Police in Guatemala have freed 126 people trapped inside a locked shipping container that was abandoned at the side of a road.
They were found between the towns of Nueva Concepción and Cocales after people living nearby heard knocks and cries for help.
A police spokesperson said: “We heard cries and knocks coming from inside the container. We opened the doors and found inside 126 undocumented people.”
It is thought they were migrants who had paid smugglers to take them to the United States via Mexico.
They were mostly from the island of Haiti. Some were from Nepal and Ghana.
A spokeswoman for Guatemala’s migration authority, Alejandra Mena, said the migrants had arrived in Central America in Honduras, before heading north to the US.
The migrants were given medical help and will be taken back to the southern border with Honduras.
It comes days after authorities in neighboring country Mexico found 652 Central American migrants, many of who were children, in six trailers near its border with the United States.
The lorries were stopped at a military checkpoint on Thursday night on a highway between Ciudad Victoria and Monterrey in the northern state of Tamaulipas.
564 of the migrants were Guatemalans. There were also people from Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Belize.
More than half of those found in the lorries were children, nearly 200 of them were not accompanied by an adult.
The trailers were padlocked and authorities had to move them to state police facilities to cut them open.
Authorities said on Friday that four people were arrested.
Tamaulipas’ health department said nine of the migrants tested positive for Covid-19.
The lorries appeared to have been driven from the central state of Puebla and it is thought the destination was Monterrey, a transportation hub for reaching various points on the US-Mexico border.
Tamaulipas, the closest border state for Central Americans, is a popular route for migrant smuggling. (https://www.itv.com/news/2021-10-10/guatemalan-police-free-126-migrants-from-abandoned-shipping-container)
