After crossing the border, the first stop for migrants is often Arriaga, a sleepy town on the Tehuantepec Peninsula where Mexico is its narrowest. It is where they hop aboard La Bestia. Every other day or so, hundreds of migrants flock to the rail yard to clamber atop the metal boxcars and tanker wagons.
As they travel northward, migrants hop other trains at rail yards with names like Coatzacoalcos, Medias Aguas and Tierra Blanca in Veracruz state, Tenosique in Tabasco state, and Lecheria on the outskirts of Mexico City.
They sit atop freight cars, fighting not to fall off with the swaying of the trains or getting pushed off by low-hanging branches. Some migrants cling to couplings between wagons — occasionally with horrid consequences.
When 16-year-old Gertrudis Rosa fell asleep, the Honduran youth had already spent an exhausting six nights as a stowaway on freight trains. On his seventh night, Rosa rested on a coupling. Overtaken by fatigue, he fell to the tracks. The wheels of the hurtling train severed both his legs.
His double amputation in mid-May was a terrible but not uncommon tragedy.
"By God, that train is criminal," said Teodolinda Interiano, Rosa's mother. When she heard the news of her son's injuries, she was hospitalized with shock for five days in Honduras before she could make the journey to be by his side.
She spoke at the Good Shepherd Shelter, which harbors migrants who have lost arms or legs under the freight trains in Mexico.
The migrants who face the greatest risk on the journey north are those who pay the least to human smugglers, or coyotes. Mostly, they are Central Americans, and many have made the journey repeatedly. They travel solo much of the way and know where to find the hostels run by charities that provide free lodging and food.
"With my experience now, I can make it to the border on my own," said Juan P. Suazo, a 38-year-old Honduran who has made the journey five times. "Once you are at the border, you have to hook up with somebody who's linked to Los Zetas. Otherwise you will fail."
Suazo referred to the transnational crime gang that has spread from narcotics trafficking to extortion, counterfeiting, kidnapping and migrant smuggling.
Suazo was eager to return to California, where he lived seven years, and perhaps take up his old job as a valet parking attendant in Beverly Hills.
"I would drive beautiful cars, Volvos, Mercedes Benzes, Lexus, BMWs. They paid me $14 an hour, and I'd get tips," Suazo said.
Another migrant, Jorge Perez, a Guatemalan, discussed the multiple risks he faced as he headed illegally back to Minnesota, where he'd resided for years, long enough to chalk up two felony convictions. Then he cut a questioner short, tiring of the line of inquiry: "You'd do the same thing. If you were in my situation, you'd do it, too."
Getting kidnapped by gangsters from Los Zetas, who often operate in league with corrupt rail employees and police, is the greatest fear of the migrants.
In a six-month period in 2010, a total of 11,333 migrants were kidnapped in 214 separate incidents, the Mexican National Human Rights Commission found in a report published in February.
In June, the Rev. Alejandro Solalinde, a priest who runs a migrant shelter in Oaxaca state, said masked gunmen stormed a train as it entered Veracruz state and abducted some 80 migrants. A similar incident in mid-December saw 50 Central American migrants go missing, never to be found.
In the most shocking incident, a frightened Ecuadorean migrant tipped off authorities in August 2010 to a ranch in Tamaulipas state along the Texas border where they found the freshly executed bodies of 72 migrants. The Ecuadorean had feigned death, then fled the scene.
"I'm not going to take the train. Too risky," said Herrera, the Colombian who grew up in Texas. "I'm afraid of getting kidnapped. ... I'd rather walk and take more time and make it safely then go on the train and get kidnapped."
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The Good Shepherd Shelter for migrants maimed during falls from freight trains
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