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Boat capsizes off Colombia, 100 killed

More than 100 people were feared dead after a boat laden with emigrants capsized and sank in rough waters in the Pacific Ocean, officials said after only nine survivors clinging to a wooden box and buoys were rescued.

Ecuadorean Navy Captain Armando Elizalde told Colombian RCN television on Wednesday that most of the 113 people aboard "sank with the boat."

The disaster that hit the boat -- whose passengers were believed to be heading for the US -- occurred Friday night more than 160km 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 and on Wednesday returned to Ecuador, their faces scorched and peeling from sunburn.

The youngest survivor was 15 year-old Rosa Cuzco, while the others were mostly in their 20s.

Julio Cisalima, 25, said he held onto a gas container to keep afloat.

"The boat tipped, there were lots of people. We then spent two days at sea and had to swim a lot," he told Ecuadorean television.

Another survivor, whose name was not given, said he held on to a buoy.

"I jumped from the boat and I saw a buoy ... and I grabbed hold of it," he told Colombia's Caracol television. "There was a little bag of water floating and that's what we were surviving on."

The Colombian Navy said the immigrants' boat was meant to hold only 15 people. A Colombian Navy plane and 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 US.

Immigrant traffickers often use Ecuador's coast as a launching point, frequently taking illegal aliens to Guatemala or Mexico, who then travel overland into the US.

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 tied to a float marking one of his long fishing lines.

The migrants said that they had paid traffickers as much as US$3,000 each as a down payment for the trip, with a promise to pay another US$7,000 more after completing the journey. But the boat's crew abandoned them at sea after the engine failed.

In August last year, a US Coast Guard ship intercepted a disabled Ecuadorean boat carrying 106 illegal immigrants from Ecuador. The Coast Guard boarded the 12m fishing boat some 665km off Ecuador's Pacific coast. The drifting boat had apparently been abandoned by its crew.

Rear Admiral 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 US.

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 20m in length.

Jorge Altamirano, port chief in Esmeraldas, said the nine survivors on Wednesday were transferred on Tuesday to the Ecuadorean Coast Guard vessel 24 de Mayo from the Don Felix, the fishing boat that found the survivors.
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