David Bacon: Permanent People's Tribunal Takes Up Mexico's Migrant 'Hell' David Bacon - The Progressive
go to original October 8, 2014

Central Americans on the Beast, June 20 (Rebecca Blackwell/AP)

Photos of the trains known as "La Bestia" (“the beast”) have become famous around the world, showing young migrants crowded on top of boxcars, riding the rails from the Guatemala border to near the United States. It's a slow train, but many boys and girls have lost arms and legs trying to get on or off, and wind up living in limbo in the Casas de Migrantes - the hostels run by the Catholic Church and other migrant rights activists throughout Mexico.

Last week, as judges heard testimony on migration at the Permanent People's Tribunal in Mexico City, interior secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong told the press that the speed of the trains would be doubled.

Osorio Chong said Mexico would require the companies operating the trains - a partnership between mining giant Grupo Mexico and the U.S. corporation Kansas Southern - to hike their speed to make it harder for the migrants.

In the Tribunal, young people, giving only their first names out of fear, said they would see many more severed limbs and deaths as a result, but that it wouldn't stop people from coming.  Armed gangs regularly rob the migrants, they charged, and young people get beaten and raped.  If they're willing to face this, they'll try to get on the trains no matter how fast they go.

"Mexico is a hell for migrants already," fumed Father Pedro Pantoja, who organized a Casa de Migrantes in Saltillo.

Outrage wasn't limited to the Tribunal hearings. Former Mexico City mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, now the head of one of Mexico's left parties, the Movement for National Renovation, asked, "How can the government keep them from freely moving through Mexico, when they're trying to stay alive, and find work so their families survive?"  If Osorio Chong really wanted to reduce migration, he told La Jornada, Mexico's leftwing daily, "he'd support the farmers, so that people have work and don't have to leave to seek life on the other side of the border."

The Tribunal hearings offered an insight into the way the Mexican left sees migration to the United States and Canada.

Read the full story at The Progressive

David Bacon, a labor reporter based in California, was one of the judges in the Permanent People’s Tribunal hearing in Mexico City.

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