Immigration News: US, Guatemala, Mexico Agree To Set Up Checkpoints On ‘La Bestia’ Train Route

The upsurge of violence in countries such as Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, together with poverty, has prompted a wave of migrants seeking a better future in America. According to the Mexican National Institute of Migration (INM)about 250 thousand Central Americans are repatriated each year, and people killed or maimed during the trip total 1,300. Furthermore, 52 thousand unaccompanied children arrived in the southern border between October 2013 and June 15, 2014.

In this context, Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina; his Mexican counterpart, Enrique Peña Nieto, and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden came to an agreement in which checkpoints are established in the cities traveled by "The Beast", the name given to the railway network of freight trains carrying thousands of undocumented migrants, traveling as stowaways from south to northern Mexico north towards the United States.

According to the Executive Secretary of the National Council on Migrant Care Guatemala, Alejandra Gordillo, the measure can be expected to "establish more checkpoints before migrants arrive at the station and on the train operating the migration, which will not let up," he said. Migrants who take "The Beast" come mainly from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, and travel with nothing but the hope of a better life.