Oaxaca City, Mexico
Reuters
Before he began the journey that ended in disaster, Jose Luis Vasquez lived in a remote mountainous community in southern Mexico, where a single telephone connects a few Indigenous families to the outside world, local residents said.
Now the 31-year-old is in a hospital in San Antonio, Texas, after becoming severely dehydrated in a sweltering tractor-trailer truck in which at least 53 migrants died in the worst human smuggling tragedy in recent US history.
One of them was as young as 13.
Virgilia Lopez, mother of migrant Javier Flores who left the community with his 31-year-old cousin Jose Luis Vasquez, who is in a hospital in San Antonio, Texas, after becoming severely dehydrated in a sweltering tractor-trailer truck in which migrants died in the deadliest human trafficking tragedy in recent US history, reacts before traveling to the town of Asuncion Nochixtlan to ask for information about her son, in San Miguel Huautla, in Oaxaca state, Mexico, on 28th June. PICTURE: Reuters/Jose de Jesus Cortes.
Vasquez had recently left the Mexican Army, according to his uncle Aquilino Guzman, who said he had seen his nephew several weeks before he left for the United States. But Vasquez had not shared those travel plans, Guzman said.
ALLEGED TRUCK DRIVER POSED AS VICTIM AFTER TEXAS MIGRANT DEATHS
The alleged driver of a truck carrying dozens of migrants who died in the suffocating heat in Texas this week initially tried to pass himself off as a victim to escape authorities before he was arrested, US and Mexican officials said on Wednesday.
The death toll in the incident rose to 53 as some migrants who had been trapped in the sweltering tractor-trailer died in the hospital, local officials said.
The truck was discovered on Monday in a desolate area near a highway in San Antonio, where temperatures that day soared as high as 39.4 degrees Celsius.
Mexicans made up about half of those who perished in the worst human smuggling incident in recent US history. Eleven people – including minors – remain hospitalised. In addition to 27 Mexicans, the victims also include 14 Hondurans, seven Guatemalans and two Salvadorans, according to a Mexican official. The nationality of some migrants in the truck remains unclear. Most of the victims were men, with 13 women among the dead, the Bexar County medical examiner’s office said.
A Mexican official and two US officials, all speaking on condition of anonymity, identified the alleged driver as Homero Zamorano, 45, and an identification document seen by Reuters showed he had an address in Houston, Texas. Surveillance photographs published by Mexican immigration officials captured the truck driving through a security checkpoint in Laredo, Texas, at 2:50pm CT on Monday.
US authorities detained two Mexican men in addition to the driver who were caught leaving a house in San Antonio. On Wednesday, US prosecutors were moving ahead with weapons charges against them.
A federal judge in San Antonio, Texas, ordered the suspects – identified as Juan Francisco D’Luna-Bilbao and Juan Claudio D’Luna-Mendez – detained until a preliminary hearing on Friday. Both men were charged on Tuesday with possessing firearms while residing in the United States illegally.
Francisco Garduno, head of Mexico’s National Migration Institute, told a news conference on Wednesday that the tractor-trailer passed through two US Customs and Border Protection checkpoints in Texas, where it was captured on security cameras.
The first was in the town of Encinal, 65 kilometres north of Laredo, and the second in Cotulla, 48 kilometres farther north.
Garduno later told reporters the trailer did not cross the US-Mexico border with the migrants inside.
“The migrants were already on US soil,” before entering the truck, he said.
A source within Mexico’s migration institute said, given smuggling dynamics, the migrants likely crossed the border in smaller groups before being concentrated in a smuggling stash house on the US side and then squeezed into the tractor-trailer to be moved farther into the United States.
Between 6,000 and 6,800 trucks cross northbound through the Nuevo Laredo-Laredo international port of entry daily, according to Mexican customs data.
A spokesperson for Guatemala’s foreign ministry, Karla Samayoa, said two Guatemalan girls who had been identified on social media as supposed victims of the San Antonio truck were not there, and had in fact drowned in the Rio Grande.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott said the Texas Department of Public Safety would start setting up highway checkpoints to investigate trucks driving across the state.
– JASON BUCH and DAVE GRAHAM/Reuters (with additional reporting by VALENTINE HILAIRE in Mexico City, Mexico, LAURA GOTTESDIENER in Monterrey, Mexico, TED HESSON in Washington DC, US, and JULIO CESAR CHAVEZ in Eagle Pass, Texas, US).
“I guess it was the same story as always,” Guzman told Reuters. “Looking for better opportunities.”
Guzman belongs to one of dozens of families awaiting word of loved ones, after Mexico’s government said 27 Mexicans and nearly two dozen Central Americans died in the ordeal.
Oaxaca’s government is seeking a humanitarian visa for Vasquez’s mother to be with her son while he recovers in Texas.
Vasquez, whose condition and hospital stay were announced by the Mexican government, could not be reached for comment. He set out for the US border with his cousin, Javier Flores, said Manuel Velasco, a relative of Flores and municipal secretary of the nearest town, San Miguel Huautla, where a third of residents speak the indigenous language Mixtec, official data show.
The last time Flores called his family was 19th June, when he told them he had already crossed the border and was hiding in a house in Texas, according to Velasco. Flores’ family is now anxiously hoping for news that he is alive.
“He told me he was going to look for a better life,” Flores’ mother, Virgilia Lopez, told Reuters. “To send his kids to school, help them get ahead and have a better future.”
“They had dreams”
Honduran brothers Fernando Jose Redondo and Alejandro Miguel Andino left their town in the northwest of the country on 4th June, along with Andino’s wife Margie Tamara Paz, according to media interviews with the brothers’ mother, Karen Castillo.
Identification documents of the three migrants were found among the bodies in the truck in Texas, according to the Honduran government. Castillo said she lost contact with her sons, aged 19 and 22, on Saturday morning.
Andino had nearly completed a degree in marketing, while 24-year-old Paz held an economics degree, but they could not find work in Honduras, Castillo told Honduran television.
“They had dreams as a couple, they had goals, and here they wouldn’t fulfill them,” she said.
Adela Betulia Ramirez, whose ID was also found among the dead, left her small town on the Atlantic coast of Honduras on 26th May, her cousin Claudia Vallecillo told local media. Ramirez’s fiance, mother and siblings had sent the 28-year-old money to get to Los Angeles, where they live.
“She told me she was going because she wanted to be with her mother and her siblings,” Vallecillo said.
Two teenage boys aged 13 and 14 from a K’iche’-speaking town in southwestern Guatemala also lost their lives in the trailer, their government said. A community leader identified them as Pascual Melvin Guachiac and Juan Wilmer Tulul.
The two were cousins who left home two weeks ago to escape poverty, Guachiac’s mother was quoted as saying by Guatemalan media. The boys had told the family on Monday they were headed to San Antonio, local media reported.
– With JOSE CORTES in San Miguel Huautla, Mexico, GUSTAVO PALENCIA in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, VALENTINE HILAIRE in Mexico City, Mexico, and SOFIA MENCHU in Guatemala City, Guatemala.
