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

by Óscar Martínez

an 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.

Thousands upon thousands of migrants have been murdered in Mexico, and many others die by falling from “La Bestia”; as many as seventy thousand, some experts estimate, lie buried along the “death corridor” of the migrants’ trail.

There’s an expression among the women migrants: “cuerpomátic. 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.”

for some people in this world there are not two or three different choices. There is only one. Which is, simply, to run.

Where are you? How are you? Nothing. No response.

Why don’t they let them board before the train starts moving? Why, if they know that the migrants are going to get on anyway, do they make them jump on while it’s already chugging? It’s a question that none of the directors of the seven railroad companies is willing to answer.

“The Beast is the Rio Grande’s first cousin. They both flow with the same Central American blood.”

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.

nobody is going to find you. You’re going to make it by yourself or you’re not. It’s that simple.

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.

“about forty undocumented migrants kidnapped every week” in the state of Veracruz.

migrants are being systematically kidnapped

There was a case of a minor who was beaten and urinated on in a migration detention center after he had tried to escape. There was also the documented case of an entire group of migrants forced by military officers to walk barefoot for miles, while two migrant Guatemalan men were forced to carry all of their shoes. Every time one of the men dropped a shoe, they were hit by the guards.

In Tabasco, which marks the beginning of Zetas’ turf in Mexico, you can almost taste the fear. It hits you in your sixth sense: that feeling of walking round a dark corner and knowing you’re about to get mugged.

And everybody (at least every migrant) is asking this one question: where is it safe to cross? And the answer is: nowhere. The US government has made sure of that.

This is where the bra tree myth was born. It’s a desert tree literally draped with the bras and panties of migrant women who are raped by bandits along this border. Their underwear is kept as trophies. I refer to it as a myth not because it doesn’t exist, but because it’s not one tree but many. The rape of migrant women is a border-wide practice, from Tecate, passing La Rumorosa and El Centinela, to the neighboring state of Sonora. On this stretch of walled-off frontier, bra trees grow everywhere.

Just before we met there had been a mass kidnapping of 300 Mexican and Central American migrants. They were holed up in a narco ranch not far from the border. Nobody except for the priest, Prisciliano Peraza, knew anything of their whereabouts. Prisciliano negotiated the release of 120 migrants with an unnamed narco. Most of them were beaten black and blue and had had their ankles broken by a bat. “Of the rest of them,” the other 180, the priest later told me, “I don’t know a thing. They refused to give them up.”

When migrants and narcos cross paths (and they always do, because they’re both chased down ever-tightening routes) the same thing happens, all the way from the Suchiate River to the Mexico–US border: the migrants pay.

I write this scene to explain something to the reader: undocumented migration to the United States will not stop. Or, it’s safe to say, neither the reader nor I will see a time when it will stop. Undocumented migration to the United States may fluctuate depending on the year, but like a river it continues, ebbing and flowing, always finding its way to the sea.

I don’t think compassion is that useful. I don’t think it’s a durable engine for change. I see it as a passing sentiment, a feeling too easy to forget.