Mexican rescue workers rushing to a highway accident found a horrific scene of death and injury after a freight truck jammed with as many as 200 migrants crashed into the base of a steel pedestrian bridge in Mexico. The death toll stands at 53.
The migrants inside the cargo trailer were flipped, tossed and crushed into a pile that mingled the living and the dead.
One young man, pinned in a heap of unmoving bodies, wriggled to free the lower half of his frame from the weight of the dead piled atop him, his face wrenched into a grimace of life extracting itself from the clutches of death.Nearby, a man blinked his eyes, unable to move as he lay on the shoulder of the road. Next to him was a fellow migrant, stouter and older, whose eyes no longer needed shading — they stared, startled and lifeless, unblinking, into the setting sun.
About 200 migrants may have been packed into the truck, said Guatemala’s top human rights official, Jordán Rodas. While shocking, that number is not unusual for migrant smuggling operations in Mexico, and the sheer weight of the load — combined with speed and a nearby curve — may have been enough to throw the truck off balance, authorities said.
Marco Antonio Sánchez, director of the Chiapas Firefighter Institute, said ambulances raced victims to three hospitals, carrying three to four injured each. When there weren’t enough ambulances they loaded them into pickup trucks, he said. Those who spoke to survivors said the migrants told of boarding the truck in Mexico, near the border with Guatemala, and of paying between $2,500 and $3,500 to be transported to Mexico’s central state of Puebla. Once there, they would presumably have contracted with another set of migrant smugglers to take them to the U.S. border.
Irineo Mujica, an activist who is leading a march of about 400 migrants who have been walking for almost 1 1/2 months across southern Mexico, blamed Thursday’s disaster on Mexico cracking down on migrant caravans.
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