The Department of Justice (DOJ) said an illegal immigrant and a foreign national pleaded guilty in Texas on Wednesday to human smuggling charges stemming from a December 2021 crash of a truck that killed 55 people.
Agapito Jorge Ventura, 34, who was arrested in Texas in December 2024, and Oswaldo Manuel Zavala Quino, 26, one of five co-defendants extradited to the United States the following year to face charges in the case, each face a maximum penalty of life in prison, the DOJ said on Wednesday.
Ventura is an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, and Zavala Quino is a Guatemalan national who was extradited to the United States to face charges. Prosecutors said the two admitted that they conspired with other human smugglers to transport illegal immigrants, including adults and minors, from Guatemala to the United States.
The charges stem from one such operation in which an estimated 166 smuggled people were packed into a tractor-trailer truck that overturned and slammed into a bridge abutment near the city of Tuxtla Gutierrez in Chiapas, Mexico, on Dec. 9, 2021.
Fifty-five people in the truck died in the accident, including a 16-year-old girl, and dozens of others were injured in what the DOJ called a “mass casualty incident.” Survivors said they had been squeezed into the trailer compartment so tightly that most people on the truck could only stand.
Video footage of the aftermath showed bodies scattered across the scene of the crash, which federal authorities have described as one of the deadliest human smuggling tragedies in recent memory.
Mexican officials at the time said nearly all of the victims were Guatemalan. Authorities in Chiapas added that three people from the Dominican Republic, a Honduran, a Mexican, and an Ecuadorian were among those who were injured.
Prosecutors said in a statement that Ventura, Zavala Quino, and their co-conspirators were paid by the smuggled people to be transported illegally into the United States. According to the statement, during a Biden administration-era phase that allowed illegal immigrants to be paroled into the United States, Ventura also facilitated the release of illegal immigrants from Guatemala into the United States, which included minors not accompanied by an adult.
Ventura also was accused of providing fake instructions to other conspirators, including Zavala Quino, to give to the minors and adults to coach them on speaking to immigration officials if they were arrested. He was also accused of providing an individual who would falsely say they are a relative to allow an arrested illegal immigrant to be released into the United States, said the DOJ.
“This crime shows that human smugglers care only about profiting from their crimes, not about the illegal aliens they transport and the life-and-death risks to which they expose them,” said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva in a statement on Wednesday, adding that the defendants who pleaded guilty exploited “vulnerable people” and broke U.S. immigration laws.
Only through “robust border enforcement” will future mass casualty incidents involving human smuggling operations be avoided, Duva said. The DOJ’s Criminal Division, he said, “will continue to pursue those who put profit over people and ensure our nation’s immigration laws are enforced.”
