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On the Road with the Beast: Violence, Corruption, and Migration in Central America

The Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez has published two books on his (field) experiences and investigations in Central America.1 Both The Beast and A History of Violence deal with three recurrent topics: violence, organized crime, and migration. Although the history of gangs in Central America is debated, according to Cruz (2010) there were already youth gangs present in the region in the 1980s when some Central American countries were still at war. Because of the conflict, many people fled to the United States, and when the wars were over, in the 1990s, there were massive deportations. Subsequently, the Mara Salvatrucha and the Eighteenth Street Gang, composed of Latino migrants living in the United States who had felt the need to organize in order to protect themselves from other local gangs, transferred their gang culture to the local street gangs in Central America. Needless to say, crime and murder rates have risen in the region since the 1990s, and as a consequence people have started fleeing their country once more—this time not because of warfare in the conventional sense of the word but because of gang violence and a lack of employment. However, migrants are often repeatedly confronted with these issues on their way to the United States (SandovalGarcía, 2017). In The Beast Martinez travels from border town to border town with migrants and recounts the stories of those he meets. He talked to gang members, coyotes, police officers, civil servants, border patrol agents, migrants, and priests running migrant shelters on the trail to the North. He traveled on the migrant train known as the Beast from Chiapas and Tabasco on the border with Guatemala to Tijuana in the west and Nuevo Laredo in the east, as well as all the other cities in between. Most of the migrants with whom he spoke did not really want to move to the United States, but they felt forced to by lack of employment/money and (gang) violence. They were looking for “a better life” (1) in the United States, but along the way they had to endure many forms of violence. Young women and men (many of them minors) are the first victims of human trafficking and sexual abuse. Taking the Beast, for women, means facing odds of eight out of ten of being raped or suffering from some other form of sexual violence. Female migrants are viewed as second-class citizens (43), and rape and other forms of abuse often go unreported. Although most women remain silent (see also Hume, 2009), the