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- BBC News World
Updated 5 hours
image source, Archyde.com
At least 46 people, presumed to be migrants, were found dead Monday inside a truck near San Antonio, Texas, in the southwestern United States.
The authorities reported that another 16 people were rescued alive, in different conditions, and taken to hospitals in the city.
12 of them are adults and the others four children.
The truck was found in a low-traffic area near a railroad track in southwest San Antonio, which is about 250 km from the US-Mexico border.
Several emergency teams arrived at the scene after receiving a call at 5:51 p.m. local time.
“A worker in one of the buildings back here heard a cry for help. He went out to investigate, found a trailer with the doors ajar, He opened them to look and found several dead people inside,” San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said during a press conference.
image source, Getty Images
He specified that until Tuesday night there were three people detained, although their participation in the tragedy is still not clear.
The Foreign Minister of Mexico, Marcelo Ebrard, said that Among those taken to the hospital were two Guatemalans.
The nationalities of the other victims were not immediately clear.
“The trailer has plates from the United States, superimposed to circulate without review. Very likely authorship of traffickers,” he said in a tweet.
The consul general of Mexico, Rubén Minutti, was sent to the scene.
no air or water
San Antonio Fire Department Chief Charles Hood said people they died of exhaustion and excess heat inside the truckwhich had no air conditioning.
The victims were “hot to the touch”.
The official added that the survivors did not appear to have access to water and were too weak to get out of the truck on their own.
image source, Getty Images
San Antonio is approximately 250 km from the border with Mexico.
“It’s a horrible human tragedy,” San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said at a news conference near the scene.
The weather in San Antonio is very hot in the summer months and this Monday the temperature reached 39.4ºC.
The incident is the subject of a federal investigation led by the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
In a series of tweets, US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas expressed his sadness at the tragedy and announced an investigation.
He also pointed to the mafias that profit from the desperation of migrants.
“Human traffickers are callous people who disregard the vulnerable people they exploit and endanger for profit,” he said.
a horrible scene
Angelica María CasasBBC News, since Saint Anthony
It is now dark, and only a few police vehicles and some tape cordoning off the road make it clear that this is the scene of a mass casualty event.
The victims, presumed migrants, probably died from exhaustion, heat or dehydration.
Edward Reyna, a security guard at a lumber yard just a few yards away, tells me he’s surprised to get to his night shift and hear this news.
He has lost count of the times has seen immigrants jump off the train which passes right next to where the truck was found.
“I thought sooner or later someone would get hurt,” Reyna told the BBC. “The cartels that bring them don’t care about them.”
This story has occurred in San Antonio before, but not to this magnitude.
In 2017, 10 immigrants were found dead inside a similar tractor-trailer outside a Walmart store, also on the city’s south side.
The southern end of San Antonio is a corridor with two main highways that connect the city with the border towns of Texas.
Most of the rural communities, a few junkyards and a handful of developing neighborhoods in this part of San Antonio make it easy for a truck this size to go unnoticed, until it’s not anymore.
Security guard Edward Reyna was not surprised to learn of the deaths, it was something he had anticipated.
dangerous routes
Immigration is a contentious political issue in the US, where last year a record number of undocumented immigrants were detained who crossed into the country from Mexico, many of them traveling along extremely dangerous and unsafe routes.
Fleeing poverty and violence in Central America, many of the undocumented immigrants end up paying huge sums of cash to human smugglers to cross the border with the United States.
In recent years there have been many similar examples of migrants who perished during their journey, but none as deadly as the one discovered Monday.
Speaking to the BBC from San Antonio, local KENS5 reporter Matt Houston said: “At this point we understand that if this is a human smuggling incident, as it appears, it would be the deadliest of its kind in history of the United States”.
Of the 16 survivors who were taken to hospitals in San Antonio, four are minors.
He said the risks facing families crossing into the United States are formidable, and in recent days the area had been hit by a heat wave.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott blamed US President Joe Bidenfor the deaths, describing them as “a result of his deadly open border policies.”
Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic candidate running against Abbott, said the reports were devastating and called for urgent action to “dismantle human smuggling networks and replace them with expanded pathways for legal migration.
Visibly moved by the tragedy, Councilwoman Adriana Rocha García, from the 4th district of San Antonio, expressed solidarity with the families of the victims during the press conference.
image source, Getty Images
Priests of the Archdiocese of San Antonio pray at the scene of the tragedy.
“We offer them our most sincere condolences. We know that these families came to give their families a new opportunity. The city of San Antonio is known as a city with a lot of compassion“he expressed.
“We are all very sorry that this has happened here in the city, but to the people who still survive, who are in hospitals, we are assuring them that they will be treating them with the most deserved charity,” he added.
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