The Helpless Plight of Tafficked Migrants

"Exploiting vulnerable individuals for profit is shameful, as is political grandstanding around tragedy, and my administration will continue to do everything possible to stop human smugglers and traffickers from taking advantage of people who are seeking to enter the United States between ports of entry."

U.S. President Joe Biden

 

"They had just parked it [the truck] on the side of the road."

"Apparently [the truck] had mechanical problems and [the driver and his co-smugglers] left it there."

"The sheriff thinks it came across from Laredo."

Bexar Country Judge Nelson Wolff

The abandoned truck was discovered after a nearby worker heard cries for help   Getty Images

 

Difficult to fathom even with the tension involved in engaging in an illegal act, that anyone knowing there are scores of people, including children, in the back of the truck they're diving panicking -- their first impulse to put as much distance between themselves and the impaired truck with its helpless passengers -- in a belated effort to divorce themselves from what comes next. Discovery of course, coming next, apprehension by policing authorities for being involved in a human smuggling racket. 

 

And in that moment of 'escape', failing to consider the impact on the doomed people locked inside the trailer. They could just as easily and humanely unlocked the trailer doors to release the people within from the heat trap that eventually took their lives. They had already entered the United States, which was their goal. The people could have dispersed, making their way to an eventual destination. They would certainly have received help from others along the way. Instead, they were consigned to death.

It was a city worker that raised the alert after hearing a cry for help from the truck that had been left on a remote back road outside San Antonio, Texas. He opened the doors to the trailer and made that grisly discovery. When police arrived, efforts at restoring life to some of the people who had succumbed to heat prostration, suffocating in the airless trailer, sent some people to hospital. While forty-six people were discovered to be beyond help at the scene, another four after being hospitalized died there. 

Mourners visit the isolated Texas road where the abandoned truck was found with dozens of dead people inside  Getty Images

 

There were 39 men and 11 women among the dead who were left in the back of an abandoned tractor-trailer where there was no way forward for the trapped people looking for opportunity and a new life, to disengage from their situation. Two Guatemalen boys, ages 13 and 14 were among the dead. Those who died "Were likely trying to find a better life. This is nothing short of a horrific human tragedy", observed San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg.

The countries of origin of the migrants have not yet been fully identified, nor how long the unfortunate migrants had been abandoned to certain death. What is known is that twenty-two came from Mexico, seven from Guatemala, and two from Honduras, another two from El Salvador, according to Roberto Velasco Alvarez, head of Mexico's Foreign Relations Department, North America department.

The driver of the truck, identified as Homero Zamo, evidently made an attempt to pose as a victim, hiding in nearby bushes, before he was arrested. To the present, the total death toll is now 53 with several more of the migrants trapped in the truck having died in hospital. Minors are among the people who remain in hospital. In addition to the detention in police custody of the driver, another two Mexican men have been detained as accomplices.