Emilie Eaton , Cronkite News

ARRIAGA, Chiapas, Mexico -- As night fell, Samuel Carcamo stood on the railway tracks with dozens of other migrants waiting to climb on top of the northbound freight train known as La Bestia.

The Beast.

The train arrives here once or twice a week, but still local children and families trickled to the railway tracks to watch the migrants as they gathered to jump aboard. Vendors peddled candy and food. Across the street, a group of men sat on the sidewalk peering at the migrants. A gang, the locals said. Stay away.

Samuel, an El Salvador native, was already more than 400 miles from home and had at least another 1,200 miles to get to his ultimate destination, Houston, where several family members live.

He said he was 17 years old, but he looks younger. He was one of thousands of unaccompanied minors from Central America who will make the dangerous journey north to the United States this year.

Many of these kids see the train ride that begins in Chiapas, Mexico's southern-most state, as a gateway to escaping poverty and gang violence in their countries.

To Samuel, the journey meant trading a hopeless situation at home for potential security and prosperity in the United States — but first he needed to survive the trip north, dodging police and criminals, and a harrowing ride on top of a freight train for hundreds of miles.

"You might die on the way," Samuel said. "But it's for a good cause — your family."

There are no jobs in El Salvador, Samuel said, and gang influence continues to grow. If he can get to the United States and find a job, he can help his family get ahead.

A calculated risk

Samuel's decision to travel north was sudden. A week before his journey began in early March, he was attending school and working in construction in his hometown of Santa Ana, El Salvador.

Not much had changed. The poverty, crime and gang activity was as pervasive as ever.

But he had saved some money to help pay for the journey and he decided the trip was necessary. It wasn't an easy choice, especially leaving his parents behind.

"I talked to (my family) about it and, truthfully, they were very sad," Samuel said. "But it is something that has to be done. You have to make the effort."

Samuel said he had his first run-in with bandits only a few days into his journey. He paid a man to ferry him across the Usumacinta River that divides Guatemala and Mexico. The man then turned him over to robbers who took all his money. He found temporary refuge at a free, bare-bones shelter for migrants, La Casa del Migrante in Arriaga, a three-hour drive from the Mexico-Guatemala border. In the shelter, he could await the freight train in safety.

Daphne Van De Werf, a volunteer at La Casa del Migrante, has heard many stories like Samuel's.

"It's incredible because I still can't grasp why they do it," she said. "How much danger and poverty can you have that you give up the safety of your own country and your own house and your family?"

Jennifer Podkul is a senior program officer at the Women's Refugee Commission, an advocacy group for the rights of women and children displaced by crisis and conflict. She interviewed 151 detained children at a U.S. Air Force base in Texas in 2012. She recalled a comment from one young man who rode La Bestia to escape Central America.

"I said to him, 'It's so dangerous going through Mexico. Why would you want to go through Mexico by yourself?' People die and are kidnapped, and all these horrible things happen," Podkul said.

"And he was like, 'Look. I lived in Honduras. It's so dangerous there. I mean, I would regularly see dead bodies on the street. If I stayed in my country, I would definitely die. If I tried to get to the United States, maybe I would die, but I'd still have a chance.'"

Only a fraction make it

As Samuel stood on the railway tracks waiting for La Bestia, also known as the Train of Death, he smiled, laughed and joked with friends.

But in truth, the 17-year-old was even more worried about what was ahead of him than what he had already experienced.

His plan was to ride on top of the train for 12 hours until its next stop in the city of Ixtepec, Mexico. He worried about getting tired and falling off; many who do lose limbs or die. He feared bandits, gangs or drug cartel soldiers who regularly board the train and demand money or kidnap the travelers for ransom or to act as drug mules.

From Ixtepec, many take the train north, 900 or so miles up the Gulf Coast, toward the Mexico-U.S. border in the Rio Grande Valley. That would be the likely jumping-off point for Samuel if he wanted to reach Houston.

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What happened to Samuel after that night in Arriaga remains unknown.

But he had reasons for his fears as he awaited the train.

Not long after that night, in April, three migrants in Chiapas were killed by a gunman who boarded the train and demanded money and personal belongings. A fourth was killed as he tried to jump off the train to escape. Weeks earlier, prosecutors in Veracruz, Mexico, filed a criminal complaint against a Mexican rail line for being complicit in the many crimes against migrants.

Before he left, Samuel had been thinking about his family and how "they might not see me again," he said.

"That was painful."

This story was produced of a depth-reporting project at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Each year, students in the Cronkite Borderlands Initiative program travel to other countries and to U.S. borders to report on immigration issues.