MEXICO CITY — Not less than 53 folks have been killed and dozens injured in a horrific truck accident in southern Mexico on Thursday, the authorities mentioned, with a lot of the victims believed to be migrants coming from Central America.
The accident, which happened in southern Chiapas state, occurred when a truck carrying greater than 100 folks overturned on Thursday afternoon close to Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital, the top of the state Civil Safety Service, Luis Manuel García Moreno, instructed Milenio TV.
The accident is likely one of the deadliest involving migrants in a long time, and follows the dying of 13 migrants in a automotive accident on the U.S. border in March.
Mr. García mentioned that, primarily based on witness testimony, the truck was touring at extreme velocity after which flipped over whereas rounding a pointy curve, with the trailer carrying the migrants then crashing right into a pedestrian bridge and development close by.
Photographs and movies shared on social media confirmed greater than a dozen our bodies laid out on the highway lined in white sheets close to what gave the impression to be the twisted stays of an overturned automobile.
The Civil Safety Service mentioned on Fb that one other 58 folks had been injured. The accident occurred on the freeway between the city of Chiapa de Corzo and the state capital.
“My solidarity with the victims of the visitors accident,” the state’s governor, Rutilio Escandón, mentioned on Twitter. “I’ve given directions to offer immediate consideration and help to the injured. Duty shall be decided based on the legislation.”
Bordering Guatemala, the state of Chiapas has in recent times seen a surge of migrants from Central America, a lot of them being smuggled by Mexico on their technique to the US border. A file 1.7 million migrants, primarily from Mexico and Central America, have been discovered attempting to enter the US illegally within the 12 months main as much as October this 12 months.
Trying to succeed in the US, whether or not to hunt asylum or to seek for financial alternatives, is a harmful and at occasions lethal course of, with migrants having to journey by cartel-infested territory in northern Mexico, usually paying steep costs to smugglers to get them to the border.
Migrants are frequently packed into vans or automobiles as they make the journey north, and regularly fall prey to violence alongside the best way. In January, the our bodies of 19 folks, most of them migrants, have been present in a charred pickup truck close to the U.S. border. A gaggle of 12 law enforcement officials have been later arrested in reference to the crime.
Not less than 3,575 deaths have been documented on the United States-Mexico border since 2014, based on the Worldwide Group for Migration, with 650 folks killed trying to cross the U.S. border this 12 months alone — the best quantity for the reason that I.O.M. started documenting deaths in 2014.
“The rising migrant dying toll within the area is extremely alarming,” mentioned Michele Klein-Solomon, I.O.M. regional director for Central, North America and the Caribbean, in an announcement on Wednesday.
Not less than 750 migrants have been killed attempting to cross Mexico since 2014, based on the I.O.M., and hundreds extra have merely disappeared.
Thursday’s accident comes only a day after the US relaunched a contentious migrant enforcement program generally known as Stay in Mexico, which might power asylum seekers to attend throughout the border whereas their instances are decided in U.S. courts. This system has been criticized by human rights teams due to the unsafe situations migrants face in Mexico.
“Underneath the Stay in Mexico program, the US and Mexico have knowingly put hundreds of asylum seekers’ lives in peril,” Ari Sawyer, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, mentioned in an announcement Thursday.
