The Associated Press

TUXTLA GUTIERREZ, Mexico - Police found 97 illegal migrants crammed into an abandoned freight trailer on the side of a highway in the southern state of Chiapas yesterday, after the migrants hacked a breathing hole in the side of the trailer with a pick when the driver fled.
A passing police patrol spotted the trailer standing without a truck on the shoulder of a highway near the Guatemalan border in sweltering weather. When the officers approached the container, they heard shouts and pounding from inside.

The migrants had improvised an air hole, breaking open a metal wall with a pick and then widening the hole with their bare hands, so they could breath until the trailer's locked doors could be opened.

"I felt like I was going to asphyxiate, and faint," said Salvadoran migrant Jose Carlos Ruiz, one of those freed from the trailer. "A little while longer and we were going to die."

The migrants said they were on their way to the United States when the driver abandoned the rig.