GHOSTS OF THE RIO GRANDE, THE DEAD OF SOUTH TEXAS

"Since January 2009, the bodies or skeletal remains of 642 migrants have been discovered in Brooks County. They die from the cold in the winter and die from the heat in the summer. They die of dehydration, heat stroke, hypothermia. They die alone. Sometimes they die together, like the five migrants whose bodies were found under a tree during a freeze one winter. Eight bodies have been found so far this year. Fifty were recovered in 2018 by the sheriff’s office, down from 52 in 2017 and 61 in 2016." New York Times April 2019

By Brendan Borrell 

The American Prospect

The path across the border is littered with bodies. Bodies old and bodies young. Bodies known and bodies unknown. 

Bodies hidden, bodies buried, bodies lost, and bodies found. 

he stories of the dead haunt the frontier towns from Nuevo Laredo to Nogales, and even deep within the interior of Mexico down to Honduras, someone always knows someone who has vanished-one of los desaparecidos-during their journey north.

Many of those missing end up in the South Texas soil. Out on the Glass Ranch, a man named Wayne Johnson stumbles upon a skull, some bones, and a pair of dentures scattered near a dry pond. During a bass fishing tournament at La Amistad Lake, anglers come upon a decomposing corpse near the water's edge. 

Late one summer night, a train rumbles down the Union Pacific Line, but it fails to rouse a father and son slumbering on the tracks. As far back as 2012, Brooks County, with a population of just 7,223, reported 129 deaths from immigrants trying to evade the Border Patrol checkpoint in Falfurrias, double the previous year. 

The county judge told the San Antonio Express-News that Brooks had run out of space for John Does in its Sacred Heart Cemetery.

The dead appear in springtime, when temperatures hit the triple digits, their fading T-shirts and tennis shoes strewn about the land like wilted wildflowers. Whether they tried to cross for money, love, or security, they did so knowing they might not make it alive. Their families keep hoping and hunting for answers-if they can. 

Last May, 22-year-old Aldo collapsed on a South Texas ranch and made one last, desperate cell-phone call to his older brother Alejandro in Houston. But Alejandro can't drive there to conduct a search because he, too, is here illegally. "More than anything, I would like to know what happened to my brother," he says, "because if I could retrieve some part of his body to bring down to Mexico, we could give him a proper burial."

Compared to Arizona, which identifies most of its unknown remains, Texas lets the corpses pile up. Autopsies are rarely conducted, DNA samples are not taken, and bodies are buried in poorly marked graves.

 Shortly after medical examiner Corinne Stern started working in Laredo, she found a 12-year-old skull from an unknown Hispanic man sitting on a shelf in the evidence room of the sheriff's office. It was devoid of any information about where it came from or how it ended up there. 

Mercedes Doretti of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which is working to identify the remains of missing migrants, calls the region from Houston to San Antonio and south to McAllen the "Bermuda Triangle" for bodies.

South Texas is a huge swath of ranch and farmland larger than New York state and with the population of New Mexico-about two million-most of it concentrated on the border. Urban centers have sprouted up around the international crossing points at Del Rio, Eagle Pass, Laredo, McAllen, and Brownsville, where residents are twice as likely to speak Spanish than English. 

Outside of these areas, the vast, vacant properties date back to Spanish land grants and have passed from their original owners to wealthy white families from Dallas or Houston, giving them a chance to play John Wayne for a weekend or shoot white-tail bucks sporting 18-point antlers. 

Development once amounted to hunting blinds poking out above the monotonous scrub, but the natural-gas boom has brought in trains of tractor-trailers, oil-field equipment, and scores of temporary houses with air-conditioners roaring full blast. 

About half of the nation's migrant deaths occur out here in the zone between the frontier towns and the U.S. Border Patrol's immigration checkpoints situated up to some 60 miles away. It's about a three-day hike through the hot, thorny scrub to evade the checkpoints.

Although Texas law has mandated the collection of DNA from unidentified remains for the past decade and a federal grant pays for gene sequencing for any body found on U.S. soil, these programs have provided little relief for families of the missing. 

Just one of 28 South Texas counties has a full-fledged medical examiner's office, and that office is only a few years old. Justices of the peace, or JPs, who are elected to two-year terms, are often the highest--ranking legal officials.

They may issue search and arrest warrants, decide small legal matters, and act as the coroner even if they only have a passing familiarity with law or medicine. Many JPs are first- or second-generation immigrants themselves, but they are still loath to pay $2,000 out of the county budget for an autopsy of a presumed migrant who died with no signs of foul play. 

Many don't even take a genetic sample, which only costs a few hundred dollars. Some JPs may be unaware of the law; others ignore it.

And dead keep popping up in the killing brush...