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

• Author: Ellen Van Damme
• Published date: 01 November 2018
• Date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X18788332
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 223, Vol. 45 No. 6, November 2018, 175–178

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18788332

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

175

Book Review

On the Road with the Beast

Violence, Corruption, and Migration in Central America

by

Ellen Van Damme

Óscar Martínez The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Train.

London and New York: Verso, 2013.

Óscar Martínez A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America. London and

New York: Verso, 2016.

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 deporta-

tions. 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 coun-

try 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 (Sandoval-

García, 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 offi-

cers, 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 vio-

lence. 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

Ellen Van Damme is a Ph.D. fellow of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO), Leuven Institute

of Criminology (KU Leuven).

788332LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18788332Latin American PerspectivesVan Damme / Book Review

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