Category World News

The man and his 23-month-old daughter lay face down in shallow water along the bank of the Rio Grande, his black shirt hiked up to his chest with the girl tucked inside. Her arm was draped around his neck suggesting she clung to him in her final moments.

The searing photograph of the sad discovery of their bodies on Monday, captured by journalist Julia Le Duc and published by Mexican newspaper La Jornada, highlights the perils faced by mostly Central American migrants fleeing violence and poverty and hoping for asylum in the United States.

According to Le Duc’s reporting for La Jornada, Oscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, frustrated because the family from El Salvador was unable to present themselves to US authorities and request asylum, swam across the river on Sunday with his daughter, Valeria.

I begged them not to go, but he wanted to scrape together money to build a home

He set her on the US bank of the river and started back for his wife, Tania Vanessa Ávalos, but seeing him move away the girl threw herself into the waters. Martínez returned and was able to grab Valeria, but the current swept them both away.

The account was based on remarks by Ávalos to police at the scene – “amid tears” and “screams” – Le Duc told The Associated Press.

Details of the incident were confirmed on Tuesday by a Tamaulipas government official who was not authorised to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, and by Martínez’s mother back in El Salvador, Rosa Ramírez, who spoke with her daughter-in-law by phone afterward.

Deadly border crossing

“When the girl jumped in is when he tried to reach her, but when he tried to grab the girl, he went in further … and he couldn’t get out,” Ramírez told AP. “He put her in his shirt, and I imagine he told himself, ‘I’ve come this far’ and decided to go with her.”

From the scorching Sonoran Desert to the fast-moving Rio Grande, the 3,200km US-Mexico border has long been an at times deadly crossing between ports of entry. A total of 283 migrant deaths were recorded last year; the toll so far this year has not been released.

In recent weeks alone, two babies, a toddler and a woman were found dead on Sunday, overcome by the sweltering heat; elsewhere three children and an adult from Honduras died in April after their raft capsized on the Rio Grande; and a 6-year-old from India was found dead earlier this month in Arizona, where temperatures routinely soar well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

The search for Martínez and his daughter was suspended on Sunday due to darkness, and their bodies were discovered the next morning near Matamoros, Mexico, across from Brownsville, Texas, several hundred metres from where they had tried to cross and just a kilometer from an international bridge.

Tamaulipas immigration and civil defence officials have toured shelters beginning weeks ago to warn against attempting to cross the river, said to be swollen with water released from dams for irrigation. On the surface, the Rio Grande appears placid, but strong currents run beneath.

Ramírez said her son and his family left El Salvador on April 3 and spent about two months at a shelter in Tapachula, near Mexico’s border with Guatemala.

“I begged them not to go, but he wanted to scrape together money to build a home,” Ramírez said. “They hoped to be there a few years and save up for the house.”

El Salvador’s foreign ministry said it was working to assist the family including Ávalos, who was at a border migrant shelter following the drownings.

The bodies were expected to be flown to El Salvador on Thursday.

Comparison to Syrian boy

The photo recalls the 2015 image of a three-year-old Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, who drowned in the Mediterranean near Turkey, though it remains to be seen whether it may have the same impact in focusing international attention on migration to the US.

“Very regrettable that this would happen,” Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Tuesday in response to a question about the photograph.

“We have always denounced that as there is more rejection in the United States, there are people who lose their lives in the desert or crossing” the river.

There was no immediate comment from the White House.

US “metering” policy has dramatically reduced the number of migrants who are allowed to request asylum, down from dozens per day previously to sometimes just a handful at some ports of entry.

The Tamaulipas government official said the family arrived in Matamoros early on Sunday and went to the US Consulate to try to get a date to request asylum. The mother is 21 years old and the father was 25, he added.

But waits are long there as elsewhere along the border – last week a shelter director said only about 40 to 45 asylum interviews were being conducted in Matamoros each week, while somewhere in the neighborhood of 800-1,700 names were on a waiting list.

It’s not clear what happened to the family at the US Consulate, but later in the day they made the decision to cross. The Tamaulipas official said the father and daughter set off from a small park that abuts the river.

Civil defence officials arrived at the scene at 7pm on Sunday and later took the wife to the shelter.

“I was drawn to the girl’s arm on her father,” Le Duc said as she described arriving at the scene. “It was something that moved me in the extreme because it reflects that until her last breath, she was joined to him not only by the shirt but also in that embrace in which they passed together into death.”

“It’s a horrifying image,” Maureen Meyer, a specialist on immigration at the Washington Office on Latin America, which advocates for human rights in the region, said of the photograph.

“And I think it speaks so clearly to the real risks of these US programmes that are either returning people back to Mexico seeking asylum or in this case limiting how many people can enter the US every day.”

The United States has also been expanding its programme under which asylum seekers wait in Mexico while their claims are processed in US courts, a wait that could last many months or even years.

This week Nuevo Laredo in Tamaulipas, the same state where Matamoros is located, said it will become the latest city to receive returnees as soon as Friday.

Many migrant shelters are overflowing on the Mexican side, and cartels hold sway over much of Tamaulipas and have been known to kidnap and kill migrants.

Meanwhile, Mexico is stepping up its own crackdown on immigration in response to US pressure, with much of the focus on slowing the flow in the country’s south.

The UK government has said it will not grant any new licenses for weapons exports to Saudi Arabia or its coalition partners fighting in Yemen, after a court ruled last week that such sales were unlawful.

Britain’s Department for International trade issued a formal notice on Tuesday saying it would abide by the ruling made by the court of appeal, but that it will also appeal the judgment.

“While we do this, we will not grant any new licences for exports to Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners (UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain and Egypt) which might be used in the conflict in Yemen,” read a statement from the department. 

“Extant licences – those granted before this judgment – are not immediately affected by the Court Order. Exporters may continue to export under extant licences. But we are required by the Court to reconsider the decisions we made about those licences.”

The court ruled on Thursday that the process by which arms export licenses had been issued was unlawful, in what was heralded as a landmark decision by campaigners.

The decision followed a challenge by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) that accused the UK government of licensing arms sales despite a clear risk their use could breach international humanitarian law.

The UK’s arms sales have significantly bolstered the Saudi-led coalition’s capability to carry out air attacks in Yemen. The final six Typhoon jet fighters of 72 ordered in 2007 were delivered in 2017. The following year, Riyadh signed a memorandum of intent to buy an additional 48 Typhoons from the UK.

Egyptian authorities have arrested at least eight people, including prominent activists who were part of the country’s 2011 uprising, accusing them of a plot to bring down the government.

The arrests drew condemnation by Amnesty International, which described Egypt as “an open-air prison” where no opposition or independent reporting was allowed.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Egyptian Ministry of Interior said Zyad Elelaimy, a former legislator and member of the secular Egyptian Social Democratic Party, was held along with seven other people.

The ministry said those arrested were loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt designated a “terrorist” group in 2013.

It added that the eight suspects were the most prominent figures arrested, but did not specify how many others were arrested.

Authorities said they had also identified and targeted 19 companies and “economic entities” run via “secret methods” by Muslim Brotherhood leaders and the “provocateur elements” loyal to it.

Elelaimy’s party was one of the main protest groups in the 2011 uprising that led to the departure of longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak, but it also opposed the government of Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader who became the country’s first freely elected president in 2012.

Morsi was toppled a year later in a military coup led by then-army chief and current President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and was promptly arrested.

Last week, he collapsed during a court appearance in the capital, Cairo, and shortly afterwards was pronounced dead.

Morsi’s death prompted criticism of el-Sisi’s government, with human rights groups accusing it of mistreating the former president and failing to provide adequate medical care or prisoner rights, charges the Egyptian authorities have denied.

Secular activists

In its statement, the interior ministry accused Elelaimy and other detainees of involvement in a plan financed through leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood abroad “to carry out violent and disorderly acts against state institutions simultaneously with creating a state of revolutionary momentum”.

It accused five individuals outside Egypt, including former presidential candidate Ayman Nour and prominent TV personalities Moataz Matar and Mohamed Nasser of involvement in the alleged plot.

Economist Omar el-Shenety and journalists Hossam Monis and Hisham Fouad were also arrested, it said.

Monis was the campaign manager for opposition leader Hamdeen Sabahi, the candidate who ran against el-Sisi in the 2014 presidential election. El-Sisi won that vote with almost 97 percent.

Abdelaziz el-Husseini, a senior leader in the Karama, or Dignity party, said Elelaimy and Monis took part in meetings with political parties and opposition legislators to discuss possibilities to run in the 2020 parliamentary elections. Their latest meeting was late on Monday in Cairo, he added.

“These public meetings are legitimate. They are members in legitimate parties and absolutely have no ties to the Brotherhood,” he told The Associated Press news agency.

The meetings included the Civil Democratic Movement (CDM), a coalition of liberal and left-leaning parties, which called for their release on Tuesday.

In a statement, the CDM denied Elelaimy and the others arrested had any connections with the Muslim Brotherhood.

One of Elelaimy’s colleagues said he believed the arrest was linked to the coalition’s move to seek more members to prepare for next year’s elections.

“We have nothing to do with the Brotherhood … I am truly astonished and I don’t know why security would be upset that we want to take part in the elections in the framework of the law and constitution,” CDM member Khaled Dawoud told Reuters news agency.

Amnesty criticised the arrests as part of “the Egyptian authorities’ systematic persecution and brutal crackdown on anyone who dares to criticise them.”

The far north and far south of Australia both registered their lowest temperature in more than five years on Tuesday morning, according to Weatherzone.

In Tasmania, Hobart’s -0.2 degrees Celsius shortly before 5am on Tuesday was the city’s lowest temperature since 2013. It was also its third coldest morning in the last 20 years.

In the tropical north, Darwin Airport dipped to 12.7C just before 4:30am on Tuesday, which was their lowest temperature in eight years. Just to the ease of Darwin, Middle Point’s 4.8C was its lowest temperature since at least 2001.

While cold mornings are common in Australia during winter, the chill on Tuesday morning was given a boost by dry air in both Tasmania and the north. Dry air allows much more cooling of the ground because it prevents the formation of mist or dew, both of which act as insulation for the surface.

Darwin Airport’s coldest morning on record is 10.4C during July 1942, while Hobart’s lowest was minus 2.8C, from July 1981 and June 1972.

South Australia has seen temperatures plummet well below zero, severely damaging soft crops. The Bureau of Meteorology said Monday’s low of -5.7C at Renmark, in the state’s Riverland, was the equal-second lowest temperature on record for the town.

Meteorologist Matthew Bass said it was the region’s sixth consecutive day below zero.

“Those sort of temperatures are not what we see very frequently in South Australia … It’s a very significant, severe low temperature.”