JAD ABUMRAD: Okay, before we start, New York, New York City. If you're listening and you live in New York, you know somebody who lives in New York.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Or New Jersey, you know? Long Island.

JAD: Yeah. Wherever. New York-ish. Know that we have a live show on Wednesday May 16. We are taping a new episode of a series that is shortly to be here from amazing producer Molly Webster. It's all about sex, this particular event—particularly sex ed. Come join Molly and company for a night of stories, debate and nervous laughter.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: You can get tickets at Radiolab.org/sexed. It's gonna be good.

ROBERT: Also, what you're about to hear is gonna be good, but we should warn some of you that there will be descriptions in this coming—upcoming podcast right now that are kind of grim and are about people dying in the desert. So if there's kids in your house or you dont want to listen to that, maybe take a break. But otherwise, here we go.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

BRUCE ANDERSON: So we come back here where you see yet another case from early 2018.

LATIF NASSER: Oh and this—oh, what? What is—what are those hairs? Or what ...

BRUCE ANDERSON: That's dried muscle.

LATIF: Oh, that's muscle.

BRUCE ANDERSON: The closest I can—the closest thing I can say is the muscle dries out so it gets stringy and shredded.

LATIF: Okay, wait wait. Let's—actually, let's just start from the beginning. Okay, so—so we are in what room was this again?

BRUCE ANDERSON: We're in the special procedures room.

LATIF: Okay.

BRUCE ANDERSON: Of the Pima County Office of The Medical Examiner. And what we're looking at here is a case of mostly skeletal remains.

LATIF: So we have a—we have a skull. We have a few—we have some parts of the ...

BRUCE ANDERSON: The spine.

LATIF: ... the spine it looks like, and then just two ...

BRUCE ANDERSON: And all three—all three major bones of the lower limbs. So the two thigh bones, the femurs, and the two tibias and the two fibulae. We know it's a male. He's an adult.

LATIF: Okay.

BRUCE ANDERSON: 20 to 30 to 40-year-old migrant. He came in in late January/early February. And animals found him. Maybe 50 percent of his skeleton is missing. His upper limbs and his pelvis and most of his spine are missing, and his hands and feet are missing. We have evidence too that a vulture was feeding—was feeding on the person.

LATIF: I—I don't know if this is ...

BRUCE ANDERSON: That's a beetle. That's a domestic beetle.

LATIF: That's a beetle?

BRUCE ANDERSON: That's called a hide beetle. They're—they're found globally.

LATIF: Right.

BRUCE ANDERSON: And these hide beetles specialize in eating dried, hard tissue.

LATIF: So he's still—he's still eating?

BRUCE ANDERSON: Yeah, he is.

LATIF: Wow.

BRUCE ANDERSON: He was in the body bag. He and his colony would have been on the body.

LATIF: Wow.

BRUCE ANDERSON: In the body bag. And although we try to get most of them off during our exam, you can see there's lots of little crevices where a single bug could—could be.

LATIF: Wow. Oh, wow that's so—yeah, wow.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And today we present the final episode of our Border Trilogy.

JAD: With producers Latif Nasser and Tracie Hunte. And this is episode three.

ROBERT: Which we're calling, "What Remains."

LATIF: Yeah, okay. So just to catch everyone up ...

JAD: Here's Latif.

LATIF: The person I was just talking to, his name is Bruce Anderson. He's a forensic anthropologist at the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner in Arizona, which is where when they find a body of an unidentified migrant in the Sonoran Desert, that's where they bring them. And Bruce had been working there, you know, on and off since the 1980s, but he told me that it was only in the early 2000s that he started seeing, you know, just more and more and more of these migrant bodies being brought in.

BRUCE ANDERSON: And we're just crushed by the weight of all the dead and all the missing person's reports. And, you know, it's like working a mass disaster when people are still dying and planes are still crashing around you. And you throw your hands up in the air sometimes and you just think, "When's it gonna stop?"

LATIF: And it hasn't stopped. The number of bodies found last year was in the same range as the year before. The number of people crossing did go down after Donald Trump's inauguration, but traffic has basically rebounded. So people are still coming through the desert. They're not being deterred, which made us wonder is deterrence, that fundamental idea behind our current border policy, is it even possible? Now in some ways that's a policy question, which we talked about in our last episode, but it's also a human question.

MATT KIELTY: Is Jason still there?

JASON DE LEÓN: I'm still here.

LATIF: And that's what led us back to the person who we started this whole journey with, the anthropologist Jason De León.

MATT: All right, can you hear Latif too?

JASON DE LEÓN: I sure can. Good morning.

LATIF: Oh, good morning!

JASON DE LEÓN: Fantastic.

LATIF: Well, I feel like maybe we should just start off where we left off, which is that you were gonna tell us the story of—of Maricela.

JASON DE LEÓN: Sure, um ...

JAD: When was this, by the way?

JASON DE LEÓN: This would have been June of 2012.

JAD: Okay.

JASON DE LEÓN: So we had been about two weeks into the pig experiment, and ...

LATIF: This is a series of experiments where Jason and his team—mostly students—looked at how pigs decomposed in the desert in order to understand how people decompose in the desert.

JASON DE LEÓN: And it wasn't until about two weeks into this experiment where we were out hiking one day with a group of about nine people.

LATIF: Down in southern Arizona.

JASON DE LEÓN: And so on this particular day, on this trail that I had hiked many, many times, a student had run ahead to—to check stuff out and was taking pictures of us as we were walking up this hill. He turns around and starts yelling at us. He says, "Hey, you gotta come up here. Something has happened." So I threw my backpack down, and I race up this hill. And by the time I get up there, I see that he's kind of staring at this body that's just laying face down in the—in the dirt on this—on this trail.

LATIF: Like a fully intact body.

JASON DE LEÓN: Yeah.

LATIF: A woman's body.

JASON DE LEÓN: You could tell it was a woman because she had long hair. You know, she's wearing camouflage clothes, stretch pants, women's running shoes on, she's got a scrunchie around her wrist. But the rest of it, I mean, her body was incredibly bloated. I mean, to the point where it looked like it was about to—to pop from all of the gasses that had built up inside of her body cavity. I didn't know what to do at this point. I mean, you know, the students start walking up. I mean, these are young students. We had someone in the group who was 18, 19.

LATIF: For some of the students, this is the first time they've seen a dead body. One of them was crying.

JASON DE LEÓN: I tell everyone, I say, "Hey, look. You gotta go sit down and give me a second here to figure out what—what it is we're gonna do here."

LATIF: So first he called the police.

JASON DE LEÓN: We did that, and then we kind of had a conversation like, are we gonna photograph this person? Are we gonna record any information? Is this—are we still doing research right now?

LATIF: And Jason decided yeah, we should—we should document this.

JASON DE LEÓN: You know, we took some notes down. Gray-to-green discoloration. About what she was wearing. Brown-to-black discoloration of arms and legs.

LATIF: Took some pictures of the body.

JASON DE LEÓN: Her fingers have started to curl. Her ankles are swollen to the point that her sneakers seem ready to pop off. There is a steady hissing of intestinal gasses. And then it just got to the point where I was like, "Okay, this is enough. I don't wanna do this anymore."

LATIF: And so they covered her with a blanket because Jason noticed the birds.

JASON DE LEÓN: Circling overhead.

LATIF: Four turkey vultures. And so at that point they just sort of sat down and waited.

JASON DE LEÓN: For the police to come. The sheriff.

LATIF: An hour went by. Two, three, four.

JASON DE LEÓN: Just waiting with the body.

LATIF: It was about five hours in that a sheriff and three border patrol agents show up, and they had hiked three miles to get to Jason with a stretcher. And so they bring the stretcher. The sheriff puts on gloves. He asks them a few questions like, did you guys put the blanket on there? And then they roll her into this white body bag. And as the authorities do that, Jason—because she was face down, Jason gets to see her face for the first time. And so he writes a paragraph in his book, and it's pretty gruesome but I'm gonna—I'm gonna read to you the paragraph that he writes about in his book. "As her body turns, I see what is left of her face. It is frightening and unrecognizable as human. The mouth is a gnarled purple and black hole that obscures the rest of her features."

JASON DE LEÓN: "I can't see her eyes because the mouth is too hard to look away from. The skin around the lips is stretched out of shape, as though it had been melted. Her nose is smashed in and pushed up. She died face down, and the flesh on the front side of her skull has softened and contorted to fit around the dirt and rocks beneath her. The scene is a pastiche of metallic gray and pea green. Whatever beauty and humanity that once existed in her face has been replaced by a stone-colored ghoul, stuck in mid scream. It's a look you can never get away from."

JASON DE LEÓN: After this thing had happened, and it really just shook me in a lot of different ways.

LATIF: Jason says he just couldn't shake the question: who was this woman? How did she end up face down in the desert? So that night ...

ROBIN REINEKE: I remember Jason calling me.

LATIF: ... Jason called a friend of his, a woman named Robin Reineke.

ROBIN REINEKE: Him being really clearly shaken and, you know, asking for advice.

LATIF: Robin actually runs this non-profit.

JASON DE LEÓN: In Tucson, called the ...

ROBIN REINEKE: Colibri Center for Human Rights.

JASON DE LEÓN: ... Colibri Center for Human Rights. And they do a lot of work with the missing and with bodies that have been recovered.

LATIF: So Jason tells her ...

JASON DE LEÓN: Look, we—today, we had this thing. We found this person out here and ...

LATIF: "Could you help us ID her?" Now the thing is, Robin's office is actually in the medical examiner's office, so that means that just down the hall from Robin is the guy we met at the beginning, Bruce Anderson.

BRUCE ANDERSON: Probably a couple hundred people, or at least bones of a person are in here.

LATIF: So Bruce is working on the medical examiner's side, so anytime an unidentified migrant body comes in, Bruce tries to piece together who this person is, looking at ...

BRUCE ANDERSON: The dimensions and the shape of the skull, and ...

LATIF: ... markers.

BRUCE ANDERSON: ... the robustness of the bones, and ...

LATIF: Like, looking at the length of the bones or the density of the bones.

BRUCE ANDERSON: By the non-fusion of these separate bones.

LATIF: Looking at whether some bones in the body are fused together, which is something that happens right after puberty. Bruce can actually figure out approximately what age the person is, their sex, their weight, their height. And in the case of the woman that Jason found, her body was surprisingly in relatively good condition. So pretty quickly, they were able to determine, you know, she's probably in her 30s, she's 5'4". They were actually able to get fingerprints from her as well. Meanwhile on the other side, on Robin's side ...

LATIF: Wow. So each of these tabs is a person, is that right?

ROBIN REINEKE: Yeah.

LATIF: ... she's dealing with hundreds of missing persons reports.

ROBIN REINEKE: All day, every day.

LATIF: She spends her days taking calls, going through her voicemail.

ROBIN REINEKE: Which is full of relatives searching. "I'm looking for my uncle. He disappeared in 2010." Or, "I'm looking for my daughter. She crossed two weeks ago, we haven't heard from her."

LATIF: And she's also getting tips from different people, different aid organizations. And it's actually one of those calls that leads to a break in the case of the body that Jason found.

ROBIN REINEKE: Okay. So this was an email from me from 2012. "Hi, Jason. Just a quick update regarding the woman that your group found. The case number is 12-15-67, and as of yet she's not been identified."

LATIF: But Robin tells Jason that she got a call from an aid organization that had spoken to a guy who had crossed the desert with a big group of people around the same time and around the same area where Jason found the body.

ROBIN REINEKE: He said that he had recently left behind two fellow travelers who were in serious medical distress.

LATIF: He said one of them was an elderly man.

ROBIN REINEKE: 70 years old.

LATIF: And the other was a woman, maybe from Guatemala or Ecuador, late 30s, early 40s.

ROBIN REINEKE: "It isn't certain that this group is related to ML-12-15-67, but it's highly likely. I will contact Guatemalan and Ecuadorian consulates regarding new missing persons' cases."

LATIF: And eventually, using all the information that got gathered, Robin was able to determine that the body that Jason found, it's the body of a 31-year-old Ecuadorian woman named ...

ROBIN REINEKE: Maricela Ahguipolla.

LATIF: ... Maricela Ahguipolla. Robin gets in touch with Jason to tell him. Jason then asks her ...

JASON DE LEÓN: I would just—would appreciate if you could, you know, help me at all connect with this family.

JAD: That request would, oddly enough, lead Jason to New York City.

ROBERT: That story in just a moment.

[LISTENER: Hey, it's Nate from Cincinnati, Ohio. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Jad.

ROBERT: Robert.

JAD: Radiolab.

ROBERT: We're back with the third installment of our Border Trilogy: What Remains.

LATIF: And when we left, Jason along with Robin from the Colibri Center, had managed to ID the body of the woman he found in the desert. And so now he was trying to get in touch with her family.

JASON DE LEÓN: I don't know. When people disappear, or when they die in the desert, I think that the families make up—you know, lots of stories run through people's heads, and so I was hoping that if I could find this person's family, I could at least say, "This is what it was like when we found her. This is what we think had happened."

LATIF: So Robin was eventually able to get Jason the contact information for ...

JASON DE LEÓN: Maricela's brother-in-law.

LATIF: Who we'll call Fernando.

JASON DE LEÓN: And I make the awkward phone call that says, "Hey, I'm the person that found Maricela in the desert, and I would like to come and see you if that's possible."

ROBERT: Turns out, Fernando actually lives in New York City, but he had spoken to Maricela just before she left. And when we heard his story, we decided okay, we better send reporter Tracie Hunte ...

TRACIE HUNTE: Okay.

ROBERT: ... to talk with him.

TRACIE: ¡Oh, hola!

FERNANDO: ¿Como está?

TRACIE: Hi!

TRACIE: Yeah, so I went to visit Fernando at his apartment in Queens.

[dog barks]

FERNANDO: Kimberly, please!

TRACIE: [laughs]

TRACIE: He lives there with his three dogs.

[dog barks]

TRACIE: Friendly guy. Little shorter than me, neatly dressed. He's got, you know, dark hair, longer on the top, shorter on the sides. And ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: ... when I got there, he—he pulled out a bunch of photos of Maricela.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: So this is their marriage, their wedding photo?

TRANSLATOR: Esa es del matrimonio de ellos? La foto?

FERNANDO: Si

TRACIE: Oh, okay.

TRACIE: She was his brother's wife.

TRACIE: Oh, they look so young. Were they 19 when they got married?

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: So in this picture that Fernando's showing me, it's his brother and Maricela. They're in a church, and they're posing at the altar. She's in a white satin gown, her hair is long and dark and shiny, and she's got kind of like an oval-shaped face, and, you know, she looks beautiful. But even though it's her wedding day, the thing that struck me is that she's not smiling. Not even a little bit.

TRACIE: Is she—was she like—was she serious like that?

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Yeah, actually that's part of the reason why my mother said she didn't like her as much in the beginning.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: She said, you know, she always has an angry face on, she looks like somebody who doesn't have a lot of friends.

TRACIE: And on top of that, Fernando said she also had a habit of getting his brother in trouble.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: You know, she would tell my brother to sneak out of the house to go see her.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Go out dancing, to parties without permission. You know, those kind of things.

TRACIE: But ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: ... Fernando says she eventually won the family over.

TRANSLATOR: She helped out at home. She treated my mom really well.

TRACIE: Especially his mother.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Actually, I think my mother loved her more than she loved us. [laughs]

TRACIE: So Maricela and Fernando's brother, they got married. They ended up having three kids—two boys and a girl. Maricela had a job in a factory that made counterfeit jeans—I think Levi's. And Fernando's brother, he would go around to different villages selling sodas. And they just couldn't really manage to make ends meet.

JASON DE LEÓN: They were living real rough at the time. I mean, going—when I went to the house and saw where they had lived ...

LATIF: So Jason, after he connected with Fernando, he actually ended up going down to Ecuador to meet Maricela's family.

JASON DE LEÓN: Before she had left, I mean they were living in a one room, plywood shack with a dirt floor and animals running through the house. And—you know, and she had told her relatives, she's like, "My kids are literally starving here."

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: At the time, I wasn't able to help out as much financially because I was also helping build a house for my parents where they were also going to go live. And so I wasn't able to support them as much or help out with things like school.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: And so, you know, what she really wanted to do, you know, in order to, like, send her kids to school and all that, she really wanted them to have what she never had.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Because she never had anything. So that was really the pressure that she was under.

TRACIE: So Fernando says in 2012, he called home ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: One time when I called home, my mom said that she wanted to talk to me, so I said okay.

TRACIE: Maricela got on the phone.

TRANSLATOR: And she told me that she wanted to come here.

TRACIE: She told him that she and his brother, they wanted to follow in his footsteps. That if they could come to New York like he had, they could make money, send it back home and help out their kids. That that was the only way. And immediately Fernando was like ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Absolutely not. No.

TRACIE: So Fernando told her no because he didn't want her to go through the same thing he went through 10 years before.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: 2001, he was 17 years old, about to turn 18. And his aunt was about to go to New York, and she convinced him and his parents that if he went to New York he'd be able to get a job, make more money and support his family from there.

TRANSLATOR: To have a better life, to have the things we needed.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: So my father thought about it and gave his permission, but he told me not to stay here too long.

TRACIE: And so he used his grandfather's land as collateral and took out a loan for $12,000.

ROBERT: $12,000?

JAD: Wow!

TRACIE: Yeah.

ROBERT: And do you know what the interest rate was on the loan?

TRACIE: Ten percent.

ROBERT: Ten percent.

TRACIE: Yeah. So one thing that a lot of people have talked about is the fact that prevention through deterrence, it professionalized the human smuggling business because not only did these migrants need, you know, guidance from all these South and Central American countries, they also need guidance through the desert. So now you have this smuggling business that's more expensive and also more dangerous.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Yeah, so the coyote told us that 15 days maximum to get here.

TRACIE: Fernando says he and his aunt took a bus from Ecuador to Peru, and then from Peru they flew to Panama.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: Got on another bus.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: And then somewhere in Costa Rica ...

TRANSLATOR: I remember the path being really mountainous. There was a river, all that.

TRACIE: ... this bus pulls over, and the coyote who was with them at that point just said ...

TRANSLATOR: "Okay, you have to get off here."

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: When we got out, they took our luggage and they threw them on the ground towards the river. And they said, "You have to cross the river, and someone will find you there and signal to that person."

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: And we were left there like that, with my aunt saying, "Hold on, that wasn't the deal. The deal was to take us all the way to Mexico in cars." But from that point, when we started crossing mountains on foot ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: ... that's when horrible things started to happen.

TRACIE: From that point on they were packed into the trunks of taxis, hidden in basements, chicken coops and huts.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Totally filled with rats.

TRACIE: And three months into this journey—a journey that was supposed to take just 15 days—somewhere in Mexico, Fernando says that he and his aunt are taken to this rundown hacienda, this just sprawling ranch house. Inside the ranch house ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: There were more than 250 people there from all over the world: Chinese, Central Americans, from every country, from all over South America.

TRACIE: There's all these rooms filled with people, and Fernando actually says that there were all these armed guards all over the place. Nobody was allowed to leave.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: And so we were ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: ... penned in there for about a month.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: And while he was there ...

TRANSLATOR: This part I didn't tell Jason, what happened to me there ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: ... I was abused sexually.

TRACIE: Fernando says that he was sitting outside the hacienda one day with his aunt when a group of men approached him and told him that he had to go inside with them. And he said no, that he was fine sitting there, you know, outside.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: My aunt begged—begged them not to hurt me, to please not abuse me, or do anything to me, and they said, no, don't worry, that they only wanted to ask some questions inside. But that wasn't what they wanted.

TRACIE: They told Fernando, look, you can come with us now, or you can come with us later after we beat up your aunt. So finally, Fernando relented and went with them. And when they got inside the hacienda, they went into a room.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRACIE: And ...

TRANSLATOR: Once we were inside, they raped me. Three times.

TRACIE: How many of them were there?

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Like, six.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: After that I wanted—I just wanted to die.

TRACIE: After a couple of weeks, Fernando and his aunt finally got out of this hacienda and they start their trek into the desert. Fernando thinks that he went through the same desert that Maricela would try to cross 10 years later. He's actually caught by the Border Patrol and held for about a month before he manages to bail himself out of detention and make his way to New York. And Fernando says he shared all of this with Maricela except his own rape, but he did tell her that migrants do get raped, that he's seen it happen, that he knows it happens.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Even when I told her all of that, she said none of that would happen to her. She knew how to defend herself and, you know, if she had to she would hit people.

TRACIE: And then he told her you might have to go without food or sleep outside. But ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: She said that didn't matter. That all that mattered was getting here because the kids are the ones that matter most.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Any sacrifice made is worth it for your kids.

TRACIE: And then he doesn't talk to her anymore, that's actually the last phone call they ever have, because he thinks that if he cuts her off, maybe she'll just give up. But she goes to one of her brothers, and her brother says that he would only pay for her to go, but he's not gonna pay for her husband to go.

TRACIE: When you found out that she was gonna come by herself, did you try to tell your brother, "Look, she—you shouldn't let her come here by herself?" Come at all, I should say?

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Yeah. Yeah I called, but my brother said that there wasn't another option, and that he wanted to go first, but her brother had put the condition that she go first, and because they didn't have another option she said she would go.

TRACIE: In May of 2012, Maricela left Ecuador. About three weeks later, right before she walked into the desert, Maricela sent her family a message on Facebook. She told them, "I don't know how I'm going to get there, but I am going for my family. God willing, I will get there."

TRACIE: When did you finally hear what actually happened to her?

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Someone called me and told me they were from the consulate. And I said "Okay, finally, she's been found!" And then they told me ...

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Maricela was dead, and they didn't know what day exactly she died but that she'd been dead for about a month.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

JASON DE LEÓN: It was just really difficult wondering if I'm gonna do more damage than—than good by going to meet these folks.

LATIF: Eight months after Maricela's death, Jason came to New York to meet Fernando. And he brought with him the pictures of Maricela's body that he took when he found her in the desert.

JASON DE LEÓN: You know, he was like, just "Right now, show me the photos." And I was just dancing around that for—for over an hour.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Jason warned that the photos were really upsetting, there were so many like that, but I said that it's okay to show them to me.

JASON DE LEÓN: I give him this book of photos that I've printed out. And it's got pictures of this shrine that we built for her in the desert. It's got pictures of my students who were there. And then eventually, it's just pictures of, like, the back of her head so it's her hair, it's some of the clothing, it's her hand.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: I saw all the photos, and the truth is that it tore me to pieces to see or imagine everything she had to endure in the desert. She tried to keep going, dragging herself.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: Jason brought me photos of how she was found, and her body outstretched, trying to keep going.

TRACIE: Before Maricela's body was sent back to Ecuador, Fernando decided they should have it sent to New York first.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: When I talked to my family, I said, you know, her dream was really to arrive here, and so I thought at least we can fulfill that dream with her body.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: To be able to have a wake for her here.

TRACIE: They held a wake at a funeral home in Queens. Almost a hundred family members and friends came to celebrate Maricela's life. They were told to keep the coffin shut. The next day, her body went back to Ecuador. Fernando had to stay in New York because he knows if he were to go back to Ecuador, it would just be way too hard to try to come back to the United States. He says that, you know, right now he's just trying to fulfill a promise.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: The promise that I made to Maricela's body when it arrived here that I was going to look after her children. I was going to try to give them what she had wanted for them.

TRACIE: When you think about that conversation, do you think that there's anything you could've said that would've made her stay?

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: I told her what could happen along the way.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: I thought that would be a way of deterring her.

FERNANDO: [speaking Spanish]

TRANSLATOR: No.

LATIF: And it's worth pointing out, you know, I mean, more generally, prevention through deterrence as a strategy, it hasn't deterred people from coming to the US either. The annual budget for the Border Patrol is roughly $3.5-billion bigger than it was in 1990. We have about five times as many Border Patrol agents, and yet the number of people, immigrants, living here undocumented has more than tripled during that time, from 3.5 million to about 11 million. And more people are coming every year, every day. And more people are dying along the way.

JASON DE LEÓN: Yeah, let's just do it here.

LATIF: About a year after Maricela died, Jason got a call from her family again.

JASON DE LEÓN: Do you want—do you want Maverick or Iceman? You have to name the drones.

ROBIN REINEKE: You guys are Top Gun fans?

JASON DE LEÓN: Yeah.

LATIF: Another family member had disappeared in pretty much the same place Maricela did.

ROBIN REINEKE: So which is this?

JASON DE LEÓN: I think that's Maverick.

ROBIN REINEKE: That's Maverick?

JASON DE LEÓN: I'm going back to the Arizona desert basically because Maricela has a—had a cousin who—a 15-year-old cousin named Jose Tacuri who disappeared almost one year to the day that she died. I was able to kind of triangulate based on interviews of people who he was with, and with information from—from various folks, where we think he went missing. I mean, I told his mom that I would not stop looking, and it took me a couple years to figure out a way to—to do that, but right now it's—we'll go back and we'll use these drones and see what we can come up with.

TRACIE: And you know better than anyone what happens to bodies in the desert now, I think. I mean, why are you still looking for him? Or why— you know, yeah, as callous as that question sounds, I guess.

JASON DE LEÓN: For me, part of it is I just don't know what else to do. You feel so hopeless. I told his mom, like, I won't—I won't stop looking for him. I'll do whatever I can, whatever little thing that I can do. And if I can't find him, well maybe I'll find somebody else.

[drone whirs]

JASON DE LEÓN: It's getting mad at me now, so we will ...

ROBIN REINEKE: What was that?

JASON DE LEÓN: It's getting mad at me 'cause it's running out of batteries. I'll do one more, one more run.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Clinton: The immigration issue poses real problems and challenges, and as always provides great opportunities for the American people.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Donald Trump: We will build a great wall along the Southern ...]

ROBERT: This episode was reported by Latif Nasser and Tracie Hunte. Produced by Matt Kielty and Tracie Hunte.

JAD: Jason De León's book, which inspired this series, is called The Land of Open Graves.

ROBERT: Special thanks to our interpreter Allison Corbet, and for giving voice to Fernando in English, Carlo Alban and Carlo's manager Ted Brunsen.

JAD: Thanks also to Hayden Stewart, Raul Ras-Pastrana, Paulina Alonso-Chavez, and ambassador Jacob Prado from the government of Mexico, and to the staff at the Pima County medical examiner's office and the Colibri Center for Human Rights.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: This is Laurie from Katonah, New York. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Maria Matasar-Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Maggie Bartolomeo, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Habte, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster, with help from Amanda Aronczyk, Shima Oliaee, Jake Arl and Reed Cannon. Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris.]

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