By Steve Gorman
July 8 (Reuters) - Two more Guatemalan nationals pleaded guilty in Texas on Wednesday to human smuggling charges stemming from the December 2021 crash of a tractor-trailer truck in Mexico that killed 55 of the 160-plus migrants crammed inside the vehicle.
Jorge Agapito Ventura, 34, who was arrested in Texas in December 2024, and Oswaldo Manuel Zavala Quino, 26, one of five co-defendants extradited to the United States the following year to face charges in the case, each faces a maximum
penalty of life in prison.
Sentencing was set for October 6, according to a statement released by the U.S. Justice Department.
As part of their guilty pleas, both admitted in federal court in Texas that they conspired to smuggle adults and unaccompanied children from Guatemala through Mexico into the United States.
The charges stem from one such operation in which an estimated 166 migrants were packed into a tractor-trailer rig that overturned and slammed into a bridge abutment near the city of Tuxtla Gutierrez in Chiappas, Mexico, on December 9, 2021.
Fifty-five of the migrants died in the accident, including a 16-year-old girl, and dozens of others were injured. Survivors said they had been squeezed into the trailer compartment so tightly that most of the migrants could only stand.
Video footage of the aftermath showed bodies scattered across the scene of the crash, which federal authorities have described as one of the deadliest human smuggling tragedies in recent memory.
Mexican officials at the time said nearly all of the victims were Guatemalan. Chiapas authorities said three people from the Dominican Republic, a Honduran, a Mexican and an Ecuadorean were among the injured.
Three of the four other Guatemalan nationals extradited to the United States in the case have pleaded guilty to similar charges -- one in April and two last month. Charges against the sixth defendant are still pending.
"These defendants worked together to exploit vulnerable people by breaking the immigration laws of this country, with deadly consequences that followed," Assistant U.S. Attorney General A. Tysen Duva said in a statement.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los AngelesEditing by Shri Navaratnam)
