Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller of San Antonio condemns the trailer tragedy and the crisis faced by the migrants. He blames the system, and the tragedies are part of a bigger and more complex problem said in a July 8 interview with Catholic News Service.
“We need good policies,” those that will serve the common good, he said, “but there are people who like disarray because it benefits them personally, it benefits … their agendas, whether collective or individual. When there’s disarray, no one knows what’s going on and it opens up the field to injustices, to abuses … and there is always a scapegoat.”
In many ways, García-Siller echoes Pope Francis, who has called out the “indiscriminate trafficking of weapons” and those who treat migrants as “pawns on the chessboard of humanity” following tragedies such as mass shootings and the large-scale death of migrants.
In recent days, the archbishop has walked through the rawness of helping a community heal from two major heartbreaks at its doorstep: the killing of 19 defenseless fourth graders in a mass shooting at an elementary school and a group of dehydrated men and women found dead or dying of heat stroke inside a trailer designed to carry cargo, not people.
“Traders of death,” the archbishop called those responsible for the trailer tragedy in a June 30 homily.
“As a ‘First World’ country, we are failing because we have the ability, the possibility” to fix the social ills that cause such carnage and yet there doesn’t seem to be the will for it to happen, he told adding that instead “a culture of death is what’s prevalent.”
“We may walk around wearing masks on the streets, but they can tell who we are because of our color, our culture, a language that we speak (with others),” he said.
Migrants, ordinarily are abandoned and they live without any identity. He added without names, without being acknowledged and that striped us our identity, our history, he said.