Another 16 managed to save their lives. Authorities have made three arrests.
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 out to the US side in search of a city to get lost in. Yesterday, one of these massive 18-wheelers was discovered off the side of Interstate 35 that runs through Texas. Inside, nearly a hundred bodies crammed together, without water or air conditioning, so hot “it burned to touch them,” said San Antonio Fire Chief Charles Hood.
Among that human mass from which some voices came out asking for help, 16 people were rescued alive, who were transferred to a hospital in San Antonio, the closest city. Four were children, 12 have been considered adults, although witnesses referred to them as teenagers. The road must have been long. The nearest border post was about 400 kilometers away, but for at least three Guatemalans among the survivors, the journey began thousands of kilometers away.
The Dantesque scene constitutes the greatest tragedy of its kind in US history, despite the fact that precedents are not lacking. In 2017, a worker at a Walmart hypermarket also heard screams coming from a truck packed with 38 people, of whom 10 died. And that was already less than another macabre discovery in 2003, when 19 people were found dead in the rear compartment of another trailer that hid 70 people, always under the scorching sun of South Texas.
political disputes
Yesterday the temperatures were over 40 degrees, but inside the trailer that Tyrone Williams was driving in 2003 it was almost 80 degrees. The Jamaican-American, who had been paid $7,500 to transport the human cargo, “forgot” to turn on the air conditioning, he testified at trial. The jury exempted him from capital punishment after five days of deliberations, but sentenced him to life in prison.
The Police arrested three people who could follow their fate, if it is proven that they were driving the truck full of victims found in San Antonio. “Oh my God, have mercy on them, they were looking for a better life,” Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller wrote on Twitter. «Lord, after Uvalde, this, help us, we need you. So many people suffering!
Not everyone had turned their eyes to the sky. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who is campaigning for re-election, took the opportunity to hang the dead on President Joe Biden, also on Twitter. “These deaths are the result of his open border policies,” he charged. “The consequences of not wanting to apply the law”.
The reaction of this political intersection was furious. Methodist Reverend Chuck Currie publicly called for “political bullshit” to be put aside because “what America needs is immigration reform that the Republican Party is preventing,” he charged. For his part, the city’s mayor, Ron Nirenberg, called for this “horrible human tragedy” 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 deceased, those hospitalized and their families”