In 1903, Train Robbery and Robbery was released in the United States, a silent short film that was notable for being one of the first films to use different editing techniques to show two scenes of simultaneous action in different locations. Also for being considered one of the first works in which two genres such as action and western so typical of North American culture were manifested. Action as an alternative way to the classic drama when it comes to resolving the conflict, western as the founding epic of the nation of individualism. It is no coincidence that the railway was the element chosen to convey the plot, a symbol of industrial progress, of explosive colonization, but also of a fierce dispute to monopolize the benefits of the new era.

January 14, 2022, John Schreiber, a CBS photojournalist, publishes on his Twitter account some videos that take on remarkable relevance in just a few hours. In them, a freight train is seen advancing slowly, with the gravity of tons of cargo, along cloistered tracks in an urban environment. Around him, as far as the lens reaches, the floor is covered with the remains of parcels, thousands of cardboard boxes and plastic containers scattered along the route, giving the scene the tone of the moment after a catastrophe. Hailing from the Midwest, Schreiber thinks he's seen that scene before: "It looked like a tornado had hit a warehouse and just vomited debris everywhere." What has happened?

These train tracks were located not in some tornado-corridor state like Kansas and Nebraska, but in sunny California, specifically in Lincoln Heights, a suburb of Los Angeles. The desolation had not been caused by a natural disaster, but simply by the robberies, the continued looting of the freight trains that transit that route from the nearby ports of Terminal Island and Long Beach, located 30 kilometers from the center of the city, through which 40% of maritime imports enter the country, goods that are distributed to the rest of the United States after passing through the intermodal station, but that up to that point still go in the large metal containers that have been unloaded directly from the ships behind the train.

The logistics detail is not minor for the story at hand. Those containers that are raided constitute a real surprise for the looters, since most of them do not even carry a homogeneous load, completely impossible to identify from the outside. "Everything comes on the train," says one of the thieves, 37, interviewed by the LA Times, "cell phones, designer clothes, toys, lawn mowers, electrical equipment. I once found a robotic arm. We take things out of here and there, we make some money by reselling it." The trains reduce their speed in the section of Lincoln Heights, they are even stopped for a time due to the uneven flow after the collapse of the ports in these months. The thieves seize the opportunity. One in four wagons arrives at the delivery facility with the depleted containers.

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After the jump to the present, the media have published a letter that the Union Pacific company, owner of the railway line, sent to George Gascón, district attorney, at the end of December. In it they denounced that there had been a dramatic increase in these assaults on freight trains. According to the company, up to 160% in Los Angeles County, with distribution companies such as UPS, Amazon or FedEx being affected. More than 90 containers raided per day. Beyond the figures, the images themselves were revealing, showing a picture of looting in which the private railway police, plus public law enforcement, have been unable to guarantee the safety of the route. In one of the videos, a uniformed officer reluctantly runs after two people who are fleeing with two packages.

It seems to be gangs of robbers, but also many others who, once the containers are opened, start looting. On the ground, boxes of masks and PCR tests discarded as loot are left abandoned. In an interview on public radio, they ask Schreiber, the photographer who has made the matter known, if he knows what has caused this situation: "I can imagine it. There are many people suffering right now." In the rest of the media, the treatment of the news does not go beyond showing the images of the chaos accompanied by striking headlines that try to take us back to the time of the western train robberies. Also to the fight between Union Pacific and the district attorney, whom the companies, using diplomatically business language, view as lax on crime. Without a heavy hand, criminals rise up.

As far back as February of last year, Joe Busciano, a Los Angeles city councilman, blamed homeless encampments for the degradation of rail environments, optimal for homeless people to set up their shantytowns under bridges and other architecture industrial. No one seems to point out that in the largest city in California official statistics tell us of a million and a half absolute poor out of a total population of almost ten million people. The gray areas do not appear, all those who, even having work and income, are unable to lead a normal life due to the high cost of basic goods such as housing. In 2018, the documentary report Skid Row, hell in the first world, by Helena Villar, RT correspondent in the United States, showed the poverty camps in the very center of Los Angeles.

US imports, mostly from Asia, amount to more than $500 billion. Electronic commerce has triggered the purchase of all kinds of goods that need a dense network of infrastructures to be distributed. Something that does not happen with money. Millions of people in the United States have been left out of production, also transportation work and of course the acquisition of these products. Billions of dollars going through neighborhoods like Lincoln Heights, Wilmington or El Serno, fortified roads with high fences crowned with barbed wire, hundreds of armed uniformed men watching the movement of merchandise: a preventive war so that those who have been left out of the great business or go near it.

Until episodes like the one from last week break out. The answer will not be to increase public social protection networks, correct inequality, improve working conditions to end working poverty. Distribute employment and wealth to achieve stability. The answer will be to build more fences and hire more armed agents, the only employment opportunity for the village dormitories: shooting their neighbors.