Canada Global(Web News)Only three percent of truck drivers in the world are women despite the perceived low risk of truck driving.But gender-based violence and armed robberies are common in Mexico, keeping women away from this type of work.
100 Women traveled some of the country’s most dangerous roads with a few female truck drivers.Lying in the bushes just off a busy highway, Clara Fragoso thought, ‘Now they’re going to shoot three shots and leave me wrapped in this blanket and no one will find me.’It was midnight. By this time they should have reached their destination. Until a few hours ago, she was on her way to the city of Tuxpan on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Now she was forced out of her truck and a man was pointing a gun at her.
A vehicle came behind them and signaled them to stop the truck with the help of headlights. Clara did the same because the car looked like a police car. But in reality it was not the police.The masked men got out of the car and, while searching the truck, ordered Clara wrapped in a blanket into the bushes.”I had already said goodbye to the world,” says Clara Fragoso, 57.But the subsequent conversation changed the whole situation.He said that the person carrying the gun asked me my age, my age and his mother were the same. “How did you start driving a truck?” he asked.Clara told the man that at the age of 17 she was married to a man who abused her. It took her 15 years to leave her husband. Then she moved with her children to a city near the US-Mexico border. His sister also lived in this city.
But starting life anew was not easy. She says she worked as a waitress and made less than $50 a week, and that money didn’t always feed the children. One day when she hears customers saying that they make a lot of money driving trucks, Clara decides to give it a try.
18 years ago she became a ‘Trillera’, the term used in Mexico for female truck drivers. It was their ticket to a better life.
