In front of the bus station north of Mexico City, groups of migrants wait for the departure of buses heading to Mexican towns located on the border with the United States. This December 12, the mood is rather good and everyone says they are happy to leave Mexico as quickly as possible after crossing, in almost twenty-two hours, the center and the north of the country. “The tickets cost us a lot of course, but with children, we can’t travel on the roof of the train, it’s too risky”, explains Mario Gomez, a 27-year-old Honduran who traveled here with his wife and two children aged 10 and 12.
This father spent 150 euros per adult and 50 euros per child to avoid the “Bestia”, the freight train that crosses Mexico and which allows the poorest migrants to reach the northern border. Mario had heard of the accidents that happened to those who fell asleep on his roof, of the hours of waiting in the middle of the desert without a drop of water, but also of the racket that the Mexican police would engage in when the train took a break in the cities. He therefore preferred to work for a few weeks in Mexico City to be able to offer his family a safe bus trip to the American border. At least he thinks so. Because this means of transport is not a guarantee of tranquility either.
In recent months, migrants have told NGOs and journalists that they have been victims of kidnapping and extortion while traveling on these buses which shuttle between Mexico City and the US border. The Chihuahuenses and Futura lines, belonging to the Estrella Blanca transport group and connecting the city of Ciudad Juarez from Mexico, are particularly cited by migrants. Neither this company, nor the National Migration Institute, nor the Ministry of Transport agreed to answer questions from the World.
Large-scale criminal network
On the other hand, four families now safe in the United States told us about their ordeal after they boarded a bus of these lines. The similarity of their testimonies, even though they traveled on different dates, shows that they were most certainly victims of the same criminal network operating on a large scale and with the complicity of the drivers.
Jovana (the witnesses’ names have been changed), a Venezuelan mother, was traveling in July with her four children and a friend on a Futura company bus to Ciudad Juarez. She was going to join her husband who had been living in the United States for two years. After eight hours of driving, the bus stopped and the driver let in men dressed in police uniforms to check the migrants’ passports. “They didn’t ask anything from the Mexicans and they made all the foreigners get off the bus under the pretext that they had to do checks, explains Jovana, reached by telephone in Texas. I thought the bus was going to wait, but no, the driver drove off as soon as we were outside. My friend saw that these supposed police officers were paying the driver. »
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