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 dozens of migrants died after being abandoned in the scorching heat, few victims’ identities have been made public, illustrating the challenges authorities face in tracking down people secretly crossing borders.
The death toll rose to 53 on Wednesday after two more migrants died, according to the Bexar County Court. Forty of the victims were men and 13 women.
Officials had potential identifications of 37 of the victims as of Wednesday morning, pending an investigation with authorities in other countries.
“It’s a tedious, tedious, sad, difficult process,” said Bexar County Commissioner Rebecca Clay-Flores, who represents the area where the truck was abandoned.
MORE: “It was very painful to watch my sister die,” said a survivor of a smuggling attempt to travel to the United States.
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 truck, which is registered in the Alamo, Texas, but has fake license plates and logos, was carrying 67 migrants, Francisco Garduño, head of Mexico’s National Immigration Institute, said on Wednesday.
The driver was detained after he tried to pretend to be one of the migrants, Garduño said. Two other Mexican men have also been detained, he said.
The dead included 27 people from Mexico, 14 from Honduras, seven from Guatemala and two from El Salvador, he said. One of the victims was unidentified, Garduño said.
RELATED: How America’s Deadliest Smuggling Incident Happened in Victoria, Texas
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.
Several survivors are in critical condition with injuries such as brain damage and internal bleeding, according to Ruben Minuti, Mexico’s consul general in San Antonio.
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 trying to confirm the identities of four of the dead, who were carrying documents from Honduras.
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 among the pitfalls are fake or stolen documents.
SEE ALSO: “This is not the time to start being afraid:” Lawyer believes open border will stop extreme cases
Mexico’s foreign minister identified two people on Tuesday who were hospitalized in San Antonio. 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 safe in a mountain community more than 1,300 miles (2,092 kilometers) from San Antonio 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,” said Antonio Guzman.
“My relatives contacted me anxiously and asked where I was,” she said. “I told them I was fine, that I was in my house and clarified it on my Facebook page.
Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard deleted his tweet identifying her without comment. The other victim, identified by Ebrard, 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 Vazquez Guzmán 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 a cousin had traveled with Vazquez Guzmán and was now thought to be missing.
Another cousin, Alejandro Lopez, told Mexican television Millenio 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 two of the dead were from there, although this was not confirmed.
In a city with many migrants, everyone asked if their friends or neighbors were among the dead found in Texas. Trying to cross into the United States is such a tradition that most young people in the city 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.
U.S. envoy Henry Cuelar told the Associated Press on Wednesday that internal security investigators believe the migrants boarded the truck in or around Laredo, on U.S. soil, but did not confirm this. He said the truck passed through a checkpoint northeast of Laredo on Interstate 35 on Monday.
Before leaving for the more than two-hour trip to San Antonio, the truck was parked Monday in South Texas, just north of the border, Garduño said.
Authorities believe the truck had mechanical problems when it was left next to a railroad in an area of San Antonio surrounded by landfills for cars colliding with a busy highway, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolf 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.
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.
During Tuesday’s vigil at a park in San Antonio, many of the more than 50 people present expressed sadness and anger at the death and what they described as a disrupted immigration system.
Back in Puebla, 45-year-old farmer Juan Sanchez Carrillo fell ill when he heard about his death in Texas.
He was on the verge of death when he and his friends fled from dozing migrant kings in the mountains near Otay Mesa near San Diego.
“For smugglers, we migrants are not human,” said Sanchez Carrillo. “For them, we are nothing more than a commodity.
___
Writers from the Associated Press Juan Lozano in San Antonio; Eliot Spagat in San Diego; Edgar H. Clemente at Villa Comaltitlan, Mexico; Sonia D. Perez of Guatemala City and Marlon Gonzalez of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2022 by Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Add Comment