Border Trilogy Part 3: What Remains

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Science, Natural Sciences, History, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.6 • 43.5K Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2023

⏱️ 57 minutes

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Summary

While scouring the Sonoran Desert for objects left behind by migrants crossing into the United States, anthropologist Jason De León happened upon something he didn't expect to get left behind: a human arm, stripped of flesh.

This macabre discovery sent him reeling, needing to know what exactly happened to the body, and how many migrants die that way in the wilderness. In researching border-crosser deaths in the Arizona desert, he noticed something surprising. Sometime in the late-1990s, the number of migrant deaths shot up dramatically and have stayed high since. Jason traced this increase to a Border Patrol policy still in effect, called “Prevention Through Deterrence.”

First aired in 2018 and over three episodes, Radiolab investigates this policy, its surprising origins, and the people whose lives were changed forever because of it.

Part 3: What Remains

The third episode in our Border Trilogy follows anthropologist Jason De León after he makes a grisly discovery in Arivaca, Arizona. In the middle of carrying out his pig experiments with his students, Jason finds the body of a 30-year-old female migrant. With the help of the medical examiner and some local humanitarian groups, Jason discovers her identity. Her name was Maricela. Jason then connects with her family, including her brother-in-law, who survived his own harrowing journey through Central America and the Arizona desert.

With the human cost of Prevention Through Deterrence weighing on our minds, we try to parse what drives migrants like Maricela to cross through such deadly terrain, and what, if anything, could deter them.

Special thanks to Carlo Albán, Sandra Lopez-Monsalve, Chava Gourarie, Lynn M. Morgan, Mike Wells and Tom Barry.CORRECTION: An earlier version of this episode, when it originally aired, incorrectly stated that a person's gender can be identified from bone remains. We've adjusted the audio to say that a person's sex can be identified from bone remains.

EPISODE CITATIONS:

Jason de Leon's latest work is a global participatory art project called Hostile Terrain 94 (https://zpr.io/dNEyVpAiNXjv), was exhibited at over 70 different locations around the world in 2020.

Read more about it here (https://zpr.io/uwDfu9bXFriv).

Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!

Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.

Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected].

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Latif.
0:03.8	This is our third episode of our trilogy about the US-Mexico border that we initially ran
0:08.6	back in early 2018.
0:11.4	The first episode was from the border community's perspective.
0:15.5	Second episode was from the government perspective.
0:18.2	This episode is mostly from the migrants perspective.
0:21.3	At the end, we have an update looking at weather and the degree to which these issues
0:25.1	from the Trump era are still around in the Biden era.
0:29.9	Before we start quick content warning, this episode includes graphic descriptions of
0:33.9	human remains and may not be suitable for younger listeners.
0:38.3	You're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC.
0:50.1	So we come back here where you see you at another case.
1:00.2	Oh, what are those hairs or that stride muscle?
1:06.8	That's muscle.
1:07.8	The closest thing I can say is the muscle dries out so we get stringy and shredded.
1:15.2	Okay, let's just start from the beginning.
1:18.1	So we are in what room is this again?
1:20.4	We're in the special procedures room, okay, Pima County office of the medical examiner.
1:26.1	And what we're looking at here is a case mostly skull to remains.
1:31.1	So we have a skull, we have a few, we have some parts of the spine.
1:36.2	Spine it looks like and then just two and all three major bones of the lower limb.
1:41.6	So the two thigh bones, the femurs and the two tibias and the two fibulae.
	...

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