San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Migrants choose risky routes amid tougher policing
TACOTALPA, Mexico — An engineer shouted for the young migrant woman to hurry up and climb aboard the freight train or she’d be left behind. In her bright red tennis shoes, she quickened her pace and was the last to get on when it pulled out near Salto de Agua in Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas.
Hours later and about 27 miles to the west, the train stopped near the Tabasco state town of Tacotalpa and the woman hopped off to buy some cheesestuffed rolls. When the train crowded with migrants began to move again, she hustled to clamber back aboard. But the train suddenly stopped and rolled back. She lost her grip and fell beneath its wheels. It dragged her 100 yards before jerking forward again in a thunder of shuddering steel.
“The people were screaming there. They yelled at those in front to stop, to the engine, but the engine accelerated,” said Catalina Leon Munoz who lives alongside the tracks.
Frank Manuel Murillo, a 27yearold Honduran who spent half his life in Houston before being deported a year ago, had also gotten off the train to buy some water. “When I turned around she was hanging from those wagons on the train,” he said Wednesday. “The train was running back, it hit so hard and she fell on the rails and then it cut her in half.”
The littlenoticed death of 19yearold Honduran Saily Yasmin Andino Andino — her identity confirmed by local officials — added to a notorious toll claimed over the years by a train known as “The Beast,” a perilous stage on the migrant journey from Central America to the U.S. border.
Many migrants over the past year had tried to avoid such dangers by joining caravans of hundreds or thousands who trekked openly across southern Mexico.
Others bought bus tickets — or had Mexicans buy tickets for them — and traveled in relative safety. But the government has pressured bus companies to require identification when the tickets are purchased and people board. Foreigners without papers are not allowed on.
The government’s renewed crackdown on migration, spurred by threats of tariffs by U.S. President Trump, has pushed many back to more risky strategies, often involving smugglers who sometimes pack migrants perilously into illventilated truck trailers.
Some, like Andino, risked a ride on the rattling train to advance though a remote stretch of southern Mexico with hopes of getting off and making their way by other means.
But Mexican officials last week moved to squeeze that off as well. About 100 soldiers and immigration agents raided a train on Thursday and detained dozens of Central American migrants riding atop the cars. They detained another 500 in a series of raids at hotels, bus stations and highways.
The government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says it has completed the deployment of 6,000 National Guard members to regulate immigration along its southern border, with thousands more reportedly focused on restricting migration elsewhere in the country.
Christopher Sherman is an Associated Press writer.