Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez’s book, The Beast, takes readers on a journey through hell. In Spanish, the book’s title is, Los Migrantes que no Importan, which captures its subject better than, The Beast. The migrants Martínez writes about don’t matter to anyone. Everything in the book flows from that fact.
The Beast is a translated collection of Martínez’s best articles on Central Americans who travel through Mexico for a chance to cross the US border. The migrants don’t begin this odyssey lightly. Their hometowns and countries are plagued with poverty and violence. For a chance to escape, they suffer terrors in Mexico and tremendous uncertainty at the US border.
To tell their stories, Martínez spent months traversing the trails with migrants. He mounted and rode “la bestia,” (in English, “the beast”) the name given to the speeding cargo trains migrants travel across Mexico. It is a fitting nickname for careening trains that throw migrants off their roofs, and chew off carelessly dangling legs and arms. Martínez talked to many migrants atop the beast’s cold roofs. He also went to boom towns along the beast’s route where he interviewed girls who danced and had sex with migrants for money. During his travels, he saw bandits – many of them poor Mexican farmers who can no longer eke out a living from the land – rob and beat migrants. He witnessed drug runners stick up migrants with AK-47s. Everywhere he went he heard about men raping women. Given their vulnerability, migrants sometimes banded together. Martínez writes about how migrants once threw assailants from the speeding train. But mostly, Martínez narrates how the migrants lived in fear.
They feared immigration officers, members of drug syndicates, bandits armed with guns and machetes, and crooked “polleros,” who promise to take them to safe border crossings, but only steal their money. If migrants do make it to the US border, if they do survive this modern day Middle Passage, new fears fester. After he spent a night shift with a US border patrol agent, Martínez reveals how finding a safe place to cross is like a pedestrian finding a twenty dollar bill on a crowded city sidewalk. From Tijuana to Juarez, fences, cameras, motion and heat sensors, walls and border agents, violent drug smugglers, corrupt Mexican officials, and shifty polleros have closed the border tighter than the lid on a new can of latex paint. While some migrants make it, many more get imprisoned and eventually sent home. They are lucky. Unknown numbers drown in rivers, or die in the desert. How many perish is impossible to tell. These migrants rarely carry ID.
As terrible as this tale sounds, Martínez never preaches. He does not depict migrants as saints and victims. What makes this book so good and important is that it describes a modern day inferno right below our border. The Beast invites us not to look away; it makes people who don’t matter, matter.