A friend’s simple advice to stay close to the door may have saved Yenifer Yulisa Cardona Tomás from the deadly fate that befell 53 other immigrants when they were abandoned trapped in a stormy semi-trailer last week on the edge of San Antonio. Speaking by phone from her hospital bed on Monday, the 20-year-old from the Guatemalan capital said she was already hot on June 27 when she walked out of the warehouse on the Texas side of the Mexican border where she had been waiting and climbed into the back of the trailer. He said the smugglers confiscated their cellphones and covered the floor of the trailer with what he believes was powdered chicken bouillon, apparently to throw off any dogs at checkpoints. As she sat stuffed inside the suffocating trailer with dozens of others, the powder stung her skin. Remembering her friend’s caution to stay near the door where it would be cooler, Cardona Tomás shared the advice with another friend she had made during the trip. “I told a friend that we shouldn’t go back and we should stay close (to the entrance), in the same place without moving,” said Cardona Tomás, who is being treated at Methodist Hospital Metropolitan in San Antonio. And this friend survived. As the truck moved on, making additional stops to pick up more migrants, people began to gather near the door like Cardona Tomás. He had no way of keeping track of the time. “People were shouting, some were crying. “It was mostly women yelling for him to stop and open the doors because it was hot, that they couldn’t breathe,” she said, still struggling to speak after being intubated in hospital. He said the driver or someone else in the taxi shouted that “we were about to arrive, that it was 20 minutes, six minutes.” “People asked for water, some had run out, some carried some,” he said. The truck continued to stop occasionally, but just before she passed out it was moving slowly. He woke up in the hospital. The driver and three others were arrested and charged by US Attorneys. Guatemala’s foreign ministry said 20 Guatemalans died in the incident, 16 of whom have been positively identified. Foreign Minister Mario Bucaro said he hoped the first bodies would be repatriated this week. Cardona Tomás said the truck’s destination that day was Houston, although it was ultimately headed to North Carolina. “She didn’t have a job and she asked me if I would support her” in immigrating to the U.S., her father, Mynor Cordóna, said Monday in Guatemala, where the family lives. She said she knew of other cases of children who just left without telling their families and ended up disappearing or dying, so she decided to support her. She paid US$4,000 for a smuggler – less than half the total cost – to get her to the US. He left Guatemala on May 30, traveling by car, bus and finally by semi-trailer to Texas. “I didn’t know it was going to be traveling in a trailer,” he said. “He told us he would be on foot. It seems that at the last minute 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 stayed in touch with his daughter until the morning of June 27. Her last message to him on Monday was at 10:28am. in Guatemala or at 11:28 A.M. in Texas. “We’ll be going in an hour,” he wrote. It wasn’t until late that night that Cardona Tomás’ family learned about the abandoned trailer. It was another two days before relatives in the United States confirmed that she was alive and in hospital. “We cried so much,” Cordóna said. “I was even thinking about where to wake her and bury her. It’s a miracle.”
