SAN ANTONIO — The death of 51 migrants in a truck with a choking trailer in what is believed to be the deadliest smuggling episode ever recorded at the U. S. -Mexico border amounts to “a crime against humanity,” San Antonio Police Chief William McManus told CBS. . , KENS-TV.
The bodies were found Monday afternoon on the outskirts of the city in the abandoned truck. More than a dozen people were taken to the hospital, adding four children.
“The scene is tragic beyond words,” McManus said. “I don’t perceive how anyone can be insensitive enough to allow this to happen and run away from the scene. “
San Antonio officials temporarily arrested 3 suspects and added one in a nearby field.
As for the migrants, “once there and they close the doors, their destination is in the wind,” McManus explained.
Few patient identities have been made public, illustrating the difficulties the government faces in tracking other people crossing borders illegally.
As of Tuesday afternoon, medical examiners potentially knew 34 of the victims, said Bexar County Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores, who represents the district where the truck was abandoned. he described it as an unscheduled challenge in terms of completing the process.
“It’s a tedious, tedious, unhappy and complicated process,” he said.
The tragedy occurred at a time when gigantic numbers of migrants have arrived in the United States, many of them in dangerous danger to cross fast-moving rivers and canals and hot desert landscapes. Migrants were arrested nearly 240,000 times in May, a third more than a year ago.
With little left over the victims, desperate migrant families from Mexico and Central America desperately sought to communicate about their loved ones.
Of the dead, 27 are believed to be of Mexican origin according to documents they carried, according to Ruben Minutti, Mexico’s consul general in San Antonio. Several survivors were in critical condition with injuries such as brain damage and internal bleeding, he said. About thirty other people have contacted the Mexican consulate in search of relatives, authorities said.
Guatemala’s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday night it had shown the hospitalization of two Guatemalans and was running to identify 3 possible Guatemalans among the dead. documents.
Eva Ferrufino, a spokeswoman for Honduras’ Foreign Ministry, said her firm is collaborating with the Honduran consulate in South Texas to adjust names, fingerprints and full IDs.
The process is arduous because among the pitfalls are forged or stolen documents.
Mexico’s foreign secretary on Tuesday met two other people 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.
Haneydi Antonio Guzman, 23, was in a mountain network more than 1,300 miles from San Antonio on Tuesday when he began receiving messages from family and friends. There is no phone signal there, but it has internet access.
Journalists began to appear at his parents’ house in Escuintla – the cover of his identity card that they stole and found in the van – waiting to locate his relatives worriedly.
“It’s me on the ID card, but I’m not the user who’s in the caravan and they say she’s hospitalized,” she said.
“My relatives were contacting me worriedly, asking me where IArray was,” Guzman said.
Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard deleted the original tweet that identified it as an additional comment. The other hospitalized victim known Tuesday by Ebrard turned out to be accurate.
In the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, municipal officials in San Miguel Huautla visited the network of Jose Luis Guzman Vasquez, 32, Tuesday night to find out if his mother wanted to go to San Antonio to be with him at the hospital.
Manuel Velasco Lopez, municipal secretary of San Miguel Huautla, said some other cousin was traveling with Guzman Vasquez and is now considered missing.
Another cousin, Alejandro López, told Milenio tv that his circle of relatives was dedicated to agriculture and structure and that they emigrated because “we still have nothing to weave hats, palm trees and handicrafts. “
“Growing corn, wheat and beans is what we do in this region and that leads many of our fellow citizens to migrate and to the United States,” he said.
Miguel Barbosa, governor of the neighboring state of Puebla, unleashed a wave of data on Tuesday in the izucarera town of Matamoros when he publicly stated that two of the dead were from there.
In the highly migrant city, everyone, if their friends or neighbors were among the dead discovered in the Texas cargo truck. Rumors abounded, but the city government said no deaths had been reported in Izúcar.
But going to the United States is such a culture that most young people here are at least.
“All the other young people start thinking about leaving (to the United States) as soon as they are 18,” said migrant activist Carmelo Castañeda, who works with the Casa del Migrante association. “If there are no more visas, our other people will continue to die. “
Migrants pay between $8,000 and $10,000 to cross the border and be loaded onto a semi-trailer and driven to San Antonio, where they are flown in smaller cars to their final destinations in the United States, said Craig Larrabee, acting special agent for Homeland Security. Investigations in San Antonio.
Conditions vary widely, adding the amount of water passengers get and allowing them to bring mobile phones, Larrabee said.
Authorities discovered Monday that the truck had mechanical problems when it was left next to a railroad track in a San Antonio domain surrounded by the remains of cars grazing a busy road, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said.
San Antonio has been a recurring scene of tragedy and depression in years involving migrants in semi-trailers.
Ten migrants died in 2017 after being trapped in a van parked at a Walmart in San Antonio. In 2003, the bodies of 19 migrants were discovered in a suffocating van southeast of the city. More than 50 migrants were discovered alive in a caravan in 2018, driven through a guy who said he had to be paid $3,000 and sentenced to more than five years in prison.
Other tragedies occurred before the migrants arrived in the United States. In December, more than 50 people were killed when a semi-trailer overturned on a highway in southern Mexico. In October, the Mexican government reported that it located 652 migrants crammed into six trailers detained at checkpoint near the border.
At a vigil Tuesday night in the rain at a San Antonio park, many of the more than 50 people who attended expressed sadness, frustration and anger over the deaths and what they described as a damaged immigration system.
Back in Puebla, farmer Juan Sanchez Carrillo, 45, was upset to learn the news of the deaths in Texas.
He himself narrowly escaped death, when he and his friends fled the sleepy migrant thieves in the mountains near Otay Mesa, near San Diego. He pointed guns at the organization of 35 migrants and threatened to kill them unless they discovered $1,000 each.
“For smugglers, migrants are human,” Carrillo said. For them, we are just commodities. “