In honor of National Hispanic Heritage Month I’m featuring a Hispanic missing person every day from September 15 to October 15. Today’s case is Denis Ariel Revolorio Perez, who disappeared from the border city of McAllen, Texas on April 30, 2018. He was 24.
Denis is from Guatemala and at the time of his disappearance, he and a friend were trying to cross the U.S. border illegally by swimming across the Rio Grande. (NamUs has it as “Bravo River” and I’m assuming that’s from the Spanish name for the river, Río Bravo del Norte.) Anyway, Denis’s friend made it; Denis did not and is presumed drowned.
He’s listed with the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office and presumably with the Mexican authorities as well, as is his remains could turn up on either side.
I found out a little bit more about Denis on Facebook and got some photos from there. He was from Santa Rosa, Guatemala and apparently worked as a dairy farmer. His family still hopes he’s alive, and there is a video in Spanish of a reporter with a woman, presumably a relative of Denis’s, holding up his picture and talking about him. (I cannot understand Spanish.) He came to the U.S. looking for a better life.
It is a HORRIBLY dangerous journey and the desert border areas of northern Mexico and the southwest U.S. are scattered with the remains of migrants who didn’t make it. I know they have a hard time trying to identify the bodies. There’s been an attempt to map migrant deaths; the link shows a map restricted to just one country in Arizona, and it’s got over 3,000 bodies recorded on it.
The Charley Project Blog 