Introduction
In 2012, I received an email about Padre Alejandro Solalinde, a Mexican priest who had opened Hermanos en el Camino (Brothers on the Road), a shelter for Central American refugees in Ixtepec, Oaxaca. I was planning a trip to Mexico and decided to visit the shelter to learn more about what was happening to refugees as they passed through Mexico. When I arrived in Mexico City, some friends showed me a video of a group of women in La Patrona, Veracruz (the women are known as Las Patronas) who handed out food and water to refugees riding the cargo trains collectively called La Besita: The Beast. I added them to my itinerary.
I ended up spending two weeks at each place, photographing and interviewing refugees (most people still call them “migrants” but because they’re fleeing violence in their home countries, they’re refugees). At that time, hundreds of refugees were riding La Bestia. The vast majority came from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, countries with some of the highest murder rates in the world. Much of the violence is perpetrated by gangs like the Mara Salvatrucha and Mara 18 who kidnap, rape and extort with impunity. The only word that can describe their journey through Mexico is “horrific.” It’s estimated that 80% will be assaulted, 60% of the women will be raped. Drug cartels kidnap and hold people for ransom. But, because the violence in their home countries is so extreme, they take the risk.
I returned to Hermanos en el Camino and La Patrona in January, 2015; I also visited shelters in other states. Things were very different and, in many ways, worse. Mexico has implemented Plan Frontera Sur (Plan of the Southern Border) and is effectively preventing people from riding the trains. The methods range from stationing police and Immigration agents at train stations to pulling people from the trains with hooks to using Tasers. Train companies have increased the trains’ speed and some have installed cement barriers next to the tracks to prevent people from running alongside and climbing on. All of this has kept refugees off the trains but hasn’t stopped them from entering Mexico and trying to get to the US. They’re forced to take ever more dangerous routes, subjected to even more brutal assaults. “We thought we could not see anything worse than the train,” says Luís López-Lago, who works with a Spanish NGO in Ixtepec. “But there is something worse: walking on the road.”
I asked one advocate in Mexico why people are willing to take such extreme risks. He said that their reasoning is: “’If I stay I die. If I go, I may die.’ They choose between certain and possible death.”
Here are links to some of the articles I’ve published:
http://inthesetimes.com/article/13505/the_patrons_of_veracruz/
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/train-unknowns
http://commonwealmagazine.org/holy-nuisance
http://inthesetimes.com/article/17916/how-the-u.s.-solved-the-central-american-migrant-crisis