Migrant truck crash in Mexico: Disaster ‘in the blink of an eye’

TUXTLA GUTIÉRREZ, Mexico — The Guatemalan teenager had been packed with more than 150 fellow migrants for hours, he said, jammed in rows of six, some sitting, some standing, some choking on the southern Mexico heat.

Then the speeding tractor-trailer started to fishtail uncontrollably, said the teenager, Esvin Chipel Tzoy. Within seconds, the vehicle flipped and crashed, the deadliest single-day disaster in many years to befall Central American migrants who attempt the perilous route through Mexico to the United States.

Mexico officials said at least 55 people had been killed and 106 hospitalized in the Thursday crash. They attributed the disaster to excessive speed and said the driver, who may have passed undetected through immigration checkpoints, escaped after the crash.

Interviews on Friday with survivors, witnesses and one of the first medics who rushed to the crash depicted a scene of mangled metal, vomit, puddles of blood and dust coating the bodies of migrants piled atop one another in the highway and what remained of the tractor-trailer.

Chipel said the tractor-trailer began to lurch from side to side and then he heard a loud boom, as if the brakes had failed, followed by the screech of metal as the trailer tipped. Then came the screams from fellow passengers, including children.

Not far behind, Melody Ramírez Moreno, 17, was perched behind her husband on a motorcycle when they saw the tractor-trailer sway precariously. Her husband hit the brakes, but the bike’s front wheel started to twist, she said, as her foot became trapped and mangled in the back wheel.

“The only thing I could hear were the screams, the laments, the cries of the people on the truck,” she said. “Everything happened in the blink of an eye.”

The trailer overturned, slammed into a pedestrian bridge, split apart and scattered a mass of bodies across the highway, including Chipel.

“I couldn’t breathe,” Chipel said, recalling how his nostrils filled with blood and dust. “I thought I was dying.”

Chipel was among the luckier ones, with only a broken wrist and some cuts and scrapes.

The injured migrants, mostly from Guatemala like Chipel, were being treated at hospitals around Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the Chiapas state capital, on Friday.