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 Editorials | Issues | November 2007 
San Diego Wildfires Rattle Faraway Hamlet in Mexico
 Leslie Berestein - San Diego Union-Tribune
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| | Fire-repressing fog moves into an area charred by the recent 80,000-acre Harris Fire, 01 November 2007 southeast of San Diego, California. A boy who accidentally started one of the devastating wildfires that ravaged California last month after playing with matches will not be prosecuted, officials said Tuesday. (AFP/David McNew) |
Though it is 2,000 miles away, a small community in Mexico is reeling from last month's firestorms in San Diego County, a disaster that has left one of the town's young people dead and three missing. On Sunday, 20-year-old Alejandro Martínez Flores died from his injuries at UCSD Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized since being rescued by firefighters on Oct. 21, the day the Harris fire began.
Martínez was from Mazatlan in the coastal state of Guerrero, a hamlet of roughly 5,000 inhabitants about an hour inland from Acapulco that happens to have the same name as the glitzy resort city.
Relatives and friends said he was one of a group of five young people who boarded the same flight from Acapulco to Tijuana the day before the fires began, with plans to be smuggled into the United States.
He planned to live with an uncle in Anaheim and work so he could send money to his parents and three siblings, his mother said yesterday by phone from Mexico.
“He dreamed about helping us, because we are so poor,” Yolanda Flores Salvador, 41, said tearfully. “His siblings are all studying, and he wanted the best for them. He was the oldest.”
Martínez had quit school to work as a bricklayer, his mother said, but this didn't bring in much. So he got together with four friends planning to make the trip north, three of whom are now missing, including a young married couple and a young woman.
Relatives fear they could be among the two men and two women whose badly burned bodies, still unidentified, were found Oct. 25 in Dulzura.
A family friend said Martínez decided to tag along with Rubén Santos Ramírez, 27, and his wife, Arely Peralta Rivera, 24, when he learned they had plans to leave. The couple had bought plane tickets for Tijuana and planned to go to Orange County, where they had relatives, including Santos' father.
“Alejandro told me that he knew my brother was going to go,” said Luis Alberto Santos, 21, Rubén Santos' brother.
Another young man and woman joined them on the trip. One was Lourdes Eugenio Tadeo, according to a Guerrero state agency that assists migrants and their families. Eugenio, around 20, also knew the couple and had a boyfriend in Orange County, Santos said.
The other was a man whom relatives of the group described as an acquaintance. He is the only member of the group known to have called relatives in Mexico to say he escaped the flames and made it across.
Relatives of the missing individuals said they had not been in touch with him personally, and it's unclear what happened once the group reached Tijuana. However, Santos and other relatives said the group had apparently crossed the border and was either waiting for a smuggler's vehicle, or already in one, when the fire approached and they tried to flee.
The bodies found late last month were in a ravine off state Route 94, a highway smugglers routinely use for picking up people who crossed into the country illegally on foot.
Altogether, seven people who crossed or are thought to have crossed illegally during the firestorm have died. The fires have killed a total of 10 people.
In the town of Mazatlan, the families of the missing are ridden with anxiety, fearing the worst.
“We are devastated over what has happened there with the fires,” said Concepción Peralta Ramírez, 54, Arely Peralta's father. “We know nothing of my daughter and my son-in-law.”
Peralta said he and his wife were trying to see if they could obtain a temporary visa to search for the missing couple in the United States.
“We'd like to be able to stay two or three weeks searching the hospitals,” he said.
Flores, Alejandro's mother, said she had tried to persuade her son not to leave for the United States, telling him it would be a dangerous trip. Now, she is determined not to let her younger children go.
“We've seen what can happen,” she said.
Leslie Berestein: leslie.berestein@uniontrib.com |
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