Who were the migrants who died in the Texas truck?

Victims without identity documents or with a stolen document. Remote villages that do not have a telephone service to talk to relatives and determine where the missing migrants are. Fingerprint data has to cross borders to be identified by different governments.

More than a day after the discovery in San Antonio, Texas, of dozens of migrants who died in the intense heat in the truck where they had been abandoned, the identity of some of them was released, a sample of how difficult it is for the authorities to trace people crossing the border subway.

On Wednesday, the Bexar County Coroner’s Office announced two more deaths, bringing the total death toll to 53. 40 of the victims were men and 13 women.

As of Tuesday afternoon, coroners had preliminarily identified 34 of the victims, said Bexar County Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores, a representative from the district where the truck was abandoned. Those identities had yet to be confirmed with fingerprints or other means and there were no deadlines to complete the process, she added.

“It is a very boring, sad and difficult process,” the official said.

The bodies, discovered Monday afternoon, were abandoned on the outskirts of San Antonio, in what is believed to be the deadliest episode of human smuggling which is known on the border between Mexico and the United States.

More than a dozen people, including four children, were hospitalized. Three people were arrested.

frantic search

Huge numbers of migrants are arriving in the United States. Many of them are at serious risk crossing stormy rivers and canals and burning deserts. There were nearly 240,000 arrests of migrants in May, a third more than a year ago.

In the absence of information on the victims, the desperate families of Mexican and Central American migrants frantically seek news of their loved ones.

The truck, registered in Alamo, Texas, but with fake license plates and stickerstransported 67 migrants, said Francisco Garduño, head of the National Institute for Migration of Mexico.

They arrested the driver when he was trying to pass himself off as a migrant, Garduño said. There are two other Mexicans in prison, he added.

Twenty-seven of the dead are believed to be of Mexican descent, according to the documents they carried, Mexican consul in San Antonio Rubén Minutti said.

There were several survivors critical condition due to brain injury and internal bleeding, he added. About 30 people turned to the consulate for information.

The Guatemalan Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that it had confirmed the identity of two Guatemalans in the hospital and possibly three were among the dead.

The Honduran Foreign Ministry said four people in the truck had documents from the country and was trying to confirm their identities. Her spokesperson Eva Ferrufino said she is working with her consulate in South Texas to match names and fingerprints.

It is a laborious process that contains pitfalls such as fake or stolen documents.

false documents

On Tuesday morning, the Mexican foreign minister identified two people hospitalized in San Antonio. But it turned out that one of the identity documents he showed on Twitter was stolen last year in the southern state of Chiapas.

Haneydi Antonio Guzmán, 23, was alive and well in a mountain village 2,092 kilometers from San Antonio when she started receiving messages from family and friends. There is no telephone service there, but she does have access to the Internet.

Reporters began showing up at her parents’ home in Escuintla – the address on the stolen ID found in the truck – thinking they would find a bereaved family.

“It’s my credential, yes, it’s me with the credential, but I’m not the person who was in the trailer who they say is hospitalized,” he said.

“My relatives spoke to me worried, asking me where I was, I already told them I was fine, that I was at home, and I made the clarification on my (Facebook page)”.

Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard deleted the tweet that identified her without clarity. The other hospitalized victim the official identified on Tuesday turned out to be accurate.

In the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, municipal officials from San Miguel Huautla traveled to the town of José Luis Guzmán Vásquez on Tuesday to find out if his mother wanted to travel to San Antonio to stay with him in the hospital.

Manuel Velasco López, municipal secretary of San Miguel Huautla, said a cousin was traveling with Guzmán Vásquez and was considered missing.

And another cousin, Alejandro López, told the Milenio canal that his family worked in the fields and construction and had no choice but to emigrate. “We have nothing else to weave but hats, palm trees and handicrafts. Planting corn, wheat and beans is what we do in this region and this makes many of our compatriots emigrate and go to the United States,” he counted.

Miguel Barbosa, governor of the neighboring state of Puebla, caused journalistic uproar in the city of Izúcar de Matamoros on Tuesday when he publicly claimed that two of the dead were from there.

In that city where migrants abound, everyone wondered if there were no friends or neighbors among the dead in Texas. Rumors were circulating, but the local government said the presence of Izúcar people among the dead had not been confirmed.

Emigrating, a tradition

But going north is a true traditionand most young people at least think about it.

“All young people start thinking about going there as soon as they turn 18,” said activist Carmelo Castañeda, who collaborates with the NGO Casa del Migrante. “If there are no more visas, our people will continue to die.”

Migrants pay between $ 8,000 and $ 10,000 to be transported across the border, load them on a truck and take them to San Antonio. There they are transferred to smaller vehicles to take them to destinations in different parts of the United States, said Craig Larrabee, officer in charge of the Homeland Security Investigative Division in San Antonio.

Conditions vary widely, from how much water is given to whether cell phones can have, Larrabee said.

US legislator Henry Cuellar said so Associated Press On Wednesday Homeland Security investigators believe the migrants boarded the truck in Laredo, United States, but have not confirmed.

He said the truck passed a border patrol checkpoint northeast of Laredo on Interstate Route 35 on Monday.

Before starting the more than two-hour drive to San Antonio, the truck was parked just north of the border, Garduno said.

Authorities believe the truck discovered Monday had mechanical problems and therefore was unloaded near a railroad track in the San Antonio area surrounded by car wreckage near a busy highway, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said. .

repeated tragedies

San Antonio was the theater of recurring tragedies and the desperation of recent years carried on by migrants on trucks.

In 2017, 10 migrants died trapped in a truck in a Walmart parking lot in San Antonio.

In 2003, the bodies of 19 migrants were found in a truck southeast of the city. In 2018, fifty migrants were found alive in a truck driven by a man who said $ 3,000 would be paid. The conduit was sentenced to five years in prison.

Other tragedies occurred south of the border. In December, more than 50 people died when the truck they were traveling in overturned in southern Mexico. In October, Mexican authorities found 652 migrants in six trucks held at a military checkpoint.

During a vigil Tuesday night in a San Antonio park, many of the more than 50 attendees expressed sadness, helplessness and anger over the deaths and an immigration system they consider broken.

In Puebla, farmer Juan Sánchez Carrillo, 45, felt grief after receiving news of his death in Texas.

He himself was saved from death when he and his friends fled a dozen thieves in the Otay Mesa Mountains near San Diego.

The criminals – who according to Sánchez were in league with the traffickers who took him across the border – pointed guns at the group of 35 migrants and threatened to kill them if they didn’t give them $ 1,000 each.

“For the traffickers, we migrants are not human”, said Sánchez Carrillo, “for them we are nothing more than commodities”.

Source: Associated Press

CB