Pitiful stories at US-Mexican border
MEXICO CITY: A father and daughter drowned in a tragic embrace. A mother begging hysterically for her son’s release. Soldiers forcefully detaining a woman and her daughter at the border.
These three photographs left their mark last week on the migration debate on both sides of the United States-Mexican border, where spiralling numbers of asylum seekers were chasing the increasingly impossible dream of reaching the US.
Amid a mounting crisis, these three pictures emerged as symbols of the human stories behind the politically charged debate.
The photo of the drowned Salvadoran migrants drew instant comparisons to that of Aylan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian refugee whose body washed up on a Turkish beach in 2015.
It shows Valeria Martinez Avalos, three weeks shy of her second birthday, face-down in the water of the Rio Grande alongside her father, Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez. His dark T-shirt is wrapped around her — his vain attempt to protect her as they crossed the river towards the US — and her right arm was wrapped around his neck.
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve had to cover in years,” said photojournalist Abraham Pineda, one of those who shot the tragic scene in the border city of Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas.
“Seeing them there at the edge of the river, the way she had her arm around his neck, like an embrace .... It left me speechless.”
Trump’s opponents immediately blamed him for the tragedy. Across the border, leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who came to office vowing to protect migrants’ rights, faced similar accusations for his recent hardline turn.
Trump fired back, saying that he “hated” the photo and blaming Democrats in Congress for failing to pass migration reform. Lopez Obrador, meanwhile, said his “conscience is clear”.
As both governments make it harder for people to cross the border to request asylum — a right protected under international law — “people get more desperate”, said Human Rights Watch head Kenneth Roth.
Two days earlier, Mexico’s migrant crackdown was vividly captured by photojournalist Herika Martinez Prado, who shot the moment a National Guardsman dragged a Nicaraguan woman and her daughter back from the Rio Grande in Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas.
In the picture, another guardsman, carrying an assault rifle, moves to intercept a second woman trailing close behind.
That militarised approach to controlling the northern border caused a backlash in Mexico, where Lopez Obrador’s newly created National Guard had been meant to fight violent drug cartels, not unarmed migrants.
Mexico has focused much of its effort on slowing the flow of migrants across its southern border.
Hundreds protested on Tuesday at the Mesoamerican Fair detention centre, in the southern border city of Tapachula, demanding to be let out.
One woman fell to the ground and begged hysterically through the gap underneath fence to be released to get medical attention for her son.
“Help my son, he’s sick, many days. I’m begging you, there’s no water to drink, no food. Help, help,” she screamed in broken Spanish, tears and saliva dripping from her face.
In San Salvador, the widow of the husband who drowned with their daughter trying to cross the Rio Grande river returned home from Mexico on Friday.
Tania Avalos, 21, clasped her hands and kept her head down as she exited the airport here, accompanied by Foreign Ministry officials. She was met by El Salvador Deputy Foreign Minister Mauricio Cabrera.
“Her loss is very big and very deep,” he said, asking journalists to respect her privacy.
“She was emphatic in telling our government she did not want to talk to the media.”
He said the remains of Oscar and Valeria were being repatriated overland to avoid the lengthy paperwork to bring them home by plane.