If you are a woman who undertakes the journey, you will almost certainly be raped, perhaps many times. Maybe this will happen when your are misdirected into an ambush in La Arrocera (near the beginning of the trail), perhaps it will happen on the train, perhaps it will happen when you are kidnapped and held on a ranch with hundreds of others whilst your relatives wire a ransom to the gangs, perhaps near the US border where a “bra tree” displays the underwear of victims as the rapists’ trophies.
From Chris Bertram’s excellent review of Oscar Martinez’s The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail. And that bit about hundreds of people being tortured while their relatives wire money to the kidnappers — that is not a phenomenon specific to Mexico.
You might be tempted to think that kidnapping, rape, murder, and exploitation on the migrant trail have nothing to do with U.S. immigration policy — isn’t this just what happens in Mexico? — but you’d be mistaken:
Your problem is that the few places you might cross are the same few places that the drug mules can get across: everybody is funnelled into the same dangerous spaces, towards the Arizona desert where you can perish in the heat or the Rio Grande which may well drown you.
…The system of closed borders exposes the desperate and vulnerable to predators on the road: it is a system that the democratic publics of the West have willed.