Most people are afraid of snakes in general and particularly those that bite, especially those with a poisonous bite.
I would hope that the Border Patrol is flooding the Mexican media with press releases, filmed interviews with the victim (in Spanish), and above all, photos and video footage of this kind of snake.
All of this relates to a Border Patrol press release issued earlier today that included this buried paragraph:
Finally, at approximately 8 p.m. [Tuesday] agents assigned to the Kingsville [Texas] Border Patrol Station responded to a telephone call regarding an undocumented Mexican male who suffered a snake bite and was unable to move. Responding agents called an ambulance and the man was transported to a Corpus Christi-area hospital where he remains under medical care.
There were, unfortunately, no details provided — nothing on the man's condition, the type of snake, or what the man was doing at the time; he probably was seeking to walk around one of the Border Patrol's traffic stops.
The point of this exercise is to remind Mexican nationals, particularly would-be illegals, that it is dangerous to cross our border (except at ports of entry), and to show the Border Patrol in a favorable light.
Unfortunately, the quoted paragraph above is buried deep down in one of several press releases that came out at the same time. Further, no illustrations were provided.
Kingsville is in the middle of a large semi-arid area in South Texas, on the road north from Brownsville, the border town. It is through this area that many illegals travel on their way to the interior of the United States.