San Antonio residents reel from latest smuggling tragedy

Tony Bokanian got a call last Monday from a neighbour who told him police were massed near his used auto parts business on the south-western edge of San Antonio in southern Texas.

- Dylan Baddour

Bokanian went out to look. That was when he saw the bodies - dozens of lifeless men, women and children heaped behind a lorry on an obscure backroad while swarms of emergency vehicles arrived. It was the deadliest known human smuggling incident in the US. Police found 50 people from Mexico and Central America dead inside a truck trailer, locked and abandoned in the sweltering summer sun. The death toll has now risen to 53.

Bokanian barely slept that night. "I really felt it when I saw all the bodies on the ground," he told the Guardian. "I'm pretty sure they've been on the road for months. Then they get here and die."

Bokanian, 44, recalled his own journey more than 20 years before, out of Iran through Turkey and Greece to the US with a visa as a protected Christian minority. The phenomenon of migration would always occur, he said, so governments should try to find an approach that avoids such tragedies.

He was among a small crowd of media, mourners and neighbours who gathered around the police tape. One woman, 65-year-old Angelita Olvera, approached with two colourful crosses. A mother of four and immigration activist, she had crafted them of dyed corn husks the night before.