CHAHUITES, Mexico (AP) – The largest crackdown by Mexican authorities on illegal migration in decades has decreased the flow of Central American migrants trying to reach the United States, and has dramatically cut the number of child migrants and families, according to officials and eyewitness accounts along the perilous route.
Convoys of Mexican federal police and immigration service employees in southern Mexico have begun scouring the tracks of the infamous freight train known as “La Bestia,” or The Beast, hauling migrants from the rail cars and sending them to deportation centers. They have also set up moving roadblocks, checking the documents of passengers on interstate buses.
Associated Press journalists who followed the train one night this week as it left the southern state of Chiapas and entered neighboring Oaxaca noticed the drop-off, with just a few dozen mostly adult males perched atop the rumbling cars instead of the hundreds of men, women and children who were there not long ago. The men said they were the only ones able to evade capture. There were only two women and no children on the train.
“They took almost everyone” said Jorge Ruiz Williams, a 20-year-old Honduran migrant who avoided detention and was seated atop La Bestia on Tuesday night. “We escaped because we’re young and agile.”
When the authorities come, the migrants who once circulated openly in shelters and boarded the cars as they were being attached to the locomotive are forced to hide in the woods, where criminals lurk.