Recently on Alt.Latino, a spanish-speaking branch of NPR (National Public Radio, sort of like CBC but just in the US), I heard about a book called La Bestia: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail by Salvadoran Oscar Martinez. Published in originally 2010 as Los Migrantes Que No Importan (The Migrants Who Don’t Matter), the book is a non-fiction account of his journey from areas of Southern Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua to the United States. The title is named after the infamous freight train, “The Beast,” which hundreds of thousands Latinos take to escape poverty and the effects of the Drug War and immigrate to the US (usually undocumented). While Martinez takes the journey eight times, his writing accounts for the journeys of others along the way. His style exhibits freelance journalism, where he asks many people their reasons for leaving their homes and making the grueling, dangerous trip. Along the way, he runs into gangs, kidnappings, gunfights, stories of rape and abuse, human trafficking, people falling or being knocked off the train, and the like. From these brief autobiographies, the reality is clear: the Drug War in Mexico is still going strong and any attempt to escape will likely end violently.

However, there are two specific aspects to La Bestia that I would like to discuss, the first being life narratives in transit and how Martinez creates a voice for these travelers, and the second in how the media has portrayed the war over the years.

Quite literally, La Bestia is a perfect example of life narratives in transit: the book illustrates the horrors of trying to get from one side to the barricaded other of a corrupted, war-ridden country. Martinez effectively intertwines the lives of the men and women he meets on the trail and does them justice by laying out full interviews for the reader. He interviews not only innocent people trying to get out of poverty, but also violent criminals, ex-gang members (often just teenagers), men who have been deported from the US 4 or 5 times over but who are still making the journey, rape victims, and grieving families. The picture he paints is visually categorized into thematic chapters, but in a broader scheme highlights the overwhelming sense of peril and despair so many migrants face. In doing this, Martinez gives a very clear voice not only to the migrants but also to the larger movement calling on the national and international sphere to end the war.

Throughout the book, Marntinez expresses a solid political stance on how the war has been portrayed in the past several years throughout the media. As we have discussed in class, audiences are often more keen to read stories of atrocities on larger scales, which are more eye-opening to them. In an interview with the Texas Observer, Martinez comments on the way in which the interest of the international community in the Drug War has come in waves but is largely waning:

“So when we realize the complexity of it I decided to stay on that path for three years exclusively traveling like an undocumented migrant through stretches, seeing what happened to the migrants, visiting those places that I think society as a whole had forgotten about. The massacre of migrants in Mexico began well before the 2010 massacre of migrants in Tamaulipas— people simply didn’t pay attention the way they do now.”

Unfortunately, it seems that the media has disregarded most of the chaos and corruption of the war in Mexico. When’s the last time you heard about large-scale disappearances, murders, and violent trafficking across borders? It’s an idea that faintly exists in the back of your head, but in my opinion the lack of media coverage has made it seem like the war was improving. After reading this boo, I’ve realized the situation is still wholly relevant. I was talking to my friend Natalia’s dad who worked for the Mexican government before moving to Vancouver, a super smart and eloquent guy, and he explained to me that there are outside influences which are keeping these stories under wraps. The drugs being trafficked into the US are largely exchanged for weapons, so both the US and Mexican governments are benefitting economically from the war. In a 2009 article, ex-President Felipe Calderon explained exactly this:

“The biggest empowerment of organized crime are the weapons that arrive from the United States,” the president said.

Even if the article is from a few years back, its implications are still relevant. Check out this article from the Atlantic: it explains the present interactions of cartels and gangs in Northern Mexico and the DEA’s fruitless attempts to end the conflict. Current President Enrique Peña Nieto called for policy improvements when he was elected, but so far nothing has been effective as murder rates still hover around 28,000 people/year in Mexico (Canada had 554 in 2012 according to Wikipedia).

I’d definitely recommend this book not only for Martinez’s exemplary, provocative writing style but also because it brings a collective voice to an important human rights cause. The best part about this is that Martinez isn’t an American outsider: this war has been a significant factor in his life and his journalism career, so the stories are legitimate.