guatemalan boy left for better life, died alone

[xchrom]

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LT_IMMIGRATION_OVERLOAD_DEAD_CHILD?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-07-02-02-44-53


Cipriana Juarez Diaz, mother of Gilberto Francisco Ramos Juarez, a Guatemalan boy whose decomposed body was found in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, listens to her husband talk, during an interview at their home in San Jose Las Flores, in the northern Cuchumatanes mountains of Guatemala, Tuesday, July 1, 2014. Juarez Diaz said that she begged her son not set out on the dangerous journey from their modest cinder block- and sheet-metal home high in the northern Guatemalan mountains. (AP Photo/Luis Soto)

SAN JOSE LAS FLORES, Guatemala (AP) -- Gilberto Ramos wanted to leave his chilly mountain village for the United States to earn money to treat his mother's epilepsy.

His mother begged him not to go. "The better treatment would have been if he stayed," Cipriana Juarez Diaz said in a tearful interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday. When he wouldn't relent, she draped him with a white rosary for safe passage.

A month later, his decaying body was found in the Texas desert. Now, the boy has become a symbol for the perils faced by a record flood of unaccompanied children from Central America who are crossing illegally into the U.S.

Authorities said Monday that Gilberto was 11, making him one of the youngest known such children to die crossing the desert. He was shirtless, having likely suffered heat stroke, but still wearing the rosary.

[renate]

1. How absolutely heartbreaking. Devastating. There are no words.

I simply cannot imagine. My brain won't let me go there. Eleven years old. My heart is shattered, for him and for his family.

[Duppers]

2. :,(

No words.

U.S. policy makes a farce of Lady Liberty's words.

[Mnemosyne]

3. ...nt

[riverwalker]

4. devastating

yet the "pro-life" contingent blows off these children and their lives. If Gilberto were an embryo or a fetus, they would kill for him. He was 11 years too old for the RW to care.