Dozens of migrants were discovered dead in an abandoned big rig near San Antonio on Monday, in what seems to be the bloodiest human smuggling case in modern US history.
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SAN ANTONIO— Victims have been discovered with no identifying documents, and in one case, a stolen ID. Phone coverage is unavailable in remote villages, making it difficult to contact family members or locate missing migrants. Fingerprint data must be exchanged and matched by many governments.
More than a day after the discovery of 51 dead migrants in a suffocating trailer in San Antonio, few of the victims’ identities have been revealed, highlighting the difficulties police have in locating persons who cross borders clandestinely.
By Tuesday afternoon, medical examiners may have identified 34 of the fatalities, according to Bexar County Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores, who represents the area where the truck was abandoned.
Those identities had not yet been validated due to further steps such as fingerprinting, and she described it as a hurdle with no estimate for when the process would be completed.
“It’s a tedious, tedious, sad, difficult process,” she went on:
The victims were discovered Monday afternoon on the outskirts of San Antonio in what is thought to be the country’s bloodiest smuggling incident along the US-Mexico border. More than a dozen people were transported to hospitals, including four children. Three persons were arrested.
The tragedy occurred at a time when a record number of migrants were arriving in the United States, many of whom were risking their lives to cross fast rivers and canals and hot desert terrain. Migrants were stopped over 240,000 times in May, up one-third from a year earlier.
With limited information about the victims, distraught relatives of migrants from Mexico and Central America scrambled for news of their loved ones.
According to Rubén Minutti, Mexico’s consul general in San Antonio, 27 of the victims are considered to be of Mexican descent based on the documentation they were carrying. Several survivors were in critical condition, with injuries including brain injury and internal bleeding, he stated. According to officials, over 30 people had contacted the Mexican Consulate in search of missing loved ones.
Guatemala’s foreign ministry reported late Tuesday that two Guatemalans had been hospitalized and that three Guatemalans could be among the deceased. Honduras’ foreign relations ministry said it was attempting to authenticate the identities of four people who died in the truck while carrying Honduran documents.
Eva Ferrufino, a spokesperson for Honduras’ foreign ministry, said her department is collaborating with the Honduran consulate in south Texas to match names and fingerprints and finalize identifications.
The process is time-consuming because one of the hazards is the use of fraudulent or stolen documents.
Mexico’s foreign affairs minister named two people who were hospitalized in San Antonio on Tuesday morning. However, one of the identification cards he shared on Twitter was stolen last year in the southern state of Chiapas.
Haneydi Antonio Guzman, 23, was safe and sound in a mountain village over 1,300 miles from San Antonio when she began getting texts from family and friends on Tuesday. There is no phone signal there, but she does have internet connection.
“My relatives were contacting me worried.”
Journalists began showing up at her parents’ home in Escuintla — the address on her stolen ID that was discovered in the vehicle — hoping to see her concerned relatives.
“That’s me on the ID, but I am not the person that was in the trailer and they say is hospitalized,” she pointed out.
“My relatives were contacting me worried, asking where I was,” Antonio Guzman said. “I told them I was fine, that I was in my house and I clarified it on by (Facebook page).”
Foreign Affairs Secretary Marcelo Ebrard erased the initial tweet identifying her with no further explanation. The other hospitalized victim Ebrard identified Tuesday turned out to be accurate.
In the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, municipal officials in San Miguel Huautla were traveling to the community of 32-year-old José Luis Guzmán Vásquez late Tuesday to find out if his mother wanted to travel to San Antonio to be with him in the hospital.
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