ALDEA NICA, Guatemala _ Candido Antonio Romero heard the voice as he lay trapped beneath the dead and the injured, amid the moans of pain and the pleas for help.
"Get up!" the voice shouted.
Three days earlier, Romero, his friend Carlos Hernandez and at least eight of their neighbors _ all in their teens or 20s _ had left the village of Nica in western Guatemala with one of the many smugglers who guide migrants to the United States.
Now, their American dream had ended with that of dozens of other migrants in an overturned truck along an isolated stretch of highway in southern Mexico.
In his half-conscious state, Romero wondered whether it was all a hallucination _ or whether he was about to take his final breath.
The voice _ perhaps a rescuer, perhaps an internal exhortation, he wasn't sure _ continued: "It's not your time to die!"
