The ‘wet backs’ suffocated to death inside an abandoned trailer in the sun on a Texas highway after suffering 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’ who swim out to the United States in search of a city to get lost in. On Monday one of these huge eighteen-wheelers was left abandoned on the side of Interstate 35 that runs through Texas. Apparently, it suffered mechanical problems and was left there. The license plate was false. 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.
Next to the truck, a door ajar and a corpse on the ground. The brave man who managed to open it fell dead after achieving it. The rest had no strength left to go out. The refrigerator truck had become a cauldron where human beings were cooked over low heat. The stench was unbearable. They had been sprinkled with spices and cooking seasonings to throw off the dogs at the border.
Hood and the thirty men who got them out are receiving psychological help, because until then their exploits had been limited to rescuing a dog stuck in the drain or injured in a car accident. “None of us were prepared to open a truck door and find that,” acknowledged the burly fire chief, who in 2007 became the first African-American to lead the force.
voices asking for help
From among that human mass from which some voices came out asking for help, sixteen people were rescued alive, who were transferred to various hospitals in San Antonio, the closest city, but some died in a few hours. Four were children, twelve adults, although witnesses referred to them as teenagers.
The road must have been long. The closest border post was 240 kilometers away, but at least for the seven Guatemalans and two Hondurans found among the fifty fatalities, the journey began thousands of kilometers away. According to Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, twenty-two of the deceased were his countrymen. “We are in mourning. Huge tragedy. Mexico joins the inquiries », he tweeted.
The Dantesque scene constitutes the greatest tragedy of its kind in the history of the United States, despite the fact that it is not without precedent. In 2017, a worker at a Walmart hypermarket in San Antonio also heard screams coming from a truck packed with 38 people, of whom ten died. And that was less than 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 scorching sun of South Texas.
over forty degrees
On Thursday 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 the death penalty after five days of deliberations, but sentenced him to 34 years in prison, which was multiplied for each victim up to life imprisonment.
The Police arrested three people on Monday night who could follow their fate if it is shown that they were driving the truck full of victims found in San Antonio. The first call received by the emergency services came at around six o’clock in the afternoon, and since the traffickers usually travel at night, it is to be feared that the hundreds of immigrants spent the day cooking. “Oh my God, have mercy 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 suffering!
Not everyone had turned their eyes to the sky. The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, who is campaigning for re-election, took the opportunity to hang the deceased on the 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,” he added.
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, demanded that this “horrible 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 deceased, those hospitalized and their families,” he said.
The president also had a veiled response to the governor of Texas who has banned abortion, liberalized the use of weapons and spent 8,000 million dollars to fortify the border. “Exploiting vulnerable individuals for money is despicable, as is politicking with tragedy,” Joe Biden said in a statement.
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