Thread: ILLEGALS DYING ENROUTE

Find a name.
Place a call.

Break a heart.

In the unforgiving barrens around southern Arizona, 184 migrants have died this year. One man's job: Identify the dead and tell the families.

By Stephen Franklin | Tribune staff reporter
September 23, 2007

TUCSON, Ariz. - The funnel of death that awaits migrants crossing Arizona's treacherous border with Mexico usually ends at a sleek, modern county office here, and the grim task of identifying the dead often falls to Jeronimo Garcia Ceballos.

On a recent day, Ceballos placed an all-too-familiar call to a family in Mexico about a relative who died trying to cross the desert frontier. But the family refused to believe it was their son, even though Ceballos had confirmed the identity with ID cards and medical tests.

Someone else had called them to say their son was alive somewhere in the U.S. and then hung up. Most likely, it was a smuggler who wanted more money or who didn't want the family to report him to the Mexican police, Ceballos said. It happens all the time.

He could not get that call out of his mind. It unsettled him.

All the calls to families and all the bodies he has seen in three years with the Mexican Consulate's protection services division here have begun to take a toll. But he had to move on because his work is piling up; the number of immigrants dying in the Sonoran Desert this year is the highest ever.

So far this year, the bodies of 184 migrants have been tallied by the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office, which also serves other Arizona counties along the Mexican border. That number is up from 152 last year.

Such figures are no surprise in Arizona, where the 350-mile stretch has become a crossing point of last resort as the government has cracked down on illegal crossers while immigration reform has stalled in the U.S. Congress.

In the mid-1990s, U.S. immigration officials thought they would not have to worry about the Arizona desert, assuming that smugglers would never risk crossing its scorched mountains and steep, rocky valleys.

But the smugglers preferred to take their risks with the less protected desert, and migrants' deaths have spiked like nowhere else. Indeed, while deaths overall have dropped this year across the vast southern frontier, the numbers are up in Arizona, according to the U.S. Border Patrol.

From 1995 to 2005, the number of migrant deaths doubled across the southwest border, and three-fourths of the increase took place along Arizona's southern rim, according to a study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

More migrants are dying here because smugglers, trying to avoid the expanded presence of the Border Patrol and National Guard, are leading them through more remote and dangerous areas.

That is what the map on the wall of Ceballos' office in the Mexican Consulate shows. It marks where the bodies have been found this year; many more of them, said Ceballos, were discovered in isolated, treacherous country.

Rev. Robin Hoover has reached the same conclusion. He is the head of Humane Borders, an immigrant advocacy group in Tucson, which has calculated, using death records, maps and measurements, that immigrants are dying farther than before from the roads where authorities patrol.

"The average deaths this year are where there were never deaths before," he said.

Scorching summer

Also, the summer was brutally hot and dry, a summer like 2005 when deaths also shot up, said Border Patrol spokesman Jesus Rodriguez. And smugglers have compounded the dangers, he added, by increasingly making migrants take doses of aspirin and ephedrine, a stimulant, along with energy drinks as they dash across the desert.

The smugglers want to keep them walking. But "they are dehydrating them much faster," Rodriguez said.

There's also been a change among those dying.

There have been more women, and most were coming north to be with husbands, who find it difficult to return home, said Melissa McCormick, a researcher at the University of Arizona's Binational Migration Institute.

Many more crossers are from poor rural communities in southern Mexico. And many of them are indigenous Mexicans who barely speak Spanish, and who until recently did not leave their traditional Mayan or other native areas. As their numbers have grown, there has been a decline in migrants from northern and central Mexico, Ceballos said.

But these people "are more vulnerable," McCormick said. "They don't have the same networks and experiences as the others."

Ceballos' three years of working with migrant deaths for the Mexican Consulate have made the 31-year-old an expert in these grisly details.

Local authorities as well as officials from other Latin American countries do the same work. But he shoulders the bulk of it because at least 90 percent of the dead are from Mexico.

"We identify about 70 percent of the unknown crossers, and we wouldn't be anywhere close to 70 percent without him," said Dr. Bruce Anderson of the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office.

Identifying them is not easy. Sometimes there are only bones and scraps of clothes. The search can take months, years. That is why the Medical Examiner's Office has several dozen unnamed cases on hand, and why it built a small extension last year to store the swelling number of remains.

Not what he dreamed

This is not what Ceballos dreamed of when he joined the Mexican foreign service several years ago. Indeed, before he began visiting the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office, he remembers feeling sick at the sight of blood.

But now he visits the morgue several times a week, prepared to do whatever he can to identify a body. He takes pictures. He examines victims' clothes, their IDs and whatever else was found with them. He has learned that migrants, fearful of dying in the desert or being killed by criminals, scribble important telephone numbers and addresses on their shirt sleeves or inside their boots, or they leave notes inside their food.

Some also write notes about their final moments.

"Today I am thinking about all that I have lost and why you are not close to me. The mountains are difficult to cross," a man wrote to his wife just before he died in October last year. Ceballos found the note in the man's jeans.

No clue is overlooked. He knows that migrants from the southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas often wear boots made in Guatemala, that men from Jalisco wear a certain kind of belt buckle and that the dental work differs in southern Mexico.

Because he noticed bright orange inserts in a migrant's boots last year, he was able months later to help a sister identify her brother.

He keeps notes on the calls from families about relatives who were last heard from before they set out across the Arizona desert. He gets at least six of these a day.

Above his desk in the cramped office where he works is a bulletin board with the cases that he is closest to solving. On another is the map of where the migrants have died -- blue markers for men, yellow for women. He studies it for the smugglers' patterns. He memorizes it. He lives it.

Reeling from all he has witnessed, Ceballos, a soft-spoken, easygoing man, the type who would seem quite content with a less emotional desk job, tries each day to forget what he had seen and heard.

He figured that would be the only way he could do his job. He couldn't see a movie without flinching at the image of bodies.

Bearing the worst

Yet that's no easy task for Ceballos, because he has almost perfect recall of cases and of telephone calls -- like the one he made not long ago to a young man in Pennsylvania. It was to tell him that his mother and a sister had died in the desert. They had planned to surprise the man on his birthday, traveling from their hometown in Mexico via the Arizona desert.

The man didn't believe Ceballos and insisted that his relatives were home safe in Mexico. Ceballos was able to convince him only by letting him talk to a sister who had survived the desert ordeal.

He remembers as well the day in July 2005 when he sat alone in his car outside the morgue after learning that 27 bodies had been found. It had been a brutally hot week, a killer for the migrants. "I just started shaking and crying," he recalled.

He made another decision this year.

No matter how heartbreaking it is for survivors to hear the bad news, he decided it is important that they know. He made that decision after so many calls where people wept or yelled at him.

"I know my calls are not good news, but it is good news for me because I think it is better for people to know what happened," he concluded, though he didn't sound convinced.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/ ... 4104.story


"Many more crossers are from poor rural communities in southern Mexico. And many of them are indigenous Mexicans who barely speak Spanish,"

We're getting mexicans who can't even speak spanish????????

What an indictment of the country of Mexico! Where are all these people with the organizational skills to rally 100,000 people to the streets of the U.S.? Go home and organize the Mexican people to overthrow the corrupt government. That is a sure way to gain the support of Americans.