Bloomberg News
@Bloomberg-News·2.8M subscribers·40.1K videos
Drowned Father and Daughter Migrants Mourned at El Salvador Funeral
Posted
July 2, 2019
Views
857
Likes
6
Comments
5
Engagement
July 2, 2019
857
6
5
1.28%
Every word spoken in this episode is indexed. Type any phrase to jump straight to the moment it was said.
Type any word or phrase that may have been spoken. Click a result to seek the player to that exact moment.
Try a name, a topic, or a quoted line
You’re on July 2, 2019. Earlier episodes are to the left, later ones to the right — the row keeps loading as you go. Click any card to open it.
Jul 2, 20191:59Now PlayingThe young father and daughter who drowned in each other’s arms last week in an attempt to swim across the Rio Grande to the United States have been returned to El Salvador for an expected burial at a private ceremony in the capital Monday.
Their bodies entered the Central American country by land Sunday from neighboring Guatemala.
Photographs of Valeria, lying face down in the water with her little arm wrapped around the neck of her father, Oscar Alberto Martínez, broke hearts around the world and underscored the dangers that migrants undertake in trying to reach the U.S.
The father and daughter were swept away by the current in the river between Matamoros, Mexico, and Brownsville, Texas.
Martínez, 25, and his wife, Tania Vanessa Ávalos, 21, had been living with his mother and apparently felt that their salaries working at a pizza parlor and as a restaurant cashier would never be enough to purchase a modest home in their suburb of San Salvador.
That dream to save money for a home led the family to set out for the United States, according to Martínez’s mother, Rosa Ramírez.
The neighborhood they left behind in El Salvador is a humble bedroom community where most people live in low-rise, two-bedroom homes with a combination kitchen-living room-dining room, worth about $10,000-$15,000 each.
Residents say violence and extortion has eased in the neighborhood, but that poverty and ambition still drive many to migrate.
In the Mexican border city of Tijuana, people included a picture of the drowned father and daughter in a memorial erected in the memory of migrants who have died trekking north toward the U.S. The pictures, candles and crosses of the memorial were placed next to the U.S.-erected fence along the border.
A total of 283 migrant deaths were recorded along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border last year. The official death toll so far this year has yet to be released.
Migrant families have been coming over the border in unprecedented numbers in recent months, reaching a peak in May, when 84,000 adults and children traveling together were apprehended. Nearly 500,000 immigrants have been detained at the border since the start of 2019, resulting in dangerous overcrowding in U.S. holding centers.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
TICTOC ON SOCIAL:
Follow TicToc on Twitter
Like TicToc on Facebook
Follow TicToc on Instagram
Watch all of TicToc’s videos
Listen to TicToc’s podcast
Subscribe to our newsletter
TicToc by Bloomberg is global news for the life you lead. We are a 24/7 news network that covers breaking news, politics, technology, business and entertainment stories from around the globe, supported by a network of Bloomberg’s 2,700 journalists across 120 countries.
Sentinel Indexing in Progress
Metadata and chapters are available. Claim extraction for this episode is pending.
All video content is delivered via YouTube embedded players in accordance with the YouTube Terms of Service. Sentinel provides research tools that promote discovery and accountability across political media.
