An altar dedicated to late migrant Pablo Ortega Alvarez, who died due to suffocation while being smuggled in a trailer in San Antonio, Texas, US, is pictured at his family's home, in the town of Tlapacoyan, in Veracruz state, Mexico, on July 14, 2022.TLAPACOYAN, Mexico – At first, Mexican migrants Pablo Ortega and Julio Lopez enjoyed the smuggling equivalent of a first-class ticket to the US: complimentary beers, safe houses with video games, even a week at a hunting ranch.
Their journeys, reconstructed by Reuters via dozens of texts, photos and video messages with their families, provide a rare window into the world of human smuggling: a billion-dollar trade growing ever more deadly. Ortega, a jocular 19-year-old sporting baseball caps over his dark hair, left in mid-May by bus from his home in Tlapacoyan – a hilly town in the southeast state of Veracruz ringed by banana plantations.
Vehicle and transport-related border deaths grew more quickly than any other cause, between 2020 and 2021, according to UN data.But when he reached the border, the minders said they wanted another $2,000 to take him on a safer route avoiding the desert, crossing the Rio Grande river and riding in a truck sleeping compartment with three others to Houston.
Ortega finally crossed the Rio Grande on May 29, but a US agent caught him past the riverbank and sent him back to Mexico.After flying into the northern Mexican city of Monterrey, smugglers drove him to the border town of Matamoros. A day later he celebrated his 20th birthday with a mayonnaise sandwich in a Texas safe house. Though now on American soil, Ortega's journey wasn't over: the Border Patrol maintains checkpoints as far as 100 miles inside.
"Tell my children that I love them and if I am able to get through, everything will be different," Gonzalez remembered Lopez saying. First responders arrived minutes later. The trailer's partially opened doors revealed stacks of bodies hot to the touch, officials said. Other bodies were found splayed across the ground and in nearby brush, court documents show.
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