'Death Map' of Deserts Aims to Save Lives of Desperate Mexican Migrants Edward Helmore - The Guardian
go to original June 1, 2013

A tatty blanket hanging over a barbed-wire fence is a tell-tale sign that a group of migrants has recently passed by. It's a mild find: over the past decade, more than 2,000 corpses, often desiccated, with the bones scattered by animals, have been recovered from this area of the Sonoran desert, where daytime temperatures can reach 54C and even the vegetation is painfully hostile.

The true number of deaths may be far higher, says Betzi Younglas, a volunteer with Humane Borders, as she steers her truck loaded with 1,100 litres of water down a rutted track through a forest of huge saguaro cacti. Humane Borders is one of several groups working to reduce the number of migrant deaths. Yet even as the numbers of Mexican – and increasingly Central American – migrants attempting the hazardous crossing appears to have declined, the number who die trying remains troublingly consistent.The crossing to America is simply becoming more dangerous.

According to the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group, the number of deaths is the equivalent of five migrants dying every four days. It's a situation, say humanitarian groups, that began with policies under president Bill Clinton to tighten the US-Mexico border, but exacerbated by inertia in Washington over immigration reform and, at a local level, by new powers to demand immigration papers from anyone suspected of being undocumented.

But nothing, says Younglas, has caused as much danger as the hundreds of kilometres of border walls that have forced migrants further into the desert, away from historical travel routes that have natural access to water.

Read the rest at The Guardian

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