Eyder Peralta
Appearances
Consider This from NPR
Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
So at some point I gave him a little coin so he could put it on the train track and see what happened to it. And indeed, I had never done this before.
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
There was this Venezuelan woman who I met, and she had slung her little girl just on her shoulder. And I asked her, like, you know, why do this, and why do this right now? And she sort of, like, looked at me, surprised, I think, at the question, and she said, You know, you guys think that the American dream is dead. But for us, the American dream is still very much alive.
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
I remember there was this one kid who was putting plastic bottles on the train tracks just to see what happened to them.
Consider This from NPR
Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
And I think what the explanation for that, that I got over talking to dozens of migrants, is that the American dream is not this grand idea. It's a really simple idea. For her... It was that her two kids could get an education. I also met this mother and son from Venezuela as well, Brian and Yalitza, who was his mom. And his mom was in her 50s and he was 23, right?
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
And Yalitza's husband died and she says she told Brian, you know, this is our chance. I've got nothing to lose. We can do this and you can find a better life now. And so they left. And so she told me why I'm doing this is because I think that Brian, my son, could become an entrepreneur. He can have a better life. And then talking to her son, he told me something much simpler, right?
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
Yeah, and it flattens it, right? It's like one of those machines.
Consider This from NPR
Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
Which was that he had a little kid in Venezuela.
Consider This from NPR
Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
What this trip could mean, what this American dream could mean, is that one day his kid could have a birthday present.
Consider This from NPR
Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
Yeah. But, you know, I think another thing about these migrants, right, is they've been told that throughout. A lot of these migrants, they've been at this for years. You know, a lot of these Venezuelan migrants, you know, they first started in Colombia and then, you know, they crossed the jungle in Panama and then, you know, they went up to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, right?
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
And so we were catching these migrants at the tail end of a journey. I think that's a lot of why they're saying, we don't care what the American president says, we've been going through hell. And whatever he says is nothing compared to what we've already been through.
Consider This from NPR
Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
You know, this story was born out of a conversation I had with my wife. You know, we live in Mexico City, and Mexico City is a stop along the way for migrants. So you see a lot of migrant families. And my wife had a question, right? She was saying, I don't know that I have the capacity emotionally to put my family through a trip like this.
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
They have like their whole lives with them. You know, they have just bags full of coats and blankets and they have jugs of water. When a train would finally approach... They're so heavy that like the earth beneath it sort of heaves as they move across, right? It almost feels like the gravity of the train pulls you toward it.
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
And what she was saying is, is I have a hard time understanding migrants who do. I was like, you know, that's probably a question that many of our listeners have. I had met this Mexican photographer, Pedro Anza. I had met him in Haiti. when we were doing some coverage in Haiti. And he rides this train a lot. He's working on a long-term project on this train.
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
And he had told me, you know, you should ride the train. It gives you a very different understanding of the migrant experience.
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
I did. I have to say, I didn't realize how hard this was. You know, I was coming off of an assignment in Lebanon. I was there as Israel started bombing. It was missiles and you could feel the force of them, right? So, like, I was like, well, you know, what's getting on a train, right? It's all relative.
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
Scott, like we spent a 12-hour part of that train ride was at night. And it was in the high 30s. And that train is moving at 50 miles an hour. So like just the wind, right?
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
And there are these people who help the migrants. And this lady, she saw me and the photographer I was with. And she said, you guys are crazy. You don't know what you're getting into. And she gave us this very thin blanket. And I was like, I'm not going to take this. Give it to one of the migrants, right? I'm just here. As a reporter, I'm not doing this. And she's like, you're going to want this.
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
And so, like, I took it sort of with a little shame. And in the middle of the night, I was just holding on to that blanket.
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
It was difficult and you're just, you know, there's so many people on that train that you can't, you can't really move, but there's also like not really body warmth that you're getting like from other people. Nobody's talking. It's so loud. The wind, right? You're just, like, you look up and all you see is, like, there was, like, a full moon, right?
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
And, like, you really can't see anything on either side.
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
The sun. Literally all I could think about is, what am I doing? Like, why did we do this? And when is that sun going to come up?
Consider This from NPR
Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
I think my editor always tells me, like, Ader, you know, the chaos will be there tomorrow, right? Whatever chaos that is, right? Haiti will be there tomorrow. She's like, let's take a breath. Because my instinct, right, as a journalist is... is let's go. I grew up in Miami and the first house we stayed at, it was like a corner house and like a big intersection. Right.
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
And so there was always car crashes and like no one could keep me from going to see the car crash. Right. It was like the thing I did, um, So I always wanna run toward things, but there's always a conversation between me and my editors about risk versus benefit. It's interesting because on this train, I had a different opinion than my photographer friend.
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
So they have this term that they say, which translates to we're going to puncture the train. And so the young people, they will put on gloves, like a ski mask to protect their face and their eyes. And then as the train comes, they just sprint like right beside it and they somehow jump on and then they just start turning knobs and pulling levers.
Consider This from NPR
Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
We had gotten on a couple of trains and they were moving in the wrong direction, everybody got off, and I was not comfortable on top of that train. You know, you're two stories up. I'm afraid of, like, Ferris wheels. So, like, I don't like heights.
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
The slow height of it, no. And then, like, sometimes, you know, you have to walk on top of those things and you have to jump from cart to cart. And that...
Consider This from NPR
Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
That made me really uncomfortable. I rarely am physically scared, right? Yeah. I was physically scared. And I sat down at some point with Pedro Anza, the photographer who was with me on this trip. And I said, I'm not doing this. And I'm like, we won't even use it for the story, I said. Because actually, in the end, we used about one paragraph of that awful 12 hours overnight of freezing cold.
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
And so in my mind, I was making that calculation, right? And he stopped me and he said, you will never understand what they go through unless you get on the train with them.
Consider This from NPR
Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
You know, just as President Trump took office, I was in Ciudad Juarez at the border. And I actually met some of the same migrants that had been on the train with me. The same people. The same people. And they were waiting in line because they had gotten... a CPP-1 appointment, which is this app that the Biden administration used to have. And that's kind of like, that is the glimmer of hope.
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
That was the glimmer of hope for so many migrants, right? And on that day, Trump takes the oath of office and that app goes offline just minutes after he does. And the heartbreak on that international bridge, it's hard to describe, honestly. You're just watching somebody's world crumble in a few minutes.
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
And to know, I guess, to have felt what it's like for a little tiny period, right, of how hard that journey is, to watch it crumble on that day, I mean, you know, I think it's difficult.
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Riding 'La Bestia' with migrants in Mexico
And what they're hoping will happen is that it disrupts the train's air brakes. And so that would usually cause an emergency stop.
The NPR Politics Podcast
How Canada & Mexico Respond To Trump's Tariffs
You know, Mexico's president, Claudio Sheinbaum, has always said that Mexico's response will be cool-headed. So this morning, the president came out for her morning briefing. You know, she basically said, everyone, stay calm. We're not going to enact retaliatory tariffs, unlike Canada.
The NPR Politics Podcast
How Canada & Mexico Respond To Trump's Tariffs
And, you know, basically, she said these tariffs on aluminum and steel are not a reality, they go into effect in March. And she said, we're going to talk, she got her economy minister out. And he said, look, these economies are too interwined. And so we have to find common sense. And he said,
The NPR Politics Podcast
How Canada & Mexico Respond To Trump's Tariffs
that Mexico is going to wait for Trump's cabinet to get settled and that they just want to have phone conversations. And what the economy minister said is, we're going to explain to Trump just how complicated and impossible this would be for him. And he gave a really interesting example. He said, take a look at pistons, the pistons that go in cars.
The NPR Politics Podcast
How Canada & Mexico Respond To Trump's Tariffs
For a car that is made in Michigan, those pistons would be made with US aluminum. But then that same piston goes into Canada and then to Mexico and then back into the US. Sometimes, he said, that piston can cross borders up to eight times. And so they're like, so what are we going to do? Are we going to put tariffs on this piston eight times? What would that do to car prices?
The NPR Politics Podcast
How Canada & Mexico Respond To Trump's Tariffs
What would that do to American consumers? And so I think the bet here in Mexico has been to hope that these economies are so integrated that Trump will eventually back down from tariffs once he thinks about the consequences of them.
The NPR Politics Podcast
How Canada & Mexico Respond To Trump's Tariffs
It was exactly the same. And the first tariffs that President Trump announced, he would place 25% tariffs on everything coming out of Mexico. That's a huge deal because Mexico has become the number one trading partner for the United States. So it's billions of dollars on all sorts of things, right? From limes and avocados to computer screens to the cars you drive. Mexico took the exact same tack.
The NPR Politics Podcast
How Canada & Mexico Respond To Trump's Tariffs
On the day that President Trump announced those tariffs, Claudia Sheinbaum said, we have retaliatory measures ready, but I'm going to wait to talk to President Trump. That next morning, she talked to President Trump. She came out to the nation and said, these tariffs have been postponed. And this is the playbook, actually, that Mexico used during its first term. And basically, what
The NPR Politics Podcast
How Canada & Mexico Respond To Trump's Tariffs
they've learned, and they've told Mexicans this, right, is that we're not going to take on Trump in the sort of same aggressive manner that he takes with us. And so far, that seems to be working.
The NPR Politics Podcast
How Canada & Mexico Respond To Trump's Tariffs
I don't know. I think it's a bit of a sleight of hand. Right now, Mexico is not doing anything that it wasn't doing when Biden was in office. I mean, Mexico, when Biden was in office, had sent troops to the border. It allowed the US to deport non-Mexican migrants to Mexico. You know, we've been hearing a lot about raids and all these military planes shipping migrants back to their country.
The NPR Politics Podcast
How Canada & Mexico Respond To Trump's Tariffs
But the Mexican government says that they haven't seen a significant uptick in deportations since Trump took office. So, I mean, in a lot of ways, Mexico's relationship with the United States is the same. They're doing sort of the same things. But what we're getting is a much more aggressive language coming from U.S. leadership.
The NPR Politics Podcast
How Canada & Mexico Respond To Trump's Tariffs
And I could be terribly wrong here, Sue, because I hear you on Trump being dead set on tariffs, right? But I think if things do change, between these countries and in this market, it's probably just not going to happen with the swiftness that we've been seeing in these first few weeks of the administration.
The NPR Politics Podcast
How Canada & Mexico Respond To Trump's Tariffs
Thank you guys for having me.