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Central American migrants in Mexico cannot report crimes without risking deportation, carry cash for the journey, and have no local ties. These traits make them ideal targets: crimes against them have almost no cost for the perpetrator, so cartels, gangs, bandits and police all treat them as a free resource. Their lack of legal standing is what turns them into a commodity.
Groups like the Zetas turned migrant kidnapping into a volume business. They seize dozens of people at once and torture them until they give up phone numbers for relatives in the United States or back home, then demand ransoms of a few thousand dollars per person. Each victim is worth little, but the flow on the train routes is huge and steady, so the model scales. Informants planted among the migrants help select targets.
In August 2010, in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, the Zetas executed 72 migrants who had been taken from the route north, reportedly after the migrants refused to work for the cartel or pay. An Ecuadorian survivor, Luis Freddy Lala Pomavilla, was shot and played dead among the bodies, then walked to a military checkpoint and raised the alarm. The massacre made visible to the world a pattern of killing that had long gone unrecorded.
Sexual violence against migrant women on the route is so routine that many take contraceptive injections before leaving, expecting to be raped. Some trade sex for protection from a single man or a coyote to avoid being attacked by many. Treating rape as an expected cost, rather than a rare crime, shows how completely the violence has been normalized.
Checkpoints and raids on highways and buses do not stop migration. They push migrants onto freight-train roofs and into remote stretches of scrub and rail yards, where no witnesses or authorities are present. Those zones are exactly where bandits, gangs and cartels operate, so tighter enforcement moves the danger onto migrants' bodies rather than reducing the flow.