The Beast

Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail

By: Oscar Martinez, Francisco Goldman - Foreword, Daniela Maria Ugaz, John Washington

Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon

One day a few years ago, 300 migrants were kidnapped between the remote desert towns of Altar, Mexico, and Sasabe, Arizona. A local priest got 120 released, many with broken ankles and other marks of abuse, but the rest vanished. Óscar Martinez, a young writer from El Salvador, was in Altar soon after the abduction, and his account of the migrant disappearances is only one of the harrowing stories he garnered from two years spent traveling up and down the migrant trail from Central America and across the US border. More than a quarter of a million Central Americans make this increasingly dangerous journey each year, and each year as many as 20,000 of them are kidnapped.

Martinez writes in powerful, unforgettable prose about clinging to the tops of freight trains; finding respite, work, and hardship in shelters and brothels; and riding shotgun with the border patrol. The Beast is the first to shed light on the harsh new reality of the migrant trail in the age of the narcotraficantes.

©2013 Verso; translation copyright 2013 by Daniela Maria Ugaz and John Washington; foreword copyright 2013 by Francisco Goldman (P)2020 Tantor

Awesome, takes you right along!

Wow, what an amazing book. The priceless experiences and amazing narration makes this book so good I was sad when it finished.

The different point of views

10/10- it give you an idea of the struggles on all sides.
Also if you come from an migrant family it shows you what your parents/ grandparents had to endure

Phony accents

I was really aggravated by the reader’s rendering of Latino voices. He used a ridiculous Speedy Gonzalez, faux-barrio voice that was completely unnecessary and distracting. The book is already translated from the original Spanish, so we know the informants were not speaking as he imitates. As a native Spanish speaker myself, and identifying the reader as such, I wish he had just read everyone the same.