1. Journey to the North
The first migrant death of 2025 in the Patagonia area was Aguida Vásquez Reynoso, a 23-year-old woman, in the foothills of the Santa Rita Mountains. The site is accessed up a wash, grazed by cattle, and peppered with oaks and lots of catsclaw. After passing piles of cow bones bleaching in the sun, the phrase “valley of the shadow of death” seems appropriate for the route to the death site.
For several days before her body was found, Aguida had been calling for help on her cell phone, having been abandoned by a group of four other migrants heading north. She’d said she was near a lake, but more likely she was near one of two cattle tanks in the region, the only open water within a few miles. Border Patrol’s search parties had gotten within a couple hundred yards of where she was found. A ranch manager later reported the nighttime temperatures that week had hovered around 20, so her likely cause of death was hypothermia.
Aguida’s camo-clad body was discovered midday on January 17, about 20 feet off the Arizona Trail, by a mountain biker heading south. He contacted law enforcement via 911, and the body was taken to the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (PCOME) by staff from the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office.
PCOME gathers case data as part of its processing of remains, and the group Humane Borders maintains a publicly available data base and maps, together with online interactive tools that accurately locate the death sites.
On March 4, the death location was memorialized with a simple wooden cross by a group with the decade-long project ‘Where Dreams Die, Donde Muerten Los Sueños.’ The intention of planting crosses at the death locations is simply to witness and remember the deaths, not to make a political statement. There are no demands or criticisms, only human empathy. On any given cross planting trip, the core group may be joined by students, reporters or simply folks who want to experience the process.
As the PCOME’s “data dashboard” reports, roughly 35% of documented migrant deaths in Arizona are unidentified, but Pima County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Gregory Hess explained that for Aguida, “We made the identification via fingerprints but almost everything else was handled through the Guatemalan consulate [in Tucson] in regards to repatriation, conversations with relatives, etc.”
The forces getting migrants’ feet moving north are both pushes and pulls. The sparkling allure of the American Dream is easy to understand. The desires are universal: a secure home, money in the bank, food on the table, education, social mobility, health care, racial acceptance and job opportunities. And sometimes a big part of the lure is to reconnect with family already in Los Estados Unidos. The PCOME noted Aguida was on her way to her brother Michael in Tennessee.
Aguida’s home was in the scattered villages of the western Guatemalan highlands in the mountainous region called El Altiplano. It would be easy to romanticize El Altiplano as a tranquil hilly patchwork of small farms, clusters of houses, canyons with streams and lakes.
There are three 13,000-foot volcanoes in the area. Almost all roads are dirt. Between some of the houses there are only footpaths. The rugged geography creates long, winding roads prone to washouts and landslides, further isolating villages from each other. The people of Aguida’s home region, the San Marcos district, are 96% Mayan. Other villages in the Altiplano maintain Mayan ceremonies and religious practices, but Aguida’s religion seems strongly rooted in Catholicism.
As indigenous people facing centuries of colonial oppression, Mayans are still discriminated against. In her parents’ generation 200,000 Mayans were victims of a 30-year genocidal civil war ending in 1996. Besides racism, sexism is pervasive. Guatemala has high rates of rape, murder and disappearance for women. Organized crime is a major force in Guatemala, where the main sources of cartel and gang income are trafficking in humans and drugs, both heading north.
2. Journey to the South
The Patagonia end of Aguida’s journey north was not the end of the story. The transport of her body from PCOME to the Tucson airport was arranged by Tucson’s Funeria Azarhes, a funeral home run by Pakistani Azar Dabdoub.
Asked about conditions for the Guatemala part of the transport, a six-hour drive into the mountains, Dabdoub said in an interview with the PRT that that part of the repatriation would “probably be easier than it would have been a year or two ago, when they’d have been paying ‘business tax’ to a cartel somewhere along the way.” This is because of recent shifts in cartel geography. They’re now making more money in the southern Mexico states of Michoacán and Chiapas, he said.
In any country, independent extortionists can prey on families of deceased migrants, as investigated in 2023 by the online magazine El Diario. And in the US, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center now has a category called “bereavement fraud,” which can transcend national borders.
After a flight south to Guatemala City on April 10, social media videos picked up Aguida’s story. A nighttime vehicle cavalcade, led by flashing lights, brought her casket to her hometown. On April 11, it was placed on the lace-draped altar of the village’s Catholic church, near a photo of her, with candles, flowers and a donation jar.
There was no ceremony or music in the video, just the visitation. The camera was right in back of Aguida’s parents, Cirilo Vazquez and Framcisca Reynoso, as they grieved. At one point her mom has a hand on the edge of the casket. Her dad straightens up and turns, so there’s a glimpse of his face from the side. Her mom and the other women in the church are in traditional Mayan dress.
The next video walks through the cemetery with pallbearers bringing the coffin to an above-ground concrete block tomb just being finished by masons, its sides and top tiled with a graceful blue hibiscus pattern. The top slab holds an abundance of candles and flowers. The coffin is slid in by some young men, who then step back to make space for five or so elder Mayan women to place bags and bundles of items to join Aguida in death.
One man says a few short words to the group, but there is no other ceremony or leadership by a pastor. The feeling at the cemetery is both somber and casual. Among the shawls of the women, for instance, one has a fleece with cuddly golden teddy bears, and another wears an American flag around her shoulders. A block mason, mortar already mixed, walls up the opening. A man passes around water bottles and people hang out in silence for a while before drifting away as the sun begins to set.
On May 2, two videos by a TikTok creator named “mramos” featured tearful words from a phone call, presented as Aguida’s last words. After saying she never imagined walking for three days, she said it was “una verdadera pesadilla para mi“—a real nightmare for me. The second of the TikTok videos received over 300,000 views and more than 200 comments. In the following weeks Aguida’s story went viral. Her tale had clearly moved many people.
A final layer of intensity was added to these journeys by further info from the PCOME. At the time of her death, Aguida was approximately 18 weeks pregnant, and the fetus had been a male. We can only speculate if being “embarazada” figured into Aguida’s decision to head north. But it is now clear that two beings made that journey.