People 'cried for water' in trailer

SAN ANTONIO, Texas - Adan Lara Vega said he was told the $5,500 he was being charged to be smuggled into the United States would include an air-conditioned truck ride.

Instead, the 27-year-old Mexican laborer climbed with his friends into a pitch-black, metal tractor-trailer compartment that lacked ventilation - a deadly oven that would claim 10 lives.

"After an hour I heard ... people crying and asking for water. I, too, was sweating and people were despairing," Lara Vega said on Monday from his bed in a San Antonio hospital. "That's when I lost consciousness."

By the time he regained it on Sunday, he was in the hospital, where his ID bracelet identified him by the last name Lalravega. Mexican consulate and US officials later said the correct spelling was Lara Vega.

He said it all started when he climbed aboard the tractor-trailer in the border city of Laredo, Texas, with six friends from the state of Aguascalientes after the group waited nearly two weeks in a safe house.

"The guy we were with in the house told us they'd be putting us in a refrigerated compartment, a refrigerated compartment with air. But that didn't happen," he said.

The trailer was already full of people when the door opened up on a Laredo street. Lara Vega said it was so dark he couldn't see how many there were. A few were children, he said, whose voices he later heard begging for water.

He said the smugglers didn't offer passengers water, and he and his friends hadn't brought any with them. The ride to San Antonio would only be 240 kilometers.

Lara Vega said he never saw the driver of the tractor-trailer. He said that when people are being smuggled, they are told not to look at the faces of their handlers and it's a good idea to obey.

The packed tractor-trailer was found early on Sunday outside a Walmart store. As many as eight passengers were dead, and two more would soon die. The driver has been charged in the deaths.

Mexico's foreign ministry released a statement Monday night that said "according to preliminary information," 25 of the migrants inside the rig were Mexican.

Four of those who died and 21 of those hospitalized are Mexican, the statement said. Some of the others inside the truck were from Guatemala.

"Even though they have the driver in custody, I can guarantee you there's going to be many more people we're looking for to prosecute," said Thomas Homan, acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Associated Press

(China Daily 07/26/2017 page11)