by Emma Volonté
Exclusive for El Repotero
Immigrants mainly Central Americans board the train (aka The Beast) bound north and possibly to their death. (PHOTO BY EMMA VOLONTÉ)
Arriaga is a necessary stage for undocumented Central Americans who migrate to the United States. They cross the Suchiate river, which separates Guatemala from Mexico, and they arrive to Tapachula. From there they are only 260 km from Arriaga, the city in Chiapas from where “La Bestia” (The Beast) departs, the freight train they take to travel North.
María says she walked for ten days to arrive to Arriaga from the border. Most of Center Americans, however, take the bus, and they get off before arriving to the migration post in the highway. They advance into the hill and walk for several kilometers in order to reach again the highway and catch a new bus. “The drivers charge us three times more to take us,” says Rolando, who comes from Guatemala.
Local gangs hide in the bits of the road that the migrants take in order to avoid the border control police. They rob and kidnap them and rape women and kill whoever refuses to cooperate. The authorities don’t protect them: Chiapas is the Mexican state where the police commit the most abuses against Center Americans.
A number of migrants pay a pollero to take them to the border with the US. According to Carlos Bartolo Solis, regional coordinator for the Promigrante association in Arriaga, “You are never going to see the true pollero: he hires someone else to take people and who is in charge to pay the bribes to Migration. To travel from here to the Northern border we are charged 90,000 pesos (more than $6,500 dollars).”
Once in Arriaga, the undocumented migrants can stay at the Home Hogar de la Misericordia, established in 2004 by the Father Heyman Vázquez.
“Here we offer them clothes, a bed, medical attention and moral support. We also give them a risks map, a guide that locates the risks that can be found on the road,” tells Father Heyman.
Not all the migrants stay in his shelter: those who have more money sleep in the hostels in the center, others sleep among the tombs in the municipal pantheon or in the railways.
I found Franklin, a 26 year-old Honduran, while he was walking between the coaches of the train with his crutches. The accidents during the trip are very common: a lot of people get hurt when they try to climb to the Bestia’s roof, others during the trip itself, as the only way to secure a coach is by tying your waist to a grill. Further, by mid-April the flow of migrants on the train increased significantly, and with that, the danger of the trip: the normal number of 600 travelers increased up to 1,500 people.
Flanklin got hurt while travelling on the train: he put his foot on the steel piece that secures the coaches, and when these got closer together, it destroyed his heel. He was bleeding for twelve hours before the train stopped. Flanklin had already been in Arriaga once before.
“I was here with a girl from Chiapas, who got pregnant. I went North to look for a job and during the trip I had the accident. Now I’m back and I’ve been forbidden to see my daughter, it really hurts not to be able to hold her. I’m going to Mexico City to look for a job, so at least I can send her money.” Asked about how he thinks to work with the leg in that condition, he answers: “God is just wonderful.”
Everybody speaks of God, of the United States and the mara violence. Ana is 26, she has a 4 year-old son, and she is from Salvador.
“It is very difficult over there, the mara doesn’t allow you to work, it is always asking you for money. If they want you to become a gang member and you refuse, you get killed. Not so long ago three kids were killed for going to a school in a different neighborhood from where they lived. I don’t know where I’m going, but I want my son to study because I couldn’t.”
Pedro also comes from El Salvador and he left the country because of the gang violence: he is gay and they tried to rape him. He managed to avoid it, but he had to escape. He has lived in Mexico City for one year and he descended to Tapachula to get his refugee papers. The papers however, were not ready and now he has to return to Mexico City: he needs to take another ride on La Bestia.
It was a difficult situation: “It is very hard to be a migrant, and it is harder to be gay and a migrant. We are target for rapists, thieves, kidnappers. Often criminals get mixed with us. A guy from Guatemala tried to steal my watch, I resisted and filed a suit, but the authorities didn’t do anything about it. When I told them that he wanted to rape me, the police officers laughed.”
The organized crime also robs migrants, particularly the Zetas cartel. It often kidnaps undocumented migrants and forces them to work for them, or either they demand a ransom to their families. In the last four years, 80,000 migrants have been kidnapped.
“What can be done to face this situation?”, Bartolo Solís was asked. “The visa for Center Americans should be eliminated and they should be allowed a free flow through Mexican soil. This way the migrants will travel in dignity, by bus instead of by train and wouldn’t become easy target for extortion and kidnapping.”
