Guards at a Mexico detention centre appeared to make no effort to help 38 migrants who died in a fire, surveillance footage shows.
The blaze broke out after migrants at the immigration detention facility in Ciudad Juarez, close to the US border with El Paso, Texas, placed mattresses against the bars of their cell and set them on fire.
Footage from the facility appears to show staff making no attempt to release the migrants before smoke filled the room.
In the video, two people dressed as guards rush into the camera frame, and at least one migrant appears by the metal gate on the other side.
However, the guards did not appear to make any effort to open the cell doors and instead ran away as billowing clouds of smoke filled the room within seconds.
Adan Augusto Lopez, Mexico’s interior secretary, confirmed the authenticity of the video.
Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said the fire was started by migrants in protest after learning they would be deported.
“They never imagined that this would cause this terrible misfortune,” Mr Obrador said.
Rows of bodies were laid out under silver sheets outside the centre after the fire.
Authorities originally reported 40 dead, but later said some may have been counted twice in the confusion.
Twenty-eight people were injured and were in a “delicate-serious” condition, according to the National Immigration Institute.
There were 68 men from Central and South America being held at the facility at the time of the fire, the agency said.
Immigration authorities identified the dead and injured as being from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador, according to a statement from the Mexican attorney general’s office.
The deaths forced the government to rent refrigerated trailers to hold the migrants’ bodies, Chihuahua state prosecutor Cesar Jauregui told reporters.
Viangly Infante Padron, a 31-year-old Venezuelan migrant seeking asylum in the US with her husband and three children, had been waiting outside the detention centre for her partner’s release when the fire broke out.
“There was smoke everywhere,” she said.
“The ones they let out were the women, and those [employees] with immigration,” she said.
“The men, they never took them out until the firefighters arrived.”
She said she saw several dead bodies before finding her husband in an ambulance.
“I was desperate because I saw a dead body, a body, a body, and I didn’t see him anywhere.”
Tensions between authorities and migrants had reportedly been running high in recent weeks in Ciudad Juarez, where shelters are full of people waiting for opportunities to cross into the US or for the asylum process to play out.
More than 30 migrant shelters and other advocacy organisations published an open letter on 9 March that complained about the criminalisation of migrants and asylum seekers in the city.
It accused authorities of abusing migrants and using excessive force in rounding them up, including complaints that municipal police questioned people in the street about their immigration status without cause.
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Migrant advocates said on Tuesday that the immigration facility was over capacity and that the site of the fire was small and lacked ventilation.
“You could see it coming,” the advocates’ statement said. “Mexico’s immigration policy kills.”
Mexico has emerged as the world’s third most popular destination for asylum seekers, after the US and Germany.
But it is still largely a country that migrants pass through on their way to the US.
