Guatemala City is racked by the practice of extortion: the act of obtaining goods and/or money through the threat of force. Transportation workers are a particularly vulnerable population, with a homicide rate four times the national average. While social scientists, policy experts, and asylum advocates rightly observe that extortionists control territory, lost in this literature is an appreciation for how these violent actors also govern victims’ experience of time and velocity. This article, in response, develops ethnographically the concept of terminal velocity to assess how the violent extraction of payments from transportation workers routinely presses these drivers up against the practical limits of Guatemala City. This includes the downward pull of extortion, which compels them to drive at ever-increasing speeds, and the upward drag of road congestion, poor infrastructure, and human fatigue that inevitably caps their acceleration.

危地马拉城被勒索的做法所折磨：通过武力威胁获得商品和/或金钱的行为。运输工人是特别脆弱的人群，凶杀率是全国平均水平的四倍。尽管社会学家，政策专家和庇护倡导者正确地注意到勒索者控制着领土，但在这些文献中所迷失的是对这些暴力行为者也如何控制受害者的时间和速度体验的赞赏。作为回应，本文从人种学角度发展了终端速度的概念，以评估如何从运输工人那里猛烈地提取付款，从而经常使这些驱动因素逼近危地马拉市的实际极限。这包括勒索的拉低，迫使他们以不断提高的速度行驶，