GUATEMALA CITY –
A friend’s simple advice to stay close to the door may have saved Yenifer Yulisa Cardona Tomás from the deadly fate of 53 other migrants when they were left trapped in a suffocating semitrailer last week outside San Antonio.
Speaking by phone from her hospital bed Monday, the 20-year-old from the Guatemalan capital said it was already hot on June 27 when she left the warehouse on the Texas side of the border with Mexico where she had been waiting and climbed into the back of the trailer.
She said the smugglers confiscated her cellphones and covered the floor of the trailer with what she believes was powdered chicken broth, apparently to get rid of the dogs at the checkpoints. As she sat crammed into the stifling trailer with dozens of others, the dust from her stung her skin.
Remembering her friend’s warning to stay near the door where it would be cooler, Cardona Tomás shared the advice with another friend that she had made during the trip.
“I told a friend that we shouldn’t go to the back and we should stay near (the entrance), in the same place without moving,” said Cardona Tomás, who is being treated at Metropolitan Methodist Hospital in San Antonio. That friend also survived.
As the truck moved on, making additional stops to pick up more migrants, people began to gather near the gate like Cardona Tomás. He had no way of measuring time.
“People were screaming, some were crying. Most of the women would ask her to stop and open the doors because it was hot, they couldn’t breathe,” she said, still struggling a bit to speak after being intubated at the hospital.
She said the driver or someone else in the taxi yelled at her that “we were about to arrive, there were 20 minutes left, six minutes.”
“People were asking for water, some had run out, others had a little,” he said.
The truck continued to stop from time to time, but just before he passed out it was moving slowly. She woke up in the hospital.
The driver and three others were arrested and charged by US prosecutors.
The Guatemalan Foreign Ministry has said that 20 Guatemalans were killed in the incident, 16 of whom have been positively identified. Foreign Minister Mario Búcaro said he expected the first bodies to be repatriated this week.
Cardona Tomás said the truck’s destination that day was Houston, although it was ultimately headed for North Carolina.
“She didn’t have a job and she asked me if I supported her” in migrating to the US, her father, Mynor Cordóna, said Monday in Guatemala City, where the family lives. He said that she knew of other cases of children who just left without telling her families and she ended up disappearing or dying, so he decided to back her up.
She paid a smuggler $4,000 — less than half the total cost — to take her to the U.S. She left Guatemala on May 30, traveling by car, bus and finally the semi in Texas.
“I didn’t know she was going to be traveling in a trailer,” he said. “She told us that she would be on foot. It seems that at the last moment the smugglers decided to put her in the trailer, along with two other friends, who survived. One of them is still in critical condition.
Cordóna had kept in touch with her daughter until the morning of June 27. The last message she sent him that Monday was at 10:28 am in Guatemala, or 11:28 am in Texas. “We’re leaving in an hour,” she wrote.
It wasn’t until late that night that Cardona Tomás’ family found out about the abandoned trailer. Two more days passed before relatives in the United States confirmed that she was alive and hospitalized.
“We cried a lot,” Cordóna said. “I was even thinking about where we were going to hold the wake and bury her. She is a miracle.