Guatemalan police said Saturday they had discovered 126 US-bound migrants, mainly from Haiti, trapped inside an abandoned shipping container in the south of the country.

Residents raised the alarm after hearing screams from inside the container that was located on a trailer on the side of the road between the towns of Nueva Concepcion and Cocales.

What happened to the migrants?

Police officers were quickly on the scene to investigate the suspicious container.

"We heard cries and knocks coming from inside the container. We opened the doors and found inside 126 undocumented people: 106 from Haiti, 11 from Nepal and nine from Ghana," police spokesman Jorge Aguilar said.

The migrants were hoping to get to Mexico and then onto the US when their suspected people smugglers abandoned them to their fate.

Police then gave them first aid before escorting the migrants to a shelter run by the Guatemalan Migration Institute (IGM).

The migrants will now be transported to the Honduras frontier where they will be handed over to the authorities as this is from where they entered Guatemala.

Why is there such a flood of migrants?

Following political instability, an earthquake and tropical floods, Haitians have been trying to reach the United States seeking a better life.

Guatemala borders Mexico, which is the main entry point to the US by land.

On Friday, Mexican authorities detained 652 migrants, 355 of them minors, who were traveling on three trucks in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, according to officials. The majority of them were from Guetemala, and included 197 minors traveling alone.

Thousands of migrants, mostly from Haiti, have been making hazardous journeys across Central America in the past months to try to give themselves and their families a better life.

Since the start of 2021, over 50 of them died as they crossed jungle terrain in the Darien Gap in Panama, on the border with Colombia, according to Panama authorities.

Even if they make it to the US most of them face deportation, with 7,500 migrants returned to Haiti on 70 chartered flights in three weeks, the International Organization for Migration reported Friday.

jc/sri (AFP, EFE)