Migrants opt for risky routes through Mexico amid tougher policing
TACOTALPA, Mexico — An engineer shouted for the young migrant woman to hurry up and climb aboard the freight train or she’d be left behind. In her bright red tennis shoes, she quickened her pace and was the last to get on when it pulled out near Salto de Agua in Mexico’s southernmost state of Chiapas.
Hours later and about 27 miles to the west, the train stopped near the Tabasco state town of Tacotalpa and the woman hopped off to buy some cheese-stuffed rolls. When the train crowded with migrants began to move again, she hustled to clamber back aboard. But the train suddenly stopped and rolled back. She lost her grip and fell beneath its wheels. It dragged her 100 yards before jerking forward again in a thunder of shuddering steel.
“The people were screaming there. They yelled at those in front to stop, to the engine, but the engine accelerated,” said Catalina Leon Munoz who lives alongside the tracks.
Frank Manuel Murillo, a 27-year-old Honduran who spent half his life in Houston before being deported a year ago, had also gotten off the train to buy some water. “When I turned around she was hanging from those wagons on the train,” he said Wednesday. “The train was running back, it hit so hard and she fell on the rails and then it cut her in half.”
The little-noticed death of 19-year-old Honduran Saily Yasmin Andino Andino — her identity confirmed by local officials — added to a notorious toll claimed over the years by a train known as “The Beast,” a perilous stage on the migrant journey from Central America to the U.S. border.
Many migrants over the past year had tried to avoid such dangers by joining caravans of hundreds or thousands who trekked openly across southern Mexico.
Others bought bus tickets — or had Mexicans buy tickets for them — and traveled in relative safety. But the...