Migrants experience deadly year crossing Arizona border

But the Guatemalan woman, who lives in Phoenix, knows those scenarios make little sense. The 13-year-old boy, Nelson Omar Chilel Lopez, would have called if he made it to safety. The coyotes would have demanded ransom if they were holding him. Lopez buries her face in her hands and weeps at the thought of a child she calls Omar becoming a statistic - one of a nearly record 236 corpses recovered so far this fiscal year along the Arizona-Sonora border. Coalición de Derechos Humanos (the Human Rights Coalition), which gathers data on border-crossing fatalities in Arizona, says the body count for fiscal 2010, which ends Sept. 30, is second-highest on record. Fiscal 2005 set the record, with 282 bodies recovered. We've passed the number of remains recovered last year," said Kat Rodriguez, coordinator for the non-profit organization, "and we still have a month to go. . . . This has been a horrid summer." The advocacy group gets data from medical examiners in Pima, Pinal, Cochise and Yuma counties, as well as other sources. Other immigrant-advocacy groups say fatalities appear to be increasing even as the number of illegal border crossers arrested has plummeted over the past five years. Using a formula based on the number of fatalities and arrests, No More Deaths, a non-profit organization that provides humanitarian aid to border crossers, describes the past year as the "most lethal" ever, up 30-fold since 1999...more