Authors: Oscar Martinez
“I didn’t feel pain.”
But when he stopped walking he felt nauseated. He finally reached a dirt road that crossed the tracks. He waited there for ten hours. Listening and looking, unable to move. There was nobody. Not a soul. The trains in this part of the country cross mountains and valleys, but almost always skirt the cities. 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. If you can’t walk you’re going to bleed out, and nobody is going to know about it. You probably won’t even end up as a statistic if you die there. Not unless your family goes to the consulate.
By afternoon Jaime was surrounded by buzzards. They wanted a nibble of him, a taste of his flesh. Finally a pickup truck drove by. Three men got out. One stayed in the truck. Jaime remembers hearing the one who didn’t get out say: “I ain’t going. My heart’ll stop if I see him. This one’s alive.”
The men took him to the hospital. There doctors sedated him, and then amputated his leg at the knee. When he woke he was hallucinating. “I saw horns sprouting out of the nurse’s head, like she was the devil.” The pain kept coming that night. Jaime dreamt he was playing soccer, dribbling the ball with a foot he didn’t have. His body jerked in the dream and he woke in intense pain, a heat shooting down his leg, to the bottom of his oozing stump. He screamed so loudly that the nurses came running.
“Rest,” is Jaime’s advice to migrants who ride the rails.
He was sitting with us under the mango tree, his stump hanging off the plastic chair.
“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 STRAIN OF THE JOURNEY
The train stops at La Cementera, the local branch of a cement manufacturing corporation, Cruz Azul, oddly set in the backdrop
of this jungle. The engine clicks and shudders to release some of its boxcars, then changes lanes to pick up other cars to align on the tracks behind it. It’s time to be wary, vigilant. Men crouching on top of the boxcars raise their heads to scan the streets and sidewalks surrounding the train.
Assailants hop on the train whenever it stops, to hide among the migrants. Sometimes the conductor, in previously made agreement with the assailants, slows the train down enough so that they can jump right on. On this car, the men suddenly raise all of the sticks and rods they’ve been carrying for protection. An indigenous Guatemalan raises a branch as if it were a shotgun and peers out into the darkness, as if taking aim. His silhouette, he hopes, will confuse potential attackers. Those who need to get off make sure to do so in a well-lit place, so that if they’re assaulted others will see and maybe help.
We sense some sort of a fuss, a stirring. It’s moving toward us, but is still distant. Then, behind us, we see movement, a flashlight turning on and off, winking ever closer.
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. One time, when I was on this same route, I saw, in the distance, the splashing of light over the train. It came nearer and nearer, but then disappeared. I imagine this was when the assailants would duck down in some crevice to count their loot. Then, the small circle of light would blink on again and hover toward us. We saved ourselves thanks to the ingenuity of a Salvadoran who told our photographer to turn on all his lights, including his portable reflector and shine it toward the assailants. He did so. And the small circle of light stopped. It stayed put for a few minutes and then, when the train slowed, we saw the assailants hop off and lose themselves among the trees.
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, knowing that if a struggle breaks out it will be kill or get killed. Push or get pushed off the train, onto the tracks.
A watch team is quickly put together. A Guatemalan man stands guard at the back of the car, while another is in charge of lookout at the front. Saúl, that nimble nineteen-year-old who until now has seemed so confident on top of The Beast, hides his face under the hood of his sweatshirt. “To look more ghetto,” he explains. At the back of the train we still see a flashing of lights, but it’s too far away to know what it’s about.
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 18
th
Street Gang. He got involved in some petty assault crimes, which is what put him in jail before he got deported.
Five failed attempts. Each time caught by Mexican migration officials. He’s spent thousands of miles atop The Beast. He’s got one mantra, which he repeats often: “You gotta respect this animal. If you’ve seen what I’ve seen, you know you gotta respect.” 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.
“It never stops being horrifying,” he says, “never.”
The image he can’t get out of his head is of an eighteen-year-old Honduran girl he traveled with a few months ago, during his first try at getting across. A nervous uproar washed down the train, because everyone thought a migration bust was going on just a few boxcars ahead, and she fell. She fell.
“I saw her,” he remembers, “just as she was going down, with her eyes open so wide.”
And then he was able to hear one last scream, quickly stifled by the impact of her body hitting the ground. In the distance, he saw something roll.
“Like a ball with hair. Her head, I guess.”
Alejandro Solalinde, the priest who opened the migrant shelter in Ixtepec, is the reason those migration raids have diminished in southern Mexico. Leading protests before the National Institute of Migration, he argued that if raids must continue, at least they shouldn’t be conducted at night. The darkness, he explained, is too dangerous: there’s the constant roar of the train, the metallic chink-chink and those shrill squeals that sound like faraway screams, and all of the sudden, from every side, come blinding lights and migration officers. The lights and the train and the human screams: Get down! Get down! Get down! And then the train comes to a stop and shadows dive over the tracks where the steel wheels wait to slice through a body. This is unreasonable, Solalinde argued, you have to find a better way. Too many are getting crushed in those stampedes.
A blind crowd running, a blind crowd jumping, a blind crowd pushing.
Since Solalinde’s complaints, surprisingly, the night raids have ceased. A little ahead, however, after passing Mexico City and crossing Lechería, we’ll no longer be in the priest’s territory, and the nightly raids will pick up again.
The flashing lights are nearing us. When they get two cars closer, we’ll be able to see what it’s all about. Saúl lights another cigarette.
“Let’s make a pact,” he says, “that we won’t let them get us. A .38 has six bullets but those are shot off in a second. If we dodge those, then there’s only the law of the train left.”
This is the law of The Beast that Saúl knows so well. There are only three options: give up, kill, or die.
“A month ago,” Saúl says, “three guys got on the train between Arriaga and Ixtepec. All of them were young. Armed. Two of them had a machete and one a .38. The thing was that this time we just weren’t going to take it. The one with the gun walked past this one Honduran man, starting his rounds, taking our money, and it
was so dumb, he should’ve stayed put in the front corner of the car where he could see us all, kept his gun aimed at us and then sent one of the guys with machetes to pick up the money. But he didn’t. And so the way it all went down is that the Honduran grabbed his legs, and the rest of us got up and surrounded the other robbers with machetes.”
There it was. The law of the train.
“First we beat the shit out of them. Then the Honduran asked another guy to help him out, and so the two of them got hold of the one with the gun. The Honduran got his arms and the other his legs, and they flipped him between two cars. The train cut him in two. They did the same to one of the others. When they were going for the third, one Salvadoran guy said we should leave him be so that he could spread the word that it’s best not to mess with our kind. They threw him over the side of the train but there was some sort of ledge there. Anyway, I think he died too.”
How many bodies must be out there, in the land surrounding these tracks?
Father Solalinde put it well: this land is a cemetery for the nameless.
The lights are close enough so that those standing guard can guess what it’s about: “Hey,” one of our sentinels says, “put away any weapons, it’s just some of the train crew wanting to charge us.”
Three crew members come to our car. The migrants cover their faces however they can, they turn their backs and avert their eyes to the sides of the train.
“Alrighty, boys,” one crew member says, “it’s my hunch there’s a checkpoint up ahead, in Matías Romero, and we can either stop there or dodge it, but let’s first see how you’re going to treat us.”
The train crew hops from boxcar to boxcar, acting like they’re doing their duty, as if charging passengers their fare. No one in our car responds or gives them a dime.
“Cheap sons of bitches!” one crew member groans out. “Up ahead you guys’re gonna get fucked.”
My journalist team and I don’t identify ourselves. Most train crews around these parts hate journalists. Eduardo Soteras hides his camera in his jacket but carefully peeks the lens out so that he can capture the extortion that, no doubt, those in the cars up ahead will face as well.
All the guys in this car are experienced train hoppers. They know that if there’s a checkpoint it’s not up to the driver to stop or not. The train has to stop. It can’t evade military personnel or federal police officers.
The train changes lanes. A jerky domino effect. We hold tight, clinging to the roof struts beneath us as the train turns. The journey goes on.
It’s so cold it feels like someone is whipping us with glass. The cold slicing through our sweaters, cutting through our skin. Yet some migrants are able to sleep. They tie themselves to the train however they can, looping their belts or a piece of rope around the roof struts. The top of this boxcar, overflowing with people silhouetted by the moon, looks like a refugee camp. Dozing, numb, hugging themselves, hugging each other.
The law of the train reigns again. Things are bad, but they can get much worse. Saúl puts on thin cloth gloves and asks another of his rhetorical questions.
“You think this is cold?”
It’s needless to respond. We pass through a freezing wind and everyone starts shaking.
“This is nothing,” he goes on. “I’ve seen people’s fingers freeze, seen people slip off the train because the roof got so icy.”
Soon Saúl and the others will have to endure that ice. After Medias Aguas they’ll go through Tierra Blanca, after which they’ll pass Orizaba and its volcano and rattle on through what’s called “la Cordillera de Hielo,” the Ice Range. They’ll endure at least ten hours and up to two days on top of the train, as it labors across snow-capped mountains until reaching Lechería. It gets to be about 20 degrees Fahrenheit on that mountain range. And to make the trip more terrifying, The Beast plunges
through thirty-one tunnels that are so dark you can’t even see your hands.
“Now that’s cold,” Saúl says.
A half hour passes, and the glow of nearby streetlights wakes those who were dozing. We’ve reached the train station of Matías Romero, the halfway point between Ixtepec and Medias Aguas. Again it’s time to be vigilant. The train slows to a stop, making it easy for assailants to hop on. Those traveling on the caboose ledges also straighten up with worry. At this point, only the quickest and most cunning could escape a migration bust. There’s a tall fence on either side of us, row upon row of boxcars circling us. To escape would mean diving into an obstacle course.
All of the sudden, we hear a violent scream.
“Yeah! Gotcha, asshole!”
It’s Mauricio, a forty-two-year-old Guatemalan ex-military man who’s on his tenth try at getting back to his life as a cement mason in Houston after he was deported three years ago. He’s screaming at the same gangster who, I recall, was smoking pot the entire evening we spent at Solalinde’s shelter in Ixtepec. He was already high by the time we scrambled on top of The Beast that night.
The reason for Mauricio’s anger is simple: back at the shelter, the gangster stole a pair of pants that he’d left out to dry. Mauricio swore revenge. Throughout the night, he eyed the gangster who sat a few boxcars back.
The gangster had just walked up to our car and, not yet seeing Mauricio, tried to convince a Salvadoran man that he, his wife, and twelve-year-old daughter should go back to the caboose to sit with him and his friends. He said he’d offer him and his family protection if there were a migration bust. Why would this gangster want to take this family under his wing? How many friends is he with?
Everyone responds to Mauricio’s scream as if it were a war cry. A shower of rocks pelts the gangster, who runs away terrified
while the other migrants convince the Salvadoran man that he would’ve regretted accepting that offer.
Then, moments before the train is about to take off and start the next chapter of our journey, the warriors deliberate. They decide on confrontation. Mauricio, Saúl, a Guatemalan carrying a two-yard-long iron rod, and three Hondurans will go to the caboose and give the gangster and his friends two options: get off or get thrown off.
The expedition readies itself. Rocks, whittled sticks, junkyard poles, and cheers: “We’re going to smash his nose!” But with that, The Beast jerks and blows its whistle, reminding everyone that on this road, any control over what happens or doesn’t happen belongs to The Beast alone. The train speeds up. Again the domino effect: tac, tac, tac. Everyone is forced to cling to their spot. The journey goes on.