53 die in horror crash of truck smuggling migrants in Mexico

Injured migrants are cared for on the side of the road next to the overturned truck on which they were traveling. Pic/AP

Rescue workers rushing to a highway accident found a horrific scene of death and injury after a freight truck jammed with as many as 200 migrants tipped over and crashed into the base of a steel pedestrian bridge in southern Mexico. The migrants inside the cargo trailer were flipped, tossed and crushed into a pile that mingled the living and the dead.

By late Thursday, the death toll stood at 53, and authorities said at least 54 people had been injured. 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. Volunteer rescuers hauled bodies off the pile by their arms and legs, while some migrants scrambled and limped to extract themselves from the twisted steel sheets of the collapsed container.

One young man, pinned in a heap of unmoving bodies, wriggled to free the lower half of his frame from the weight of the dead piled atop him, his face wrenched into a grimace of life extracting itself from the clutches of death. Nearby, a man blinked his eyes, unable to move as he lay on the shoulder of the road. Next to him was a fellow migrant, stouter and older, whose eyes no longer needed shading - they stared, startled and lifeless, unblinking, into the setting sun.

While the Mexican government is trying to appease the United States by stopping caravans of walking migrants and allowing the reinstatement of the "Remain in Mexico" policy, it hasn't been able to stop the flood of migrants stuffed hundreds at a time into freight trucks operated by smugglers who charge thousands of dollars to take them to the U.S. border - trips that all too often lead them only to their deaths.

Rescue workers who first arrived said that even more migrants had been aboard the truck when it crashed and had fled for fear of being detained by immigration agents. One paramedic said some of those who hurried into surrounding neighborhoods were bloodied or bruised, but still limped away in their desperation to escape.

About 200 migrants may have been packed into the truck, said Guatemala's top human rights official, Jordán Rodas. While shocking, that number is not unusual for migrant smuggling operations in Mexico, and the sheer weight of the load - combined with speed and a nearby curve - may have been enough to throw the truck off balance, authorities said.

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