Enrique Morones from Border Angeles gave a speech to the Camp. He rattled off his speech moving back and forth between Spanish and English, recounting the stories of some 10,000 deaths along the border since 1994. He told the story of Jesus, a boy of fourteen years of age who held his mother in his arms as his mother died, how his grandfather made the journey to the United States in search of her body to bring her back to Mexico. In this journey, over a small piece of the desert he stumbled across three other disintegrating corpses. A few other stories, and praise to all the people at the camp for their courage.
A 12 car caravan of people took the journey to make homage.
While frantically attempting to place one tiny flower on as many graves as possible, I looked up and saw one young man knelled in front of a gravesite, in the middle of the some 500 grave-site, marked "john doe" and "jane doe" along with date of death. This fellow was shedding crocodile tears. Later I looked up, he had succumbed to his emotions and lay embracing this one grave. His girlfriend sat next to him, offering solace with her hand on his shoulder.
Everyone else was busy with flowers, erecting crosses, and cleaning off the mud that had accumulated on the headstones. Ending with a prayer.
Apparently this graveyard has become very precarious, as the bodies are buried without caskets the earth has been caving in with the decomposition of the bodies. This huge are had recently been flooded so that they could rearrange the dirt. Enrique Morones speculates that the people are buried by prisoners in the night.
These type of graveyards are scattered throughout the US-border states, another border-crosser graveyard is located in the nearby city of El Centro.
PHOTOS:
1- Enrique Morones make a speech to NO BORDERS CAMP.
2- Sign explaining the 4,000 flags draped around the CAMP.
3- Flags
4/5- Tool laying ready for the next burial / graveyard
6- Two people enjoying the CAMP that day.
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As Enrique Morones (Border Angeles, he's been placing water in strategic places along to border to save lives for the last twenty years) stated during the ceremony, "These people here, they are the people that are not responsible for any of the problems facing us today -- they are the true people, real people, the salt of the earth."
Due to Enrique continually bringing people to make homage to these fallen souls, most of the graves now have a small cross on them.
Since i was there last, the graveyard has become very unstable as they bury the people without caskets. They had just flooded this huge field to be able to move the dirt around to cover the collapsing graves. Everything was wet, many of the tiny headstones are now covered with mud.
Link to prayer in spanish and english: