In the Footsteps of Migrants Who Never Made It

Thousands have died trying to cross into the US from Mexico. Each year, activists follow their harrowing trek

- MARCELLO DI CINTIO

LATE LAST SPRING, I stood alongside the steel bollard panels of the US-Mexico border wall and thought about the dead.

I'd joined about thirty others who had driven down to the frontier from Tucson, Arizona, early that morning, then crossed into Sasabe, Mexico, on foot. In the shadow of the nine-metre-high barrier, an Indigenous Mayo woman named Maria Padilla smudged our group with burning sage and tobacco. Then she slowly unspooled a string knotted with 160 prayer ties.

Each pinch of tobacco entwined in red cloth represented a set of migrant remains recovered from the Sonoran Desert in the past year, along with a blue tie to represent the sky, a yellow one for the sun, and a white one for the bodies that haven't yet been found.

Later, Padilla would tell me she had difficulty knotting the cloth on some of the tobacco bundles, as if they resisted being tied. This meant the person had struggled in their final moments, Padilla said. Their desert death was particularly hard.

Thousands of bodies have been recovered from the borderlands since the mid-'90s, when the American government launched a series of border policies many observers believe was designed to kill. The strategy gradually erected walls near large border communities like Sasabe, Nogales, and Douglas, where migrants who managed to cross could easily "assimilate with the population," according to a 1994 document prepared by the US Border Patrol. Walling off the urban areas would funnel migrants into "remote, uninhabited expanses of land," the plan said, where they could find themselves in "mortal danger." The risk of death was to provide "prevention through deterrence" and discourage migrants from trying to cross in the first place.