Posted on 11/02/2003 12:51:38 AM PST by sarcasm
MICHES, Dominican Republic -- The fragile wooden boat carrying 56 Dominicans hoping to slip into Puerto Rico illegally was only a couple of hours into a two-day voyage when it was ripped apart by the towering waves of the open sea.
Terrified migrants tumbled into the water -- screaming, flailing at the swells -- and more than 30 drowned immediately. The survivors clung to the partially submerged boat, praying, crying, begging for life.
Over the next two days, Epifania de los Santos recalls, people quietly drifted off in ones and twos, never to reappear.
"They began going crazy. They got dizzy. They got tired, and they just started to drown," says de Los Santos, one of three survivors of the January 2001 disaster, her 7-year-old son moving instinctively closer as she tells her tale. "They just floated away."
By boarding the fated boat, de los Santos, 33, had joined the thousands of mostly poor Dominicans who each year risk the ocean in jury-rigged boats called yolas, bidding to better their lives in Puerto Rico and on the U.S. mainland.
Driven by need or drawn by dreams, the migrants endure the terrors of a hostile sea and an even harsher sun. They run a gantlet of Dominican and U.S. officials determined to stop them. They endure the abuse of smugglers, the madness of the desperate.
And they die, with appalling regularity.
In the past three years, nearly 300 people either died or disappeared while crossing the Mona Passage, an 80-mile-wide body of water that separates the Dominican Republic from Puerto Rico, according to U.S. Border Patrol figures. Another 164 U.S.-bound migrants died or vanished elsewhere in the Caribbean region in that period.
The numbers pale in comparison with those along the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of thousands cross illegally and more than 300 die each year by Washington's count. Still, the dangers of taking small craft through the storm-lashed passage make the boat people's travail especially dire.
"There are things that happen, you know? Tragedies," says Felipe Diaz, 21, who crossed to Puerto Rico by yola four years ago and worked eight months there, earning 10 times what he could at home.
"The problem is the sea," says Diaz, whose village of La Gina, on the Dominican Republic's eastern coast, has lost scores of people to the passage in recent years. "Because things can happen. And you know either the sharks are going to get you or you're going to drown."
Like Cubans, Haitians and other wayfaring migrants of the Caribbean, many Dominicans long have considered the dangers of the deep less daunting than the doldrums of their daily lives.
But the economic motives for migrating perhaps have never seemed as urgent as now.
After booming throughout the 1990s, the Dominican economy finds itself slogging through crisis. Tightly joined by trade with the United States, the country has been slammed by the U.S. recession and the fall in tourism since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Inflation stands at 40 percent, and the currency has lost half its value in the past year. Nearly one of every five working-age Dominicans does not have a job. Many more toil part time and do not earn enough to survive. Decent jobs, in short supply here, pay just $100 a month.
"This is a very precarious economy even in normal times. And times are not normal," says Guaroguya Felix, an economist with a business consulting firm in Santo Domingo, the capital. "We're going to suffer this for many years to come."
Rather than wait out the crisis, many head for the yolas.
The migrants, and their traffickers, must maneuver past the nearly shipless Dominican navy, whose investigators seize scores of boats each year before they even set sail.
Once on the water, the voyagers face a thin but increasingly sophisticated line of U.S. enforcement -- Coast Guard cutters and aircraft, Customs Service speedboats and planes, Border Patrol coastal craft and land agents.
Still, most migrants make it. And once in Puerto Rico, they find jobs as maids, construction workers, restaurant employees -- work that pays a small fortune compared to what's available back home.
Many Dominicans and other migrants eventually find a way to fly to the U.S. mainland. Because Puerto Rico is an American possession, passports and visas are not required for travel there.
Despite the various deterrents, the exodus is not likely to abate soon.
"If they were to put a giant wall right in the middle of the passage, people would still go," says Julio Antonio Lantigua, called Chimico, a recently retired yola captain who ferried people to Puerto Rico for a decade. "Boats would take them out to the wall. They'd climb over by ropes, down the other side and other boats would take them on.
"This will never stop," Lantigua says, "never change, so long as the situation in this country doesn't change. People who have never in their lives thought of migrating are thinking about it now."
Stepping into the yola on the day she nearly died, Epifania de los Santos had planned to leave her husband and four children, then ages 2 to 10, to work for as long as five years in Puerto Rico.
It was de los Santos' first stab at migration. But neighbors and relatives already had made the journey, and the benefits were obvious in the solid concrete houses they had built upon returning, in their families' finer clothes and better food.
"You earn more in a week there than you do in a month here," de los Santos says with a shrug. "It must be good. A lot of people come back and they want to go again."
But de los Santos' vessel was poorly built, its captain foolhardy. And the Mona Passage rarely indulges either fragility or fools.
De los Santos held on to a piece of the sunken vessel with no idea where the current was carrying her or how she would get back to land.
No sharks came, she says, but some sort of large fish swam protectively beside the yola's remnants for more than a day. It might have been a dolphin, de los Santos guesses, or a whale.
Sometimes, she imagines it was an angel of God.
"I saved myself by believing in God, by praying and crying," she says, adding that she's an evangelical Christian. "The only thing I thought of was that they were going to find me."
No one was even looking. Officials in Miches, the seaside town from which the yola departed, did not believe the reports that a boat had sunk just offshore.
Through providence, de los Santos says, she and her companions were rescued by a fisherman from a distant town who happened upon them.
For months afterward, her drowned companions peopled her sleep. "They called me in the night," she says.
The trip across the Mona Passage can take as little as eight hours in a high-powered boat on a smooth sea. But yolas seldom have adequate motors. And tranquility never reigns for long in the passage.
Most migrant voyages take days, some as many as five.
Because of the increased vigilance of the Dominican navy's investigators, yolas must be built and outfitted clandestinely. Migrants, who have paid anywhere from $800 to $3,000 for the journey, hide in flophouses or in mosquito-choked woods near the coast while they await departure.
Space means money, and the smugglers pack the migrants tightly into the boats. Shoulders touch shoulders, knees tuck into chests. Food and drinking water are rationed.
Tropical squalls can transform a flat sea into a torrent of 5-foot swells in moments. The overloaded and underpowered yolas cut into the waves rather than ride above them.
Seawater washes over the migrants. Gasoline spills from the engine hoses and plastic containers. Seasickness pervades. Toilets don't exist.
"It's water mixed with excrement, gasoline, blood and vomit," Antonio Solis, the Border Patrol's intelligence officer in Puerto Rico, says of the conditions inside the yolas. "It's just a toxic environment."
Out of sight of land, the captains steer by compass. But veering off course is easy in the passage's strong currents, and the slightest deviation often means getting perilously lost.
"It's a horrible experience. I don't recommend it to anyone," says Jose Bono, 39, a Marine Corps veteran and longtime resident of Philadelphia who recently was caught trying to sneak into Puerto Rico on a yola.
"It was supposed to take a day, but we got lost," Bono says of his trip, in which he was trying to make his way back to his family after being deported for a felony drug conviction five years ago.
"We thought we were going to die," he says.
Although tragedies like those that claimed the lives of de los Santos' boatmates are rare, the drowning of migrants near either the Dominican or Puerto Rican coasts proves frequent enough.
Some fall or are pushed overboard at sea, officials say. Others drown a few feet from shore when yolas strike rocks or founder in the rough surf. A few die of exposure in lost vessels.
"This is a real immigration crisis," says Dan Geoghegan, chief of the Border Patrol detachment in Puerto Rico. "It's illegal to enter the United States. But you shouldn't have to pay for that with your life."
The Border Patrol launch skips heavily across the 3-foot waves several miles off the Puerto Rican coast as agents Victor Griffin and Richard Muñiz scan the radar screen and the horizon for smugglers' boats.
An informant in the Dominican Republic had reported that a boat stolen from a resort hotel most likely was heading toward U.S. waters filled with migrants. Muñiz turns the launch toward Desecheo Island, a desolate chunk of rock 12 miles offshore that serves as a way station for smugglers' boats waiting to hit the shore in the dark.
Nothing.
"It's an all-out war of hide-and-seek," says Griffin, who supervises the sea patrols.
In addition to the Border Patrol, search planes and helicopters from the Coast Guard and the newly formed Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement fly sorties over the Mona Passage. Coast Guard vessels patrol the waters farther from shore. Units of the Puerto Rican police maritime division join the Border Patrol working along the coast.
The goal is to detain the yolas at sea, ensuring that everyone aboard can be returned safely to the Dominican Republic. Once migrants make shore, officials say, finding and detaining them proves far more difficult.
But interdictions at sea are the exception.
Many smugglers paint their boats the blue-green of the sea. They pull blue tarps over their human cargo and cut their engines to lower the boat's wake, making visual sightings from a plane chancy at best. The yolas' low profile -- most rise just a foot or two above the water line -- make radar detection hit or miss.
Smugglers usually time their trips to arrive under cover of darkness. They vary landing sites, trying for isolated beaches with quick access to woods or highways that offer escape routes for the passengers.
"I never knew exactly where I was going to land. We are always improvising," says Chimico, the former smuggler. "There aren't enough officials on either side of the Mona to stop us."
The call comes a little before noon: Someone reports that a yola had landed on an Atlantic coast beach about 15 miles from the Border Patrol station.
Agents scramble. The station's helicopter takes off. But by the time patrols reach the site, the 20 or more migrants believed to have been aboard the boat already had disappeared into the tangled, thorny woods behind the beach.
"They hit the jungle, and it's tough getting them out," says Geoghegan, the Border Patrol chief.
Agents fan out into the jungle. They methodically beat undergrowth, check culverts and caves, scan the distant treelines.
After nearly five hours, six Dominicans have been captured. The others have vanished.
Among those caught is Luis Concepcion, an unemployed construction worker. He says he's done with the yolas.
"We were just trying to get work for our family," Concepcion, 25, says of the boat's migrants, who spent 36 hours in the passage, the last of them in storm-racked seas. "But we suffered so much on the trip across, and now to get caught like this."
Border Patrol agents just shrug. Concepcion may not try again, but many migrants do.
Back home in Miches with her family, Epifania de los Santos says she dreams of daring the sea again -- but in the proper circumstances with the right boat. The money to be made across the water is too good, the opportunities at home too few.
"People aren't going to stop taking yolas," she says. "Because of this situation, of this life that we have. People will always be sailing."
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