At least 53 ‘migrants’ are killed and 21 seriously-injured when container truck flipped over

At least 53 migrants died when the container truck they were in crashed in Mexico – with one official blaming the speed of the vehicle and the weight of its human cargo for the tragedy.   

Dozens of bodies arranged in rows covered in white sheets were photographed laid across a roadway in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas On Thursday. A further 21 people were seriously-injured in the horror smash. 

The deceased were believed to be Central American migrants, some from Guatemala and Honduras.

They were packed in a cargo truck used to transport perishable goods that rolled over and crashed into a pedestrian bridge over a highway, causing dozens of deaths and serious injuries. 

Luis Manuel Moreno, the head of the Chiapas state civil defense office, said about 21 of the injured had serious wounds and were taken to local hospitals.

Moreno said the apparent cause of the tragedy was the speed at which the truck was going combined with the weight of the truck’s human cargo that may have caused it to tip over.

Moreno reported that some of the survivors said they were from the neighboring country of Guatemala, including survivor Celso Pacheco who said the truck felt like it was speeding and then seemed to lose control under the weight of the migrants inside, AP reported. 

Pacheco estimated there were eight to 10 young children in the cargo truck and said he was trying to reach the United States, but now he expected to be deported to Guatemala. 

Survivors said they boarded the truck in Mexico, near the Guatemalan border, and paid between $2,500 and $3,500 to be transported to Mexico’s central state of Puebla.

According to survivors, once in Puebla they would presumably have contracted with another set of migrant smugglers to take them to the U.S. border.  

He said that as the vehicle toppled over, it hit the base of a steel pedestrian bridge. There was a curve in the road near the accident scene that may have contributed to the crash.

That meant at least 107 people were crowed into the vehicle, which is not an unusual amount for freight trucks to carry in migrant-smuggling operations in southern Mexico.

But according to rescue workers who first arrived at the scene, even more migrants had been aboard the truck when it crashed and some had even fled to avoid being detained by immigration agents.

One paramedic said some of those who fled into surrounding neighborhoods were bloodied or bruised, but still limped away in their desperation to escape.

Video footage showed the dead and injured migrants jumbled into a pile inside the collapsed freight container, with some struggling to extract themselves from the weight of bodies piled atop them.

Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei posted his condolences for the families of those affected by the tragedy on Twitter.  

‘I deeply regret the tragedy in Chiapas state, and I express my solidarity for the victims’ families, to whom we will offer all the necessary consular assistance, including repatriation,’ he wrote. 

In recent months, Mexican authorities have tried to block migrants from walking in large groups toward the U.S. border, but the clandestine and illicit flow of migrant smuggling has continued.

In October, in one of the largest busts in recent memory, authorities in the northern border state of Tamaulipas found an 652 mainly Central American migrants jammed into a convoy of six freight trucks heading toward the U.S. border.

Irineo Mujica, an activist who is leading a march of a couple of hundred migrants who have been walking for more almost 1 1/2 months across southern Mexico, blamed Mexico’s policies of cracking down on migrant caravans for the disaster.

Mujica and his group had almost reached the outskirts of Mexico City on Thursday, after weeks of dealing with National Guard officers who tried to block the march. Mujica said the group would stop Thursday and offer prayers for the dead migrants.

‘These policies that kill us, that murder us, is what leads to this type of tragedy,’ Mujica said.

In fact, they are two very different groups. Caravans generally attract migrants who don’t have the thousands of dollars needed to pay migrant smugglers.

Migrants involved in serious accidents are often allowed to stay in Mexico at least temporarily because they are considered witnesses to and victims of a crime, and later Thursday Mexico’s National Immigration Institute said it would offer the humanitarian visas to the survivors.

The agency also said the Mexican government would help identify the dead and cover funeral costs or repatriation of their remains.

Mass deaths of migrants are something that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been desperate to avoid, even as his administration has accepted requests from the U.S. government to stem the flow of migrants moving north. ‘It is very painful,’ he wrote on his Twitter account.

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.