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

by Óscar Martínez

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.

A worker at the migrant shelter (whose name I won’t reveal) tells me that he is scared to use a public restroom, in case he finds a decapitated head. It sounds at first like he’s paranoid, or crazy, but it’s happened to him twice.