Six migrants lose their lives in a traffic accident in Mexico

At least six migrants died and another 10 were seriously injuredall originally from Guatemala, after a traffic accident registered this Tuesday in the municipality of Benjamín Hill, in the state of Sonora, northwestern Mexico. According to the first reports, the accident occurred when the driver of the vehicle where the migrants were traveling, bound for the United States, lost control and crashed with a trailer.

The Attorney General’s Office in the state of Sonora explained that the accident occurred this Tuesday morning on federal highway Mexico 15, in the Hermosillo-Querobabi section, about 170 kilometers from the border with Arizona, United States. “According to the report prepared by agents of the National Guard, who were the first to arrive at the accident site, it is established that the unit was impacted by cutting off traffic to a trailer,” reported the Sonora Prosecutor’s Office.

After the crash, the driver, whose whereabouts are unknown because fled the scene of the accidentHe lost control of the van. Six people died at the scene, five women and one man, who are unknown, and their immigration status is unknown since they did not have official identification, visas or passports. Meanwhile, the injured were taken to nearby hospitals for treatment.

Meanwhile, agents of expert services of the Ministerial Agency for Criminal Investigation went to lift the bodies and carry out the expert opinion to determine the causes of the accident. In Sonora and other states on the Mexico-United States border, road or traffic accidents involving undocumented migrants and agricultural laborers are constant. The constant is that the people who transport them use vehicles in poor mechanical condition and regularly travel overcrowded, without respecting the number of places in the units.

Precisely traveling crowded inside trucks is one of the most dangerous ways that migrants use to clandestinely cross Mexico to the US, something for which they pay traffickers thousands of dollars. Under this modality, a tragic accident was recorded on December 9, when a trailer overturned on the highway from Tuxtla Gutiérrez to Chiapa de Corzo, in the southern state of Chiapas, in which 56 migrants died. More than 160 foreigners were traveling hidden in the vehicle.most of Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador.

Human smugglers seek out routes for foreigners, sometimes stationing themselves in Mexico’s southern and northern states as an intermediate stop on their journey to the United States. The region is experiencing a record flow of migrants to the United States, whose Customs and Border Protection (CBP) office detected more than 1.7 million undocumented immigrants on the border with Mexico in fiscal year 2021, which ended on September 30.