Daisy Mendez Mendoza

Daisy Mendez Mendoza (Tribune photo by Heather Stone)

Daisy Mendez Mendoza cradles her head in her hands, and cries. What now? Go on to the U.S. or back home to Honduras?

After days on the road, she had just arrived at the Casa Del Migrante, a haven for immigrants who flow across the nearly wide-open Guatemala-Mexico border near here. Piled beside her on a bench is everything she owns: a small clump of dirty, sweaty clothes.

She's here because she wants a better life for herself and her infant daughter, whom she left back home. And back home is a bleak life that she's trying to escape. It is where she has been robbed repeatedly and could only find a $3-a-day store clerk's job, hardly enough to live on.

Daisy hopes she can find a job in the U.S. But the 20-year-old does not know where or how. All she knows is the name of an uncle in Los Angeles.

She was going to go north aboard a freight train called "La Bestia," the Beast. It terrifies her.

She is here now, at a crossroad faced by countless other women crossing borders around the world. She--and they--are trying to decide whether to go ahead despite the dangers, dangers that can be far greater for women than for men. Along the way to the lives they're hoping to reach, women are raped. They are abused. They are sold. Their humanity is stripped from them.

And yet many go on.

As Daisy waited to board the train with two friends one day ago, two older women approached them and persuaded her companions to work in their bars. They said the young women could earn money for their trips north. But Daisy is sure they will be forced to work as prostitutes, be sold from one bordello to another and vanish as others have.

Without her friends, she sits alone in the drenching heat, haunted by a memory.

She was traveling with several young men three years ago on the same route when a gang pulled them off the Beast and robbed them. Daisy was separated from the men, and beaten and raped. She was so badly injured, she spent several days in the hospital.

Gangs control the trains. They charge the migrants fees to ride. They steal their money and their clothes, and use female migrants however they want.

"I don't feel safe. I don't. A woman is in much greater danger than a man," Daisy says, her face ablaze from tears and the heat.

Yet she is back here in the southwest corner of the Guatemala-Mexico border, with its miles of sun-baked swamps and tropical lowlands. To many desperate and hopeful women on the way north, it is the back door to a better life.


"The Beast" is the freight train that immigrants who cannot afford smugglers try to board, risking their lives in the hope it will carry them beyond Mexican immigration authorities and the gangs who prey on them. They call it the Beast because they say it is cruel and eats them.

It's not the only freight train they will ride on the nearly 2,000-mile trip from the Guatemala-Mexico border to the U.S. frontier, but it is the most dangerous because of the gangs and crowds of migrants clamoring for a spot on the side or on top of its box cars.

The rail yard in Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, just across the border from Guatemala, is where many Central American immigrants try to hitch a ride aboard the Beast.

One night as the train gets ready to roar, and hundreds of immigrants await their chances, they pass along only advice.

Those who don't grab hold as the train pulls out can fall and be crushed by the train's wheels, they say. If a rider falls asleep while the Beast is rushing onward, there is again that danger of falling off and being crushed. And one more piece of advice: Riders should travel with only what's on their backs but bring something to eat and drink.