Women, children and adolescents among the 50 victims of the worst immigration tragedy in the US

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The ‘wet backs’ choked to death in an abandoned trailer in the sun on a Texas highway after a breakdown

You don’t need small boats to cross the brown, sandy waters of the Rio Grande, but you do need trucks to transport the “wetbacks” that swim to the United States in search of a city to get lost in. On Monday, one of these huge eighteen-wheelers was abandoned on the side of Interstate 35 that runs through Texas. Apparently it had mechanical problems and was left there. The license plate was fake. Inside, nearly a hundred bodies were crammed together, with no water or air conditioning, so called “it burned to the touch,” said San Antonio fire chief Charles Hood.

Next to the truck a door ajar and a corpse on the ground. The brave man who managed to open it fell dead after reaching it. The rest had no strength left to go out. The refrigerated truck had become a cauldron where people were cooked over low heat. The stench was unbearable. They had been sprinkled with herbs and cooking herbs to shed the dogs at the border.

Hood and the thirty men who rescued them receive psychological help, as their exploits until then had been limited to rescuing a dog stuck in a drain or injured in a car accident. “None of us were willing to open a truck door and find it,” acknowledged the burly fire chief, who in 2007 became the first African-American to lead the force.

Out of that human mass, from which voices were calling for help, sixteen people were saved alive, who were transferred to various hospitals in San Antonio, the nearest city, but some died within hours. Four were children, twelve adults, although witnesses referred to them as teenagers.

The road must have been long. The nearest border post was 150 miles away, but at least for the seven Guatemalans and two Hondurans found among the 50 dead, the journey started thousands of miles away. According to Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, twenty-two of the dead were his compatriots. “We are in mourning. Great tragedy. Mexico joins the investigation,” he tweeted.

The Dantesque scene represents the greatest tragedy of its kind in United States history, despite the fact that it is not without precedent. In 2017, an employee of a Walmart hypermarket in San Antonio also heard screams from a truckload of 38 people, 10 of whom died. And that was less than yet another macabre discovery in 2003, when 19 people were found dead in Victoria in the compartment of another trailer that hid 70 illegal immigrants, always under the blazing South Texas sun.

On Thursday the temperatures were above 40 degrees, but in the trailer Tyrone Williams drove in 2003 it was almost 80 degrees. The Jamaican American, who had been paid $7,500 to carry the human load, “forgot” to turn on the air conditioning, he testified in court. The jury released him from the death penalty after five days of deliberation, but sentenced him to 34 years in prison, multiplied to life in prison for each victim.

Police arrested three people Monday night who could follow their fate if proven they were driving the truck full of victims in San Antonio. The first call from the emergency services came around 6 pm and as traffickers usually travel at night, it is feared that the hundreds of immigrants will cook all day. “Oh my God, have pity on them, they were looking for a better life,” Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller wrote on Twitter. ‘Sir, after Uvalde, this. Help us, we need you. So many people suffer!

Not everyone had their eyes to the sky. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who is campaigning for reelection, took the opportunity to hang the deceased on President Joe Biden, also on Twitter. “These deaths are a result of their open borders policies,” he said. “The consequences of not wanting to apply the law,” he added.

The response from this political crossroads was furious. Methodist Reverend Chuck Currie publicly asked that they “put aside the political nonsense” because “the United States needs immigration reform that hinders the Republican Party,” he accused. For his part, the city’s mayor, Ron Nirenberg, demanded that this “terrible human tragedy” serve to treat the crisis of migrants seeking asylum as a humanitarian crisis. “At this time, I urge you to think with compassion, pray for the dead, those hospitalized and their families,” he said.

The president also had a veiled response to the Texas governor who has banned abortion, liberalized the use of guns and spent $8,000 million to strengthen the border. “Exploiting vulnerable individuals for money is despicable, as is politics for tragedy,” Joe Biden said in a statement.

Source: La Verdad

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