SAN ANTONIO, Texas – The victims were found without any identity documents and in one case identity documents were stolen. In remote villages, there is no telephone service to contact family members and locate missing migrants. Fingerprint data must be shared and compared by different governments.
More than a day after the opening of a suffocating trailer in San Antonio, where 51 dead migrants were abandoned in the scorching heat, few identities of the victims have been made public, illustrating the challenges authorities face in tracking people secretly crossing borders.
By Tuesday afternoon, forensic doctors had potentially identified 34 of the victims, Bexar County Commissioner Rebecca Clay-Flores, who represents the area where the truck was abandoned, said. These identities have not yet been confirmed pending further steps, such as fingerprints, and she described it as a timeless challenge about when the process could be completed.
“It’s a tedious, tedious, sad, difficult process,” she said.
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The bodies were found Monday afternoon on the outskirts of San Antonio in what is considered to be the deadliest smuggling episode in the country on the US-Mexico border. More than a dozen people were taken to hospitals, including four children. Three people were arrested.
The tragedy came at a time when huge numbers of migrants are coming to the United States, many of them taking dangerous risks to cross fast-moving rivers and canals and burning desert landscapes. Migrants were stopped nearly 240,000 times in May, a third more than a year ago.
With little information about the victims, desperate families of migrants from Mexico and Central America frantically sought information from their loved ones.
Among those killed, 27 are believed to be of Mexican descent, based on documents carried by Ruben Minuti, Mexico’s consul general in San Antonio. Several survivors are in critical condition with injuries such as brain damage and internal bleeding, he said. About 30 people have approached the Mexican consulate in search of relatives, officials said.
Guatemala’s foreign ministry said late Tuesday that it had confirmed two Guatemalans hospitalized and was working to identify three possible Guatemalans among the dead. The Honduran Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it was working to verify the identities of four people killed in the truck and carrying documents from Honduras.
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Eva Ferufino, a Honduran foreign ministry spokeswoman, said her agency was working with the Honduras consulate in South Texas to match names and fingerprints and complete identification.
The process is thorough because the traps include forged or stolen documents.
Mexico’s foreign minister identified two people on Tuesday who were hospitalized in San Antonio on Tuesday morning. But it turned out that one of the ID cards he shared on Twitter was stolen last year in the southern state of Chiapas.
Hanaidi Antonio Guzman, 23, was healthy and healthy in a mountain community more than 1,300 miles (2,092 kilometers) from San Antonio on Tuesday when he began receiving messages from family and friends. There is no telephone signal, but there is internet access.
Journalists began appearing at her parents’ home in Escuintla – the address of her ID card that had been stolen and found in the truck – expecting to find her worried relatives.
“This is me on the ID card, but I’m not the person who was in the trailer and they say he was hospitalized,” she said.
“My loved ones contacted me anxiously, asking where I was,” said Antonio Guzman. “I told them I was fine, that I was in my house and clarified it on (Facebook page).”
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Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard deleted the original tweet identifying her without further comment. The other hospitalized victim identified by Ebrard on Tuesday turned out to be accurate.
In the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, San Miguel Huautla municipal officials traveled to the community of 32-year-old Jose Luis Guzman Vazquez late Tuesday to find out if his mother wanted to travel to San Antonio to be with him at the hospital. .
Manuel Velasco Lopez, San Miguel Huautla’s municipal secretary, said another cousin had traveled with Guzman Vazquez and was now thought to be missing.
Another cousin, Alejandro Lopez, told Milenio TV that their family had worked in agriculture and construction and that they had migrated because “we have nothing but to weave hats, palm trees and crafts”.
“Growing corn, wheat and beans is what we do in this region, and it means that a lot of our people emigrate and go to the United States,” he said.
Miguel Barbosa, the governor of the neighboring state of Puebla, began a fight for information in the town of Izucar de Matamoros on Tuesday when he said publicly that two of the dead were from there.
In a city with many migrants, everyone wondered if their friends or neighbors were among the dead found in a truck in Texas. Rumors abounded, but the city government said there were no confirmed deaths from Izukar.
But going to the United States is such a tradition that most young people here at least consider it.
“All young people start thinking about going (to the United States) as soon as they turn 18,” said migrant activist Carmelo Castaneda, who works with the non-profit organization Casa del Migrante. “If there are no more visas, our people will continue to die.”
Migrants typically pay between $ 8,000 and $ 10,000 to be transported across the border and towed and transported to San Antonio, where they are transferred to smaller vehicles to their final destinations in the United States, said Craig Larabie, acting special agent in charge of Internal Security Investigations in San Antonio.
Conditions vary widely, including how much water passengers receive and whether they are allowed to carry mobile phones, Larabi said.
Authorities believe the truck, found on Monday, had mechanical problems when it was left next to a railroad in an area of San Antonio surrounded by car depots that meet a busy highway, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolfe said.
San Antonio has been a recurring scene of tragedy and despair in recent years involving migrants in semi-trailers.
Ten migrants died in 2017 after being trapped in a truck parked in San Antonio Walmart. In 2003, the bodies of 19 migrants were found in a sunken truck southeast of the city. More than 50 migrants were found alive in a trailer in 2018, driven by a man who said he had to be paid $ 3,000 and was sentenced to more than five years in prison.
Other tragedies occurred before the migrants reached the United States. In December, more than 50 people died when a semi-trailer overturned on a highway in southern Mexico. In October, Mexican authorities said they found 652 migrants packed in six trailers stopped at a military checkpoint near the border.
During a vigil Tuesday night in the rain in a park in San Antonio, many of more than 50 people present expressed sadness, frustration and anger at the death and what they described as a disrupted immigration system.
Back in Puebla, 45-year-old farmer Juan Sanchez Carrillo was upset when he heard the news of his death in Texas.
He himself narrowly escaped death when he and his friends fled from dozing migrant noisemakers in the mountains near Otai Mesa near San Diego. The criminals – whom Sanchez Carrillo believes were in agreement with the smugglers who smuggled him across the border – aimed their rifles at the group of 35 migrants and threatened to kill them unless they found $ 1,000 each.
“For smugglers, we migrants are not human,” said Sanchez Carrillo. “For them, we are nothing more than a commodity.
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Associated Press authors Juan Lozano in San Antonio, Eliot Spagat in San Diego, Edgar H. Clemente in Villa Comaltitlan, Sonia D. Perez in Guatemala City and Marlon Gonzalez in Tegucigalpa, Honduras contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2022 by Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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