“If I didn’t believe in the idea that journalism can change things, I wouldn’t do it,” says Óscar Martínez. “But I don’t believe it’s the best job in the world. The best job in the world is to work on the beach in Oaxaca.” The journalist from the online newspaper El Faro has written books on migration and organized crime, winning numerous awards. Aleksandra Lipczak caught up with him at the NON-FICTION reportage festival in Kraków.

Óscar Martínez became a journalist as a young boy. He wanted to do important things. A dozen years later, he can say he’s a leading reporter both in his native El Salvador and in all of Latin America. As a reporter, he’s been taken up by two great themes: migration and organized crime. He has worked on the latter for many years in the well-known online daily El Faro, where he founded the ‘Sala Negra’ section, now a cult publication on the phenomenon of violence in Central America.

His best-known book, The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail, discussing migration and the travels of Central American migrants through Mexico, was published in Poland this year by Sonia Draga Post Factum.

“I come from a country where there was a civil war,” Martínez says during a meeting with readers during the NON-FICTION reportage festival in Kraków. “I’ve never lived in peace. From the beginning of my work as a journalist, and I started at a young age, I’ve written about violence. I worked in Iraq. But I never saw violence and impunity of criminal groups like I saw in Mexico. Violence against migrants there is extreme. You can call it a humanitarian crisis.”

We speak just before this meeting. Martínez is direct, friendly; he doesn’t like to talk about himself. He asks me about Poland, about our experience with migration. But he could talk for hours about the problems he works on. “It’s no problem, keep on asking,” he says when I glance at my watch, worried he’ll be late. He cares about being well understood. After all, the stories he tells aren’t that far from the European reality, he believes. “Maybe the context is different, but the mechanisms that govern migrations are the same today, regardless of geographic distance.”

Aleksandra Lipczak: Cuerpomátic – the bodymatic. That’s the detail of your book that seems to have stuck in my mind the most.

Óscar Martínez: This term was adopted by migrant women travelling through Mexico without documents. They have no escape, and they agree that during their travels their bodies become their currency to pay for safety, care, and sometimes simply for life. They often get condoms from their coyotes (people smugglers), because it’s very likely that they’ll get raped along the way, so it’s better to have them on hand.

Another detail I can’t forget is La Arrocera.

For me this was also one of the places that has lodged most deeply in my memory. It’s a wild land not far from a small settlement in Chiapas state called La Arrocera, for the rice warehouse that stands along the road. One of many places along the back roads of Mexico that the migrants use to evade the authorities.

In La Arrocera, two things