TUXTLA GUTIERREZ, Mexico — 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 tossed and crushed in a pile of both 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 massacre of 72 migrants by the Zetas drug cartel in the northern state of Tamaulipas.
Volunteer rescuers hauled bodies off the pile by their arms and legs, while some migrants scrambled 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, his face wrenched into a grimace as he extracted himself from the weight of the dead.
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 stared lifeless and unblinking into the setting sun.
While the Mexican government is trying to appease the United States by stopping caravans of walking migrants and allowing the reinstatement of the “Remain in Mexico” policy, it hasn’t been able to stop the flood of migrants stuffed hundreds at a time into freight trucks operated by smugglers who charge thousands of dollars to take them to the U.S. border — trips that all too often lead them only to their deaths.
The most severely injured, many bloodied, were carried by their arms and legs to plastic sheets set on the road. Those who could walk were led, stunned and uncomprehending, to the same sheets. Ambulances, cars and pickup trucks were pressed into service, ferrying the injured to hospitals.
Later, the dead were laid in rows of white sheets, side by side, 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, but still limped away in their desperation to escape.
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 weight of the load — combined with speed and a nearby curve — may have been enough to throw the truck off balance, authorities said.
Luis Manuel Moreno, head of the Chiapas state civil defense office, said about 21 of the injured had serious wounds and were taken to local hospitals. The federal Attorney General’s Office said three were critically injured in the crash on a highway leading from the Guatemalan border toward the Chiapas state capital.(AP)