Mara Salvatruchas, has taken over the neighborhood where he was born. Saúl says he knows exactly where he stands: the steel boxcars are like the backdrop of a nightmare.

This is the law of The Beast that Saúl knows so well. There are only three options: give up, kill, or die.

Father Solalinde put it well: this land is a cemetery for the nameless.

Most mass kidnappings happen in these moments, when the victim-laden trains come into mid-sized cities, like this one, which are dominated by organized gangs.

The strangest thing is that I got used to it. My fear turned to helplessness, then to rage, and then, finally, to acceptance. The sordid lives of the women who live together in southern Mexico’s brothels were just as horrifying as the lives they lived before they came to the brothels. With these women, everyday words take on new meanings. The word sex means rape. The word family refers to a fellow victim. And a body is little more than a ticket from one hell to another hell. It’s called “The Trade”: thousands of female Central American migrants, far from their American Dreams, trapped in prostitution rings in Southern Mexico.

The bar, which I’ll call Calipso, is one of the ten or so strip clubs that light up the night in this part of the city. This border region, on the Mexican side of the Mexico–Guatemala border, is known as the “zone of tolerance.” What is tolerated is prostitution. There are whole strings of similar bars, with the same process and the same sort of clientele in the small towns and cities that run along this border.

you’d be hard pressed to find a single Mexican woman. The bars are brimming with Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans. Here, “the market,” as the women are referred to, is exclusively Central American.

In recent years, public concern has begun to close down some of the bars that prostitute Central American women and girls against their will. Since 2007, when a new law was passed in Mexico against human trafficking, various civil organizations have increased pressure against the bars, making “trafficking,” especially trafficking women, a much more publicized issue.1 Modern people trafficking, it turns out, is not the image many expect—a scar-faced man tending a cage of women. It’s a complex system of everyday lies and coercion that happens just behind our backs. For this very reason, for its open secretiveness, it’s important to look closely into the shadows, to speak with the victims of trafficking, with the women themselves. The three women still laughing in the back of Calipso have offered their testimonies.

Erika

She has white skin and reddish, curly hair pulled back by a headband. She’s Honduran, from Tegucigalpa, and thirty years old. A dancer, she has round, thick legs, a thick torso, and a curvaceous body. She is short, cheerful, playful, and a good teaser.

When Erika was fourteen years old she left her country and twin babies behind. “I had to go to El Norte … looking for what we’re all looking for, a better life.” Una vida mejor. She traveled with five other girls around her age. “Things happened to them. What can I say? Bad things. We’d all heard that women on the trail get raped.” El Norte, meaning the United States, may not always be the final destination. Erika preferred to stay in the first state she came to north of the border—Chiapas, Mexico. She settled in Huixtla, known for its prostitutes, those shadows that anyone can see but few openly talk about. She arrived on a Monday or Tuesday, she’s not sure exactly when, and then went to the Hotel Quijote to ask for work.

Tears are a defect in this world of stone.

“I never met my family,” Erika tells me. “See, I’m from Honduras but I never had papers. I never had a birth certificate either. I’m like an animal.” When she was still a girl she was told that her mother worked in the fields, “whoring like me.” Her mother had given her and her twin sister away as a baby to a woman by the name of María Dolores, who Erika remembers very well. “That old whore had seven kids, and we, my little twin and me, weren’t treated like her kids, we were like her slaves.” She always calls him her “little” twin, though had he not died at the age of six, he’d be thirty years old.

What was her life like? Like a slave’s, she says. At five years old, her job was to walk the streets, selling fish and firewood. If she came back with something still in her hands because she hadn’t sold everything, María Dolores would whip her with an electrical cable until she had open sores on her back. Then María Dolores would cover those cuts with salt and oblige her “little twin” to lick it off. It was on one of those days, one of those sore-licking days, that her brother died on the floor where they both slept. They said it was parasites, Erika says. She’s convinced that those parasites came from the sores on her back.

I got sick. They took me to the hospital but never came back to pick me up. After that, I lived like a drunk on the streets, sleeping between dumpsters.” She lived like that for two years. Selling this, carrying that, begging wherever, sleeping on corners. Eight years later she bumped into María Dolores, who talked her into coming back.

The physical abuse wasn’t as bad, but, in general, life was worse. Omar, one of the woman’s sons, was fifteen years old and repeatedly raped her. “That’s why I wonder if I’ll ever understand what it is to have normal sex. I got so used to him tying up my legs and arms and having sex with me like that.”

Many of the women have no previous schooling. They flee from a past of severe family dysfunction, physical and sexual abuse, and they often come to these brothels as girls, little girls, incapable of distinguishing between what is and what should be.

Luis Flores who, as head of the IOMin Tapachula, leads community education projects in the area and case-manages Central American human trafficking victims. Here, he explains, migrant women are turned into a product. “They come having already been raped and abused. They come from dysfunctional families in which it was often their father or uncle who raped them. What many of them won’t tell you is that they knew they’d be raped on this journey, that they feel it’s a sort of tax that must be paid. According to the Guatemalan government, it’s estimated that eight of every ten Central American migrant women suffer some form of sexual abuse in Mexico. It’s six of every ten, according to a study done by Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies. They travel with that lodged in their minds, knowing that they’ll be abused once, twice, three times … Sexual abuse has lost its terror. That’s the vantage point from which to understand human trafficking. At a certain level, they know they’re victims, but they don’t feel that way. Their logic runs like this: yes, this is happening to me, but I took the chance, I knew it would happen.”

The body becomes a credit card, a new platinum-edition “bodymatic” which buys you a little safety, a little bit of cash and the assurance that your travel buddies won’t get killed. Your bodymatic, except for what you get charged, buys a more comfortable ride on the train.

An illustrative case study by Rodolfo Casillas delineates the range in ages that traffickers target: “Between ten and thirty-five years old, hardly ever older. And the trafficking problem is exacerbated with underage migrants, specifically those between eleven and sixteen years of age.”2

It’s as though the horrors of their lives were shared by all, as though what happened to one them has inevitably happened to all of them.

I’m not an idiot. I’ll work here every night, finish, and get paid right away.’ See, it’s because I grew up on the street that I at least knew how to look out for myself.” I ask about the other girls. “They were locked up. Never let out. They ate only once a day. Whatever man took them there said to them, ‘It’s not so bad, you’re gonna be able to work, but you also have to pay.’ Whoever brings you there asks for his cut from the owner of the dive, and that, of course, is taken out of your pay. They sell you. But that never happened to me. Only to the others, because they’re stupid.”

This rationalization is commonly used as justification—those who let themselves be exploited have only themselves to blame. But, as Flores explains, such passive victims are young girls with no education, who don’t know how to condemn or report anything that happens to them, who are easy to intimidate. If you try to escape, I’ll call Migration and they’ll get hold of you real fast! “It’s a problem of submissiveness,” Flores explains. Of 250 sexually abused migrants surveyed by the IOM, only fifty accepted medical and counseling help. Many didn’t see the point, because they expected it would all happen again; there was still a lot of road left to walk.

migration tends to isolate people.

She remembers that many times the sessions ended with what she’d gotten to know so well as a girl: insults and violence.

Flores explains that Salvadoran and Honduran women are particularly sought after for this business because, unlike the Mexicans of this indigenous area of Soconusco, Chiapas, or the small, dark-skinned women of Guatemala, their bodies tend to be fleshier and they tend to have lighter skin.

Keny

Her life has been marked by that huge magnet that pulls Central Americans north. When she was just a baby her grandmother left for El Norte. When she was fourteen, her father went north as well. Then her mother followed. When she was fifteen her older sister was pulled by the magnet, and Keny was left living with an aunt and uncle. “They didn’t even feed me,” Keny recalls. “They took the money my father sent and they beat me instead of raised me.” Her grandmother, after getting US papers, returned and saw that Keny was living like a martyr. She arranged for her to move in with some of her grandmother’s friends. But the change didn’t help. Keny stayed with the new family until, when she was sixteen, the mother of that family died of a heart attack and the newly widowed husband started beating and molesting her.

She moved in with her sister but only for a few months. The sisters didn’t get along. They got in a fight and Keny almost lost a breast when her sister stabbed her with a knife. “She left me mutilated,” Keny explained. “And so I went to the streets. That’s when I started to work in a cantina.”

The older they are and the more indigenous they look, the cheaper they come, 400 or so pesos for half an hour. Younger though, with whiter complexions, you could pay up to 2,000 pesos. Flores says, “They call the more indigenous or more Guatemalan migrants coppers. The more Honduran or younger ones they call escorts or teiboleras.3” The

administrators who run the shelter agree to speak, but ask me not to identify the place. “As you know,” they say, “the cartels are involved in all this.” They explain that there are two principal reasons why women decide to stay in these border towns. One is simply that they make more money than they could make in Central America, and after a month of being forced to dance or have sex, before they fall all the way into this life of darkness, vice, and vulnerability, they start to accept their situation, realizing how much money they’re sending back to their families. The second reason, the directors explain, is shame. The past. To have to explain where they’ve been. What they’ve done. The fear of being discovered. Flores

a common trap: “They recruit an indigenous girl from her land, tell her that she’ll be a waitress, and then sell her as a prostitute. They tear up her papers and assure her that if she escapes, or if she doesn’t obey, they’ll contact her family and show them a picture of her sitting on a man’s lap at the bar. They tell her that her whole village will know that she’s not a waitress, but a prostitute. Now ask that girl if she’s willing to go home. Of course not.” “Have you also come across girls who’ve been kidnapped and forced into prostitution?” “They’ve mostly been coming voluntarily. I’ve heard stories of girls that have been sold, but once they see where they’ll be working, they decide to stay put. They tell me they like the money.” But here we’re confronted again by the tricks of trafficking. The subtle wording that makes trafficking not sound exactly like trafficking; the suggestion that it’s the girls’ decision if they want to stay. Blackmail camouflaged as proposals. In the end, it seems it’s nobody’s fault. Things are as they are. How they’ve always been. The girls themselves are used to suffering: they “choose” to suffer, they “choose” to be treated like market goods.

The National Institute of Statistics and Geography affirms that there are an estimated 20,000 boys and girls enslaved or being exploited by sex traffickers throughout Mexico. Though Mexico signed international agreements on the matter in 2003, it wasn’t until September of 2007 that the trafficking of persons was finally considered an official crime and the authorities were asked to combat it. The law, however, didn’t create or equip an agency to properly define trafficking, or explain to authorities how it should be fought. And there are only three offices, in a country with thirty-one states, to address the issue. One of them is in Tapachula.

“And do you pursue the crimes even when the victims don’t?” “It’s too politicized. Our job is simply to inform the public of the law and their rights. The police are supposed to actually enforce the law. Sometimes they talk to us, sometimes they don’t. Communication is a huge problem. The cartels have infiltrated the police forces as well.” “The criminal networks are pretty well organized, then?” “Organization is one of the cartels’ strongest characteristics. They’re involved in everything: kidnapping, drug trafficking, human trafficking. We don’t even know which cartel is responsible for what. It’s impossible to identify them.” This last comment, however, I recognize as a flat lie. A few days before speaking with Tamayo, I had visited Ciudad Hidalgo, the small city on the shores of the Suchiate River that divides Guatemala and Mexico, to talk to someone from the mayor’s office. I told him that I was working on a story about female prostitutes. The official took me to a bar called Las Nenitas (The Babes), ensconced between two dirt alleyways. At about two in the afternoon, there were only two women behind the bar. Tesa, a beautiful Honduran woman, tall and dark, took our orders. She was wearing platform boots, tight pants, and a low-cut shirt. Before arriving, the official had told me that all the women who worked in Las Nenitas were prostitutes. I told Tesa, without mentioning the word trafficking, that I was interested in talking with her. She said she’d be glad to talk,...

Connie

“I came here,” she says, “with all five of my senses. No one brought me against my will.” She’s eighteen years old.

She says that an acquaintance, a fellow Guatemalan who worked as a waiter, promised her a way out. He told her that the first thing she had to do was run away from her barrio. Something she already wanted to do. Her brother had been killed only a month earlier. Three shots. He worked collecting fares on a public bus in Guatemala City. He was sixteen years old and a gang wanted to recruit him. The Mara Salvatruchas—the most dangerous gang in the world, according to the FBI—offered him the job of killing bus drivers that had wronged them. They promised safety in exchange for his participation and death in exchange for his refusal. If he refused he’d receive three bullets: chest, abdomen, head. He refused. “That same month,” Connie remembers, “the Mara killed fifteen kids in my barrio, all of them between fourteen and sixteen years old. No one could live in peace.” While

her father drank every night and harassed her as he had since she’d turned eight, and her mother, as Connie put it, kept busy “getting pregnant again and again.” Connie is the eldest of eight brothers and sisters.

many Central American women who decide to migrate are running away from this type of precarious situation, in which they live in perpetual fear of a gang or find living at home to be as bad or worse than living on the street.

normalization of prostitution, rape, and human trafficking. It’s a reality in which kids die by the dozen, fathers are aggresso...

According to a report put out by the Mexican National Commission of Human Rights, it’s not uncommon that a migration official abuses a woman in custody.

As a trafficking prosecutor explained to me, the National Institute of Migration often plays a leading role in preventing human trafficking victim testimonies from getting a court hearing.

it seems that prosecuting human trafficking is more a matter of luck than of official and concerted cooperation.