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 tipped over and crashed into the base of a steel pedestrian bridge in southern Mexico.
The migrants inside the cargo trailer were flipped, tossed and crushed into a pile that mingled the living and the dead.
By late Thursday, the death toll stood at 53, and authorities said at least 54 people had been injured. It was one of the worst single-day death tolls for migrants in Mexico since the 2010 killings of 72 migrants by the Zetas drug cartel in the northern state of Tamaulipas.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Volunteer rescuers hauled bodies off the pile by their arms and legs, while some migrants scrambled and limped to extract themselves from the twisted steel sheets of the collapsed container.
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.
Nearby, a man blinked his eyes, unable to move as he lay on the shoulder of the road.
While the Mexican government is trying to appease the US by stopping caravans of walking migrants and allowing the reinstatement of the “Remain in Mexico” policy, it has not been able to stop the flood of migrants stuffed hundreds at a time into freight trucks operated by smugglers who charge thousands of US dollars to take them to the US border — trips that often lead them to their deaths.
The most severely injured were carried by their arms and legs to plastic sheets set on the road.
The walking wounded, some of them stunned and uncomprehending, were led to the same sheets. Ambulances, cars and pickup trucks were put into service, ferrying the injured to hospitals.
Later, the dead were laid side by side in rows of white sheets on the highway.
Rescue workers who first arrived said that even more migrants had been aboard the truck when it crashed, and had fled for fear of being detained by immigration agents.
One paramedic said some of those who hurried into surrounding neighborhoods were bloodied or bruised.
About 200 migrants might have been packed into the truck, said Guatemala’s top human rights official, Jordan Rodas.
While shocking, that number is not unusual for migrant smuggling operations in Mexico, and the weight of the load — combined with speed and a nearby curve — might have thrown the truck off balance, authorities said.
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