Rosa Javier was hesitant to celebrate when police phoned to say her husband and nephew survived three weeks adrift in the Caribbean Sea, while all the other 49 voyagers are assumed dead.
“I feel some relief, but so many lives were lost,” said Javier, whose 19-year-old nephew Reynaldo Ramirez and husband Diomito Rodriguez had set off from the Dominican Republic on Nov. 13 in search of higher-paying jobs in Puerto Rico.
Dominican officials continued searching on Saturday for the missing migrants in waters just south of Haiti’s coast, where the boat was found adrift on Friday morning.
On Friday, two fishermen said they had found the survivors, naked and only able to pronounce a few words before passing out.
Rodriguez and Ramirez were being treated on Saturday for severe dehydration and burns. Authorities were waiting to talk with them once their health improved.
Javier said her nephew and husband were making their first trip abroad, hoping to escape the poverty that afflicts a fourth of the people in the country of 9.5 million.
“He told me he wanted to do something, to be someone,” she said of her husband. “I told him not to leave.”
The survivors were from San Francisco de Macoris, an agricultural center that produces the majority of the country’s rice.
“Desperation has forced people to leave,” Javier said.
The father of Reynaldo Ramirez said shortly after the rescue that he had never lost hope.
“Everybody would say that they were gone, that the sea had taken them,” Bernardo Ramirez said. “People would ask me how my heart felt, and I would tell them that my heart felt that he was still alive.”
Hundreds of migrants have died in recent years while trying to cross the treacherous Mona Passage that separates the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
Just weeks ago, five Dominican migrants survived and 28 others died on another boat. The survivors said they ate the flesh of a dead migrant, and were later charged with involuntary manslaughter for helping organize an illegal trip.
The US Coast Guard estimates that the number of Dominicans attempting to come to Puerto Rico declined over past five years, to an estimated 3,000 last year from roughly 10,000.
The trend reflected a relative strengthening of the Dominican economy, but fewer visitors are coming to the tourism-dependent country this year as the world economy falters.
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
RSS