AFP

Sheriff Urbino Martinez has collected the remains of so many dead migrants who have come across the US southern border that he is known as “The Undertaker.”

“It’s deadly out there,” says Martinez, who patrols the small Texan county of Brooks, a few dozen kilometers (miles) from Mexico.

“We started keeping track of the dead bodies from 2009,” he told AFP in his office, pointing to 20 thick volumes, where his department has information on 913 cases. 

But, he says, that’s only a fraction of the true human toll of the border crossings.

“I would multiply that times five, maybe even 10 for those bodies that will never be recovered.”

The United States logged a record 2.3 million migrant encounters at its southern border in the year to September — a key issue for some voters as they head to the polls for next month’s midterm elections.

Many were sent back south; an unknown number made it into the country without being detected. 

At least 700 people are known to have died in the attempt.

To avoid the checkpoint in Falfurrias, the main town in Brooks County, migrants are directed by human traffickers into vast farmsteads where dense vegetation, treacherous sands and soaring temperatures can prove fatal.

Sometimes, there isn’t much of a person left to find.

Martinez’s folders are labelled “human remains” — a chillingly accurate description of the photographs that sometimes show partial torsos or just a few bones.

“If it’s real hot, your body will decompose completely within 72 hours, and then the animals are going to tear whatever’s left.

“The feral hogs, the rats, anything that’s out there that can tear the limb off, they’re going to do it. We found human bones inside a rat’s den before.”

Numbers are down in Brooks county this year — Martinez has logged 80 bodies so far in 2022, all of which were processed through his mobile mortuary.

“It is less than last year but it is 80 too many,” he says.

– No identification –

The death that Martinez finds in Brooks is not unique to his county.

The same pattern of tragedy is repeated all along the Texan border: desperate people dying as they flee the crushing poverty, violence and terror of their dysfunctional homelands.

In the border town of Eagle Pass, the municipal cemetery is strewn with rudimentary crosses that mark the graves of dozens of unknown dead; the men and women whose American dreams ended in anonymous graves.

Around 40 plaques, labelled John or Jane Doe, sit next to a small US flag.

Across town, the migrants are still coming, gambling that the possibility of death en route is better than the alternative. 

“It was an ordeal,” said Alejandra, a 35-year-old Colombian who crossed the rushing Rio Grande to reach Texas, even though she cannot swim. “But it was scarier to go back.” 

Cowering under a tree from the hot sun, Alejandra said she needed asylum because of the danger she faced from organized crime in Colombia. 

“If we go back, they’ll kill us,” she said, looking at her three teenage children.

– Remains –

Corinne Stern, the chief coroner for southern Texas, says most of the migrants whose remains she examines died from heatstroke or dehydration.

“Up until about five years ago, (the border) took up about 30 percent of my time… Now it’s taking up about 75 percent,” says the doctor, who wears a necklace inscribed with the Hebrew word for “Life.”  

In the reception area of the morgue, a painting reads: “Let the dead teach the living.”  

Inside, a blackboard lists dozens of Jane and John Does. 

The morgue is impeccably clean, but the smell of bodily decay is pervasive, permeating the masks visitors are required to wear. 

The vast majority of border cases she receives have no identification, Stern says, as she examines the skeletal remains of a still-clothed female body.

Attached to the corpse is a small olive green backpack. 

When the doctor picks it up, two lollipops fall out, their colorful wrappings a contrast to the earthy ochre that swathes the clothes and the bones.

DNA samples are extracted in an attempt to identify her, but for now she will be labeled as yet another Jane Doe, one of 250 Stern has dealt with this year.

– ‘Where is my wife?’ –

For Eduardo Canales, the open-endedness of anonymous death is too much to bear.

In 2013, Canales founded the South Texas Human Rights Center, installing water stations around ranches to prevent migrants from drinking the water in the cattle troughs, which can be toxic for humans.

Canales, 74, supplies blue plastic barrels that have location coordinates and a phone number to call for help.

But when he began receiving calls from family members looking for loved ones who had gone missing after crossing the border, he decided to expand his work.  

“For me the most important thing is for families to be able to find closure,” he says. 

“Families don’t stop looking, they never give up. They keep asking where is my wife, my brother, my daughter?” 

Many were buried anonymously in the Falfurrias cemetery, but a partnership with Texas State University made it possible to exhume dozens of bodies and identify them by their fingerprints. 

The effort has reduced the number of anonymous graves in Brooks: of the 119 people found in 2021, 107 were identified. 

“But many more die and disappear without us ever finding them,” Canales says, pointing to vast dusty plains. 

“Here the only constant is death.” 

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro once took a stab at predicting the outcome of his 2022 re-election bid: “Prison, death or victory.”

Victory it was not. Death came in the form of an end to his presidency, which he grudgingly accepted Tuesday — two days after the election was declared for his opponent.

And prison?

“You can be sure that option… does not exist,” the far-right leader told members of his crucial evangelical support base in August 2021.

Analysts, however, believe a future behind bars may be a very real prospect for the bellicose Bolsonaro, even if it may take years.

Almost from the start of his controversial mandate in 2019, Bolsonaro racked up accusations and investigations for everything from spreading disinformation to crimes against humanity.

He survived more than 150 impeachment bids — a record.

Most of these were over his flawed management of the coronavirus pandemic, which claimed the lives of more than 685,000 people in Brazil — the world’s second-highest toll after the United States.

While in office, Bolsonaro was shielded from legal consequences by two political allies: Attorney General Augusto Aras and Arthur Lira, the speaker of Brazil’s lower house of Congress.

But that will change on January 1, 2023 when his arch-rival, leftist ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, takes over the reins once more, and Bolsonaro loses his presidential immunity.

– ‘Crimes against humanity’ –

Legal problems can come from several fronts.

A Brazilian Senate committee has recommended charges over Bolsonaro’s management of the Covid-19 pandemic, including “crimes against humanity.”

The Covid-denying Bolsonaro, who punted unproven cures and said vaccines could turn people into “alligators,” is also being investigated for allegedly failing to act on an embezzlement tip-off regarding coronavirus vaccine purchases.

Another probe is pending into claims that Bolsonaro leaked a classified police investigation into corruption accusations against his sons, and interfered in another.

The outgoing president was further implicated in a probe into his senator son Flavio for an alleged scheme to collect part of political staffers’ salaries in a practice known as “rachadinha.”

That case was scrapped on the grounds that Bolsonaro junior enjoyed parliamentary immunity.

Bolsonaro has consistently denied any wrongdoing, claiming he is the victim of political persecution.

“They are looking for a way to get at me,” he said after the online news site Uol published claims 30 days before the election, that his family members had bought 51 properties. 

The properties were paid partly or fully in cash for a total of some $4.7 million between 1990 and 2022, with questions raised over the provenance of the money.

There were also claims of public money being abused on his watch to curry favor with evangelical leaders.

“When his presidential term ends, Jair Bolsonaro will be answerable to justice and the public prosecutor’s office will be able to open new investigations,” legal expert Rogerio Dultra dos Santos of Fluminense Federal University told AFP.

Bolsonaro was elected on an anti-corruption platform at a time when the country was reeling from a massive graft scandal involving state oil company Petrobras, Lula’s government and his Workers’ Party (PT).

Lula’s own convictions in relation to that scandal were later annulled.

– ‘Several years’ –

Lula has vowed to grant access to possibly compromising documents, both official and personal, that Bolsonaro had sealed for 100 years before leaving office.

This “could have legal consequences,” said Dos Santos.

However, any attempt to bring Bolsonaro to justice could “take several years” considering the likelihood of multiple appeals along the way, the analyst added.

Ironically, Bolsonaro could benefit from a Supreme Court ruling that allowed Lula’s release from prison in November 2019 pending an appeal against his corruption conviction.

Temporarily changing gear from his previous insistence that Lula would never win the election, Bolsonaro recently said he would “stay out of politics” if he loses.

But Mayra Goulart, a political scientist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said she would be “very surprised” if this were true.

Lawmakers and various other public servants in Brazil enjoy immunity from prosecution while in office.

Whatever his legal fate, Goulart said Bolsonaro would likely follow a similar path as his political idol, Donald Trump, “who maintains a considerable influence on American politics despite his 2020 defeat.”

An original copy of the US Constitution — one of only two known to be in private hands — will be auctioned off in December with bidding estimated to go as high as $30 million, Sotheby’s announced Tuesday.

Five hundred first printings were made of the US Constitution’s final text and provided to participants at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Ben Franklin, but almost all have been lost to history.

Of the 13 that are known to have remained, 11 are owned by governments and institutions.

Last year, one of the two privately held copies was bought for $43.2 million by US hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, who outbid a group of 17,000 cryptocurrency investors who had raised $40 million to try to buy the document, vowing to exhibit it in the public digital domain.

Griffin’s purchase, which he has since lent for display at a free public museum, set a record for the highest price ever paid for a historical document at auction, according to Sotheby’s.

The second copy will be auctioned off on December 13 for up to $30 million dollars, but bidding could soar even higher, according to Richard Austin, an expert in manuscripts and old books at Sotheby’s New York auction house.

Austin told AFP he would “like to see another private individual or perhaps a group being responsible for the care of this very important document.”

The artifact will be on public display at Sotheby’s New York starting on November 4.

The man accused of attacking the husband of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a hammer told police he also planned to target several other politicians as part of a “suicide mission,” according to court documents filed Tuesday.

David DePape, 42, was arrested last week after he allegedly broke into the couple’s mansion intending to tie up Pelosi and break her kneecaps, but found only her 82-year-old husband.

He was ordered to be held in custody after he pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and other charges during his arraignment Tuesday at a San Francisco court.

In new court filings, state prosecutors said DePape told police he was sick of “lies coming out of Washington” and had “named several targets, including a local professor, several prominent state and federal politicians” as well as their relatives.

“I didn’t really want to hurt him, but you know this was a suicide mission,” DePape allegedly told officers at the scene of his arrest, referring to Paul Pelosi.

“I’m not going to stand here and do nothing even if it cost me my life.”

According to the state prosecutors’ filing, DePape startled Paul Pelosi awake from his bed in the early hours of Friday, holding a hammer and several plastic zip ties.

He told Paul Pelosi he had come to find Nancy Pelosi because she is “number two in line for the presidency,” and “we’ve got to take them all out.”

Pelosi was able to call the police and open the mansion’s front door when officers arrived, before DePape struck him in the head with the hammer, leaving him bloodied and unconscious for three minutes, court documents said.

“This case demands detention. Nothing less,” prosecutors wrote.

DePape wore orange jail clothes and spoke only to answer procedural questions during the brief appearance, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

His arm was in a sling, which his lawyer said was a result of an injury he sustained during arrest.

– Litmus test –

The story of the attack quickly metastasized into a political litmus test in the highly divided United States.

Liberals blasted the dangerous coarsening of public discourse and the willing perpetuation of falsehoods by mainstream Republicans that has seen Nancy Pelosi cast as a figure of hate on the right, and a legitimate target for real-life violence.

Swathes of the conservative media ecosystem, meanwhile, set about questioning the narrative around the attack with lurid and unproven allegations.

New Twitter boss Elon Musk was among those who helped spread the misinformation after tweeting a link to a speculative opinion piece by an outlet with a history of unreliability.

Speaking outside the courthouse, DePape’s court-appointed lawyer Adam Lipson said the defense team would be looking into the swirling untruths that may have influenced his client.

“There’s also been a lot of speculation regarding Mr. DePape’s vulnerability to misinformation and that is certainly something that we are going to look into,” he told reporters.

“We are going to be doing a comprehensive investigation of what happened,” he said, adding: “We’re going to be looking into Mr. DePape’s mental state.”

– ‘Long recovery’ –

In an earlier court affidavit filed Monday, the FBI said DePape intended to hold Pelosi — who is second in line to the US presidency after the vice president — hostage and talk to her.

“If Nancy were to tell DePape the ‘truth,’ he would let her go, and if she ‘lied,’ he was going to break ‘her kneecaps,'” the affidavit said.

Nancy Pelosi was not in San Francisco at the time of the attack.

Following the attack, Paul Pelosi was sent to a hospital where he underwent emergency surgery for a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands.

Late Monday Nancy Pelosi issued a statement saying her husband faced “a long recovery process.”

The suspect faces charges on both a state and a federal level.

DePape faces state charges of attempted murder, residential burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse, false imprisonment of an elder, and threats to a public official and their family.

Federal authorities on Monday charged DePape with attempting to kidnap a US official and assaulting her family member.