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El Tren de la Muerte

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Elias can't believe it—how is it possible that this man, a member of the legendary Mara Salvatrucha, was just disarmed by a tiny shop owner's wife? And it's not over. The store owner grabs the gangster by the shirt and punches him repeatedly in the face. When the man's legs buckle he drags him out front by the collar and leaves him in the gutter, throwing a few last punches. "Don't you ever come back here," he says.

The migrants watch, holding their drinks in silence.

There's a Spanish expression: "Todo se compra, Todo se vende." "Everything can be bought or sold." Perhaps nowhere is it truer than along the human smuggling routes through Mexico. Migrants are routinely beaten and robbed by cops and extorted by immigration agents. And as much as migrants depend on smugglers for at least part of the journey, it's difficult to tell which ones they can trust.

In Tenosique, I meet a muscular man with tattoos on his arms and a rosary around his neck. The migrants call him Laredo, which is stitched in white letters on his navy baseball cap. When I ask if he's made this trip before, he nods indulgently, as if I've asked if he can ride a bike. "I've lived in Austin, Boston, Kansas. I've entered the country 20 times. Crossing here isn't hard, it's getting across the border up there," he says, leaning casually on a long machete. I wonder if he is a smuggler, and later, Salas, the Beta coordinator, confirms my suspicions. "Oh, yeah—it's obvious he's a pollero," she says, using a common term for coyote.

Smugglers often pay train conductors to stop for migrants, and Salas has had her fair share of confrontations with the train companies. "Two weeks ago a woman was standing by the tracks, handing her 4-year-old to someone on the train before getting on herself, and because she didn't have money to pay, the driver pulled out and left her," Salas tells me. The horrified mother told nearby villagers, who told Beta, and soon Salas and her agents were racing after the train to rescue the toddler. The driver finally stopped after several hours, she says, and they returned the child to the mother.

As I listen to these stories, the U.S. Senate is about to abandon the first major immigration overhaul in 20 years. And in Mexico, where people are willing to risk a half-dozen terrifying attempts to cross the country on the Death Trains, where coyotes make a profit and officials turn a blind eye, the policy debate seems meaningless. As long as hundreds of thousands of people are willing to risk losing their limbs and their lives to come to America each year, few changes on the U.S. border will make a difference without serious efforts to create jobs in Central America and Mexico.

In Central America "you have a situation where a few families live extremely well, spend little on education and health care, pay little tax, and basically have unfulfilled obligations to their downtrodden," says George Grayson, a Mexico expert who teaches at the College of William and Mary. "The absence of Mexico's border certainly makes life more difficult for the U.S. and its law enforcement agencies, but there are steps we should be taking. We can't simply abandon our border; otherwise you'd have 25 percent of the world in the United States."

Back in Tenosique, on a Monday a little after 7 a.m., Salas calls our hotel. "¡Viene el tren!" she says. Minutes later we're running along the tracks. We cross a bridge over a waterway and come face to face with the Honduran teens we met the day before. They greet us with smiles and pose for the camera with tough-guy stares. The train has rounded a corner and chugs toward us, its headlights resembling enormous glowing eyes. "¡Camello!" yells the tall man in the blue bandanna, the one looking forward to the pretty girls in Missouri. "Come over here! Five on this side, five on the other!" They split and wait on each side of the tracks. The train is almost here. "Be careful," warns an older migrant. "If it's going too fast, there will be others." Russet, gray and white boxcars glide past with hordes of people standing on top. When the train is past, the 10 guys remain on the tracks. "It went too fast!" one says. They take off in a run, hoping the train will slow. We sprint after them. "¡Se detuvo!" one screams. "It stopped!" Dozens of people clamber onto the caboose, and I realize it was likely Laredo who paid off the driver. "Hurry, hurry, get on!" one man standing on the train yells to the running Hondurans. They make it just in time. All 10 climb aboard and the train moves forward, inching toward El Norte. I lean on my knees, catching my breath, and watch the waving teenagers grow small in the distance.

"Are you OK?" Elias' mother asks him as he stands at a phone booth. Friends of his have told her where he has gone.

"Yeah, I'm fine," he says.

"Don't lie to me."

"I'm fine, Mamá."

"Why did you leave like Marvin did, without telling me?"

"I didn't want you to worry." She agrees to wire him the $1,000 deposit for Martin, the coyote. She'll take it from the cosmetics store, another addition to Elias' debt. He'll continue north without Pedro, who doesn't have enough money to pay a smuggler and plans to take his chances on the train all the way to Texas.

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