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Following the discovery of the San Fernando massacres in August of 2010 and April of 2011, where Mexican authorities found a total of 265 bodies, many of them Central American, news outlets claimed that these tragedies were the result of an ongoing territorial war between the Gulf cartel and the Zetas.1 In some other cases, media outlets reported that these migrants were killed because they refused to become foot soldiers for the Zetas, or simply because they couldn't pay the territorial tax demanded by the cartels.2 Despite the different accounts, much of the public debate reduced the massacres to yet another instance of collateral damage caused by the so-called war on drugs in Mexico. Under the Trump administration, the strategies of detention and deportation deployed under Obama continued, though efforts were redoubled to restrict, curve, and ban authorized migration from Muslim countries and to substantially reduce the refugee cap number to its lowest in almost a century.4 Alongside the Muslim ban and the refugee cap reduction, Trump ordered the construction of the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico and reached "safe third country" agreements with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, as well as the "Remain in Mexico" policy, forcibly deporting asylum seekers to these countries and requiring them to apply for protection there.5 As far as the Biden administration, the early signs are mixed. Since his inauguration, Biden has continued to detain, deport, and restrict immigration at the same levels as the Trump administration. In 2014, Peña Nieto's administration, launched "Programa frontera sur," an immigration operative that further militarized the Mexico-Guatemala-Belize border and introduced a series of laws that criminalized unauthorized migration in Mexico from Central America.7 In fact, between 2015 and 2018, Mexico apprehended and deported 520,000 Central American migrants, 200,000 more than the U.S. in the same period.8 In addition, under the López Obrador administration-whose presidential candidacy adopted a pro-immigrant stance-Mexico's immigration policy has not changed much.9 In 2019, backpedaling his campaign promises, López Obrador deployed Mexico's National Guard to the Mexico-GuatemalaBelize border, making it clear that his administration had no intention to change the nation's approach to immigration enforcement. The situation in Mexico has been complicated by the "caravanization" of undocumented migration, or what some scholars suggest is a form of political representation to perform transnational solidarity against neoliberal destitution, providing both a platform for migrants to assert their right to mobility and protect themselves from human rights violations enacted both by state actors and criminal organizations (Chavez 12; Franz 184).10 In this article, I focus on Óscar Martinez's chronicle, The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail (2014), as an entry point to articulate a critical intervention which challenges the tendency to rationalize the violence against Central American migrants as the result of a crisis in Mexico's social order caused by the so-called war on drugs.
