Migrants in trailer tragedy died seeking better lives
LAS VEGAS, HONDURAS — Children set out hoping to earn enough to support their siblings and parents. Young adults who sacrificed to attend college thinking it would lead to success left their country disillusioned. A man already working in the U.S. who returned to visit his wife and children decided to take a cousin on his return to the U.S.
As families of the more than 60 people packed into a tractor-trailer and abandoned on Monday in Texas began to confirm their worst fears and talk of their relatives, a common narrative of pursuing a better life took shape from Honduras to Mexico.
Fifty-three of those migrants left in the sweltering heat on the outskirts of San Antonio had died as of Wednesday, while others remained hospitalized. The tedious process of identifications continues, but families are confirming their losses.
The dead included 27 people from Mexico, 14 from Honduras, seven from Guatemala and two from El Salvador, said Francisco Garduño, chief of Mexico’s National Immigration Institute.
Each put their lives in the hands of smugglers. News of the trailer full of bodies struck horror in cities and villages accustomed to watching their young people leave, trying to flee poverty or violence.
In Las Vegas, Honduras, a town of 10,000 people about 50 miles south of San Pedro Sula, Alejandro Miguel Andino Caballero, 23, and Margie Tamara Paz Grajeda, 24, had believed his degree track in marketing and hers in economics would open doors to economic stability.
Already together for nearly a decade, the young couple spent recent years applying for jobs with companies. But time and again they were denied.
So when a relative of Andino Caballero’s living in the U.S. offered to help him and his younger brother, 18-yearold Fernando José Redondo Caballero, finance the trip north, they were ready.
“You think that when people have a higher level of education, they have to get more employment opportunities,” said Karen Caballero, the brothers’ mother. “Because that’s why they work, study.”
Caballero did not feel like she could hold them back anymore.
“We all planned it as a family so they could have a different life, so they could achieve goals, dreams,” Caballero said.
When they left Las Vegas on June 4, Caballero accompanied them to Guatemala. From there, the young trio were smuggled across Guatemala and then Mexico in the back of semitrailers.
“I thought things were going to go well,” she said. “Who was a little afraid was Alejandro Miguel. He said, ‘Mom, if something happens to us.’ And I told him, ‘Nothing is going to happen, nothing is going to happen. You are not the first nor will you be the last human being to travel to the United States.’”
Caballero last spoke to them Saturday morning. They told her they had crossed the Rio Grande at Roma, Texas, and on Monday expected to head north to Houston.
She had just gotten home Monday evening when someone told her to turn on the television. “I couldn’t process it,” she said of seeing the report about the trailer in San Antonio.
Caballero was able to confirm their deaths Tuesday after sending their details and photos to San Antonio.