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 Editorials | Issues | April 2007 
Death in the Desert; a Mexican Migrant’s End
 Kate Thompson - Reuters
Altar Valley, Arizona - Veronico Esparza Campos set out for his new life dressed as if for a country dance: a light fleece jacket, a cotton shirt tucked into jeans and held in place by a tooled leather belt with a large buckle.
He made it almost 40 miles (65 km) north from the rusted border fence with Mexico, on foot across a scrub- and cactus-studded trail through the Sonora Desert that is searing hot by day and close to freezing at night.
It was the cold that probably claimed him under the branches of the salt cedar tree where he slumped down to die, his eyes wide open and a wooden staff at his side.
A group of volunteers from the Minuteman Civil Defence Corps, who spot for intruders crossing the porous U.S. border, found him a few yards (metres) from a lookout post they had set up in the Altar Valley, on the first day of a month-long stakeout.
I arrived as a cortege of four Border Patrol and sheriff’s department trucks came to collect his body in the gathering twilight.
The deputies had wrapped him carefully in a camouflaged tarpaulin and drove in solemn procession toward the twinkling city lights of Tucson far in the distance.
A birth certificate and voter registration card found in the man’s wallet showed the illegal migrant was from Pinos municipality in Zacatecas, a dirt-poor state in north central Mexico some 700 miles (1,100 km) south of the border.
He was 41 years old.
The human side
I live and work in Arizona and cover immigration in the United States, from border security issues to the wrangling on Capitol Hill over legislation.
I am used to seeing footsore migrants nursing ripped blisters, glassy-eyed with exhaustion after attempting to cross the desert, but this was my first death.
For Minuteman volunteer Andy Prior the discovery brought only deep sadness. The rights and wrongs of the immigration debate were reduced to the simple story of a humble man who died in search of a better life.
“Poor guy. He was alone. There was no sign of anything he had for survival. He had no water or backpack,” Prior, a 70-year-old retired fire protection engineer from Wellton, Arizona, said as we chatted at a ranch where the Minutemen had camped out.
“If we had been there, perhaps we could have saved his life. There’s a real humanitarian aspect to this, and it cannot be lost.”
The man was the 35th border crosser to die this year in the tri-county area south of Tucson, a superhighway for tens of thousands of migrants.
More than one million are apprehended each year as they cross north over the deserts and rivers of the border with Mexico in the hope of joining some 10-12 million illegal immigrants already in the United States.
A hot summer ahead
Esparza Campos died on the cusp between the bone-chilling cold of a high plains winter and the searing heat of the summer when the mercury breaks 120 F (49 C).
By the time his corpse was discovered towards evening on March 31, he had been dead for a day or two, said Dr. David Winston, the pathologist who performed the autopsy at the Pima County Forensic Science Center.
“The cause of death could be temperature, cold as opposed to heat,” Winston said. “You get too cold, your body can’t function, you just drift off,” he added.
The Mexican authorities tracked down the man’s relatives this week to break the news. His remains were flown home on Wednesday.
I sat down with consulate press attache Alejandro Ramos in his office, in an old adobe house in central Tucson that seemed filled with warmth after the morgue.
“Of course it is very sad, but it is only really getting started,” Ramos said.
“We are expecting a very hard, hot summer and we must be prepared.” |
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