US Border Patrol agents managed to rescue various illegal immigrants last weekend who had been abandoned by drug trafficking gangs in Arizona, local media reported.
Tucson authorities reported that among the people rescues is a 41-year-old Guatemalan national who had been thrown in a well in the Topowa area, when he refused to sell drugs for the gang, according to Tucson's NBC affiliate, KVOA.
The undocumented man narrated that last Sunday two smugglers forced him to go down the well's pipe, after he refused to transport an envelope with drugs in the border crossing, close to Sells.
On Monday, almost 24 hours after being abandoned in the well, the Guatemalan man's shouts for help were heard by Border Patrol agents patrolling the area, who immediately provided assistance to the man.
After being free, the undocumented man was taken to a hospital for a medical revision which revealed that he did not have any serious injuries.
According to Tucson News Now, this is not the first case of immigrants being abandoned by immigrant smugglers in the dangerous Arizona desert area.
That same Sunday, March 22, agents of the Border Patrol, Search, Trauma and Rescue (BORSTAR) managed to rescue a mother and two children close to Covered Wells.
The woman said that she and her two children had been abandoned in the desert three days before by a smuggler that had promised to get them into the United States.
The woman, whose nationality was not revealed, managed to make a call to 911 emergency services, and rescue teams deployed a land and air operation to find them.
Finally, the two minors and their mother were taken to a hospital in Tucson, where they received treatment for their high levels of dehydration.
Every year, hundreds of immigrants are abandoned by smugglers and traffickers in isolated areas of the Arizona desert, where the high temperatures make this route fatal for the people that decide to illegally enter the United States.
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