Posted on 08/17/2005 1:51:34 PM PDT by Brooklyn Kid
100 Missing After Boat Sinks in Pacific
By ANDREW SELSKY, Associated Press Writer
More than 100 people were feared dead after a boat laden with illegal immigrants capsized and sank in rough waters in the Pacific Ocean, officials said Wednesday after nine survivors clinging to a wooden box and buoys were rescued.
Ecuadorean Navy Capt. Armando Elizalde told Colombian RCN television most of the 113 people aboard "sank with the boat."
The disaster happened Friday night more than 100 miles off the coast of southwest Colombia.
"The boat, with way too many people aboard, was unable to resist a strong wave and it tipped over," Elizalde said, adding that most of those aboard were in the ship's hold when it capsized and couldn't escape. Thirteen people emerged on the surface but four of them later slipped under the waves, he said.
An Ecuadorean fishing boat found the survivors — seven men and two women — on Sunday, Elizalde said. They were later transferred to an Ecuadorean Coast Guard cutter.
The Colombian Navy said one of its planes and a boat were being deployed in a search-and-rescue operation. Ecuador's Coast Guard was also participating.
The disaster highlighted the perilous journey that migrants seeking to escape poverty in their homeland undertake to reach the United States.
Immigrant traffickers often use Ecuador's coast as a launching point, frequently taking illegal aliens to Guatemala or Mexico, who then travel overland and cross the Rio Grande into the United States.
Last May, a Costa Rican fisherman rescued 88 would-be migrants from Ecuador and Peru from their foundering vessel after he found a message in a bottle they had tossed into the water, attached to a long line.
The migrants said that they had paid traffickers as much as $3,000 each as a down payment for the trip, with a promise to pay another $7,000 more upon completing the journey. But the boat's crew abandoned them at sea after the engine failed.
In August 2004, a U.S. Coast Guard ship intercepted a disabled Ecuadorean boat carrying 106 illegal immigrants from Ecuador. The Coast Guard boarded the 40-foot fishing boat some 415 miles off Ecuador's Pacific coast. The drifting boat had apparently been abandoned by its crew.
Rear Adm. Eduardo Navas, general director of Ecuador's merchant marines, said those aboard the boat that sank in the nighttime darkness Friday, plunging the occupants into the cold waters of the Pacific, were presumably heading to the United States.
The passengers had departed from a beach near Esmeraldas, on Ecuador's northern coast.
Navas told Ecuadorean TV it was "a crime to have placed" so many Ecuadoreans in such a small boat, measuring no more than 65 feet in length.
Jorge Altamirano, port chief in Esmeraldas, said the nine survivors on Wednesday were transferred on Tuesday to the Ecuadorean Coast Guard vessel Mayo from the Don Felix, the fishing boat that found the survivors.
____
Associated Press reporter Edison Lopez contributed to this report from Quito, Ecuador.
More victims of lax U.S. boarder security policy. :(
No big loss.
God rest their souls.
These people were lied to and tricked. If only they could come to see that changing their own corrupt countries is the solution.
Pure greed takes advantage of ignorance. If it was known throughout the third world that America would actually enforce its immigration laws, tragedies like this would happen less often.
ping
. . and I lay this directly at the feet of the OBL . .
======================================
Immigrant traffickers often use Ecuador's coast as a launching point, frequently taking illegal aliens to Guatemala or Mexico, who then travel overland and cross the Rio Grande into the United States.
The mighty sea is doing what president Bush won't.
The migrants said that they had paid traffickers as much as $3,000 each as a down payment for the trip, with a promise to pay another $7,000 more upon completing the journey.
If it weren't for the promise of easy access to the USA they might not throw away their life savings to risk death.
They were illegal aliens being transported and smuggled into the United States.
I'll be looking for news releases with regrets to the families.
ping
Pretty callous.
If that's "poverty", I'm Elvis Presley.
But typical for most on this forum.
They're human beings!
Yes, God rest their soulds. Your compassionate response says much about you. I also agree with the rest of your post.
For anyone who still doesn't get it, we have criminal regimes/countries so dangerous and oppressive in our back yard that their refugees are fleeing, risking life to escape. And where are they sending their surplus goods? Aren't you feeling just a little bit used yet?
Not in his mind nor the minds of many on FR. Just look at the types of comments made on a daily basis by people of his mentality. "Turd world counties", comparing Mexicans to an infestation, and my personal favorite, saying the only solution to illegal immigration is "a bloody genocidal war".
Wrong. It's a horrible loss of their life. Their life is as important as yours or mine. And they are more important than the chattel they are used as by their country and too many in our own.
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