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Jesus Garcia Serna, 36 years old, he walked to approach the gate that separates Reynosa, Mexico Pharr, in the united States. He was wandering from one side to another, while trying to convince the guards of the border patrol to stop the crossing into u.s. territory. On the other side of the fence, a photograph captured seconds after the time in which García Serna took a knife and cut his neck. The man bent the torso forward and collapsed to the ground. The image of suicide, picked up by drivers at the international bridge, became the last Wednesday in international news and shocked people all over the world.
The paramedics arrived just after five in the afternoon, when Garcia Serna had laying about ten minutes, to few meters of the last remnants of the mexican territory, but outside of u.s. jurisdiction. The distance to cross the long bridge, more than five kilometers long, surrounded by customs and pensions for truckers on the mexican side and from extensive agricultural fields to the banks of the rio Grande in the soil of texas, made it impossible for the injured to survive the transfer to a hospital. “A man of unknown nationality collapsed,” said the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection of the united States (CBP) in a bare-bones release.
After the death of Serna multiplied the questions. It was not by any of the shelters for migrants. And when it reached the forensic service no one claimed her body for the first 24 hours. Neither one knew how and why it came up to a bridge where there are processing requests of asylum: reserved for the traffic of vehicles and no pedestrian access. The only documents he had on him were two driver’s licenses, which allowed it to be identified by name and surname, and prevented your body, will end in a mass grave if no family member recognized him in the morgue. The credentials were issued in Tlalnepantla, more than 900 miles of Reynosa, and do not put your home address.
“In recent months, it has been common to see people from all over the world desperate to receive asylum or move to the other side, but we had never seen anyone do something like that in Reynosa,” says Jesus Rodriguez, a reporter who covered the event, with 22 years of experience in the red note of Reynosa, one of the most violent cities of Mexico. The CBP stopped last year to more of 768,000 migrants who attempted to cross without documents by the border south of the united States, according to official data.
The Municipality of Tlalnepantla performed a police deployment to find out finally that García Serna I did not live there, but in the neighborhood of Calacoaya, in the adjacent municipality of Atizapán. His sister, the first to find out, did not know of the death until Thursday. The neighbors of the deceased, nestled in a hamlet of humble cottages and narrow streets and steep in the periphery of Mexico City, still can’t believe the news coming from the north of the country. “It hurt so much when I heard about it; Jesus was a kind, hardworking, and waved to all the world,” says Victor Heredia, a taxi driver who lives a few houses from the family García Serna.
His well-known feature that drove a trailer for a living and traveled a lot. I lived in a neighborhood where everyone knows each other and where people have small businesses to complete the spending. Married and with three children, sometimes helped in the store of his mother, just round the corner from the home of his parents. They had still seen in Calacoaya at the beginning of this week and after completing the 12 hours of road to Reynosa, don’t spent a lot of time at the border.
As they begin to reach the crowns of flowers to the porch of the home of his parents, the family ask for privacy in the duel. Their family members explained to Televisa a few weeks ago the truck García Serna was a robbery and he lost his main source of income, with debts that were becoming ever more pressing. According to this version, getting to America was an escape from the economic pressures. In the streets of Calacoaya, however, there is no trace of the desperation of a man attempted to end his life if he did not leave the country. Among a dozen neighbors interviewed, none heard him complain, nor learned of their problems.
The body of García Serna was delivered to his sister on Friday at noon. The Prosecutor’s office of Tamaulipas opened a folder of research after his death, but when dealing with a suicide there was no crime to pursue and have not continued the incident, said a spokesman of Security. Nor is there evidence that they perform a survey of the psychological to elucidate the causes behind the death.
That same Friday, a student of 11 years old shot and killed a teacher and himself at a school in Torreon, in the northern part of the country. In the second country with more stigma towards and among persons with psychiatric disorders, according to a study based on data from the World Health Organization, the question is whether Mexico is ready to meet the challenge of the Mental Health of its inhabitants, and if the mexicans are prepared to ask for help. In the last three decades, suicides have quadrupled in the country, despite the fact that the population has multiplied 1.5 times. In 1988 there were 1.327, according to official data. In 1998 were 2.414. In 2008 there were 4.681. In 2018, the latest figures available, 6.808.
