Violence and misery forced them from their homes. Risking everything, they climbed aboard the infamous freight train that ferries the undocumented through Mexico to the US — a journey that cost them their limbs and their hopes. Now, with the help of prosthetics, they work to rebuild their lives.
The only thing Santiago Álvarez remembers is the fit of laughter that struck him as “The Beast” passed just inches above his head. He didn’t feel pain. Or fear. He was nervous, he says, and the only thing he could do was laugh. He had fallen under the train and was stuck between the tracks, pinned to the ground as the clanging steel of the rail cars raced overhead. He waited for the train to pass. “It made me feel small and skinny, the tracks are so wide,” he says. When he looked up and saw the back of the rear engine a few meters away, he thought: “If I run, I can catch it.” Then came the worst seconds of his life. He tried to get up but a terrible pain tore him apart. He looked down at his right leg: it was broken and mangled, crushed under the churning steel of La Bestia – the train that carries thousands of Central American migrants through Mexico each year, leaving many dead and many more injured. Santiago blacked out.
Santiago tells the story sitting on a plastic chair at his home in Matapalo, a community in Honduras’s Choluteca department, near the Nicaraguan border. It’s a small, dusty town with narrow dirt streets, where cows, pigs, and chickens roam freely and emaciated dogs lounge in the shade to escape the midday heat, which is humid and suffocating. Santiago is a reserved man, perhaps a bit standoffish, and like many of Central America’s rural inhabitants speaks in slow, careful sentences, heavy on the monosyllables and punctuated with distrustful looks. As he talks, he rolls up his right pant leg to reveal the damage: his mangled leg has been replaced with a prosthetic.
The accident happened in 2004. Santiago had decided to migrate to the US after his cousins told him they had decided to leave Honduras – a country consumed by violence, corruption, and an apathetic and self-serving political class. “I said: I’ll give it a shot, and we’ll see what God has to say,” he remembers. Santiago and his cousins travelled north through Guatemala and the Mexican state of Chiapas, almost without a hitch. In the eastern state of Veracruz, they got on the freight train. It was August 2. “We were happy because now we were on top,” he says. Migrants ride on the roofs of the freight cars, jumping on when the train slows down enough for them to run alongside and swing themselves up. The plan was going well, until the train stopped at a crossing and some men with machetes climbed on top of the train. Thieves, preying on migrants. As the metal cars clanged to a start and began to pick up speed, the assailants ran along the top, jumping from car to car, chasing migrants and brandishing machetes. Santiago didn’t realize what was happening until he heard the screams of a young man being hacked in the back by the attackers. “I panicked and ran. A guy was chasing me. He was right behind me. I managed to jump between two sets of cars, but when I turned to look back, he was even closer. It was in that moment, when I turned to look back, that I went down, and fell down between the rails,” he recalls. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and a light rain was falling. “That’s when the dream ended,” Santiago says.
It’s the same dream that thousands try to make a reality every year. The figures from Mexico’s Interior Ministry speak for themselves: between 2013 and 2019, more than 820,000 undocumented Central American migrants were apprehended by Mexican authorities. Like Santiago, their hopes were dashed, either because they were captured and deported by Mexican immigration, killed or injured by criminal gangs, abused or left to die by coyotes, or suffered some other injury during their journey – or, as is too often the case, because they simply disappeared without a trace.
Santiago’s family in Matapalo thought that he was dead, because that’s what his cousins, who eventually made it to the US, had told them. Santiago recalls what happened next with an air of bitterness, his face twisted and tense: He woke up in a hospital in Veracruz, but he couldn’t remember how he had gotten there. “I only remember that I saw a person grab me, I think it was God who grabbed me,” he says. When he woke up in the hospital, his leg was gone. “I felt helpless. For me, it was like my life was over. I felt like I was no longer good for anything, I was no longer worth anything.” He was eventually transferred from the hospital to a shelter for migrants, where he met others who were recovering from similar injuries. A month later, he was back with his family in Honduras.
Sitting in the entryway of his home in Matapalo, Santiago recounts a series of spiraling tragedies: After returning home, he decided to go back to Mexico in search of a prosthesis, which he eventually found, thanks to the support of a human rights organization. He would up in Nuevo Laredo, on the Mexico-US border, where he was assaulted, along with some companions, by a group of men from Los Zetas, one of Mexico’s most dangerous and bloodthirsty criminal gangs. “Those fuckers pulled us out of the car we were in, beat us and poured gasoline on us,” he says. “They were saying they were gonna set us on fire, but they couldn’t find any matches, so they just beat us with the butts of their guns.” After recovering in a local hospital, Santiago decided to attempt to cross the Río Bravo and enter the US. “I carried the prosthetic leg in a bag, because I was afraid it would get wet,” he says. But the current was too strong, and he had to let go of the leg to save himself, grasping for some bamboo branches to keep from being swept away. He managed to cross the river and crawl up onto the bank, but by then he was desperate: He turned himself in to the authorities, and was deported back to Honduras.
Back home, Santiago sought the support of an association that provides assistance to migrants. He was able to get a new prosthesis thanks to a program supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Eventually, Santiago was able to find a job as an assistant in a clinic run by the Honduran Ministry of Health, where now he earns 9,000 lempiras (about $360) a month – money that, he says, is not enough to support his wife and their eight-year-old son, Dylan. He managed to rebuild his life, but has yet to overcome the trauma of the injury. “At least I’m alive,” he says. “It’s a miracle.”
