Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. Valeria Luiselli

you or hurt you?” The children seldom give details of their experiences along the journey through Mexico upon a first screening, and it’s not necessarily useful to push them for more information. What happens to them between their home countries and their arrival in the United States can’t always help their defense before an immigration judge, so the question doesn’t make up a substantial part of the interview. But, as a Mexican, this is the question I feel most ashamed of, because what happens to children during their journey through Mexico is always worse than what happens anywhere else.

      The numbers tell horror stories.

      Rapes: eighty percent of the women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the U.S. border are raped on the way. The situation is so common that most of them take contraceptive precautions as they begin the journey north.

      Abductions: in 2011, the National Human Rights Commission in Mexico published a special report on immigrant abductions and kidnappings, revealing that the number of abduction victims between April and September 2010—a period of just six months—was 11,333.

      Deaths and disappearances: though it’s impossible to establish an actual number, some sources estimate that, since 2006, around 120,000 migrants have disappeared in their transit through Mexico.

      Beyond the terrifying but abstract statistics, many horror stories have recently tattooed themselves in the collective social conscience in Mexico. One specific story, though, became a turning point. On August 24, 2010, the bodies of seventy-two Central and South American migrants were found, piled up in a mass grave, at a ranch in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. Some had been tortured, and all had been shot in the back of the head. Three migrants in the group had faked their deaths and, though wounded, survived. They lived to tell the complete story: members of the drug cartel Los Zetas had perpetrated the mass murder after the migrants had refused to work for them and did not have the means to pay a ransom.

      I remember the dark days when this news broke out in Mexico—thousands or perhaps millions of people in front of newspapers, radios, and TV screens, all of them asking: How? Why? What did we do? Where did we go wrong, as a society, to make something like this possible? Even now, we don’t know the answer. No one does. What we do know is that, since then, hundreds of additional mass graves have been discovered. Every month, every week, they continue to be discovered. And even though the story of “Los 72”—the seventy-two men and women, girls and boys, all brutally murdered—changed the way in which both Mexican society and the rest of the world views the situation of migrants crossing Mexican territory, nothing has actually been done about it.

      There are, of course, some redeeming stories in Mexico. There is the story of Las Patronas, the group of women in Veracruz who, years ago, started throwing bottled water and food to the migrants aboard La Bestia and are now a formal humanitarian group. There are also the many shelters that offer food and refuge to migrants as they travel through Mexico, the most well-known of which is Hermanos en el Camino, run by Father Alejandro Solalinde. But these stories—small oases in the no-man’s-land Mexico has become—are only exceptions. If anything, they are fleeting glints of hope in the dark and raucous nightmare where the metal wheels of La Bestia continually screech and howl.