The father and daughter who drowned at the border dove into the river in desperation
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“They wanted a better future for their girl,” María Estela Ávalos, Vanessa’s mother, said in an interview.
They traveled more than 1,000 miles seeking it. Once in the United States, they planned to ask for asylum, for refuge from the violence that drives many Central American migrants from their home countries every day. But the farthest the family got was an international bridge in Matamoros, Mexico. On Sunday, they were told the bridge was closed and that they should try to cross it the next day.
The next day, a photo of their bodies among matted reeds, locked in a final embrace, was published by the Mexican newspaper La Jornada and later by the Associated Press, shocking the world in a viscerally clear moment of desperation and reminiscent of a 2015 photograph showing a 3-year-old Syrian boy who lay drowned on a calm Mediterranean shore.
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