In a park, in the light of the lamps of their mobile phones which replaced the candles by a pouring rain, several people took turns to speak Tuesday evening to express their pain and their anger.

“It really hurts,” said Andrea Osorio, 48, from Mexico.

“I’ve been here (in San Antonio) for 33 years, without papers, and I’m scared every day,” she said. “I know why we came. We didn’t come to commit crimes, we only came for a better future.”

It was Monday evening that a San Antonio municipal employee heard a call for help near a road where he worked, and opened the back door of a truck abandoned by a scorching temperature.

Inside were dozens of corpses and “conscious” people, suffering from hyperthermia and acute dehydration.

Of the 51 victims, 22 were from Mexico, seven from Guatemala and two from Honduras, according to Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador.

His American counterpart Joe Biden lamented a “tragedy” and called for “fighting the criminal trafficking, weighing several billion dollars, which exploits migrants and costs far too many innocent lives”.

On Tuesday evening, people of all ages, including children, came to the vigil, which was also attended by San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who listened silently without making statements.

– “Terrible” – 

Carlos Eduardo Espina, 23, criticized the migration policy of the United States, the country in which he arrived at the age of five.

“It’s terrible, it’s heartbreaking,” said the activist whose father is Uruguayan and mother Mexican.

“But every day people die drowned in the river (Rio Grande, on the border between Mexico and the United States, editor’s note), every day people die in the desert. Death is the norm in the immigration to the United States,” he said.

The young man wants more humane migration policies and an increase in the number of visas granted each year.

“We must continue to fight, otherwise it will continue,” he claimed, accusing the governments of the countries of origin of the migrants of not giving importance to the well-being of their nationals.

Guillermina Barrón, 38, listened in silence.

“Unfortunately, I identify a lot with what is happening because I am Mexican, even though I emigrated 20 years ago,” she said, her eyes watering with tears.

“I feel a lot of pain and helplessness. We have to change a lot of things, because the lives lost are many,” she regretted.