The Miami Herald
March 9, 1999
 
 
Haitian families cling to hope for survivors

             By YVES COLON and ANDRES VIGLUCCI
             Herald Staff Writers

             All day long, Haitian immigrants who believe their relatives were among the 40
             people lost at sea in a weekend smuggling disaster streamed in to a small
             community center in Delray Beach on Monday, clutching photographs and clinging
             to the slim hope that their loved ones are alive.

             Or at the very least that their bodies would be recovered for burial.

             There was, sad to say, no news on either count.

             ``I don't know whether she was there, whether she is alive,'' said a blank-faced
             Marie-Denise Bastien, who fears her 21-year-old sister was one of the two
             women whose bodies were found at sea by the Coast Guard on Saturday. ``I'm
             just trying to find out. I have very little hope.''

             In response to pleas from South Florida's Haitian community, the Coast Guard
             sent a helicopter aloft Monday afternoon to search between Florida and the
             Bahamas, where two small boats carrying the Haitians are believed to have sunk.

             But Coast Guard officials, who had suspended an intensive air-and-sea search just
             after midnight Saturday, said they saw nothing by early evening Monday. Although
             they planned to launch another chopper for a night search, they said the medical
             probability of finding anyone alive was nil.

             However, investigators trying to learn who was behind the ill-fated smuggling
             venture were following a tantalizing lead: two trucks with empty boat trailers
             discovered at what may have been the launch point on Grand Bahama Island.
             Investigators were also looking into a report from the Bahamas of an overdue boat
             that matches the description given by survivors of one of the smuggling vessels.

             Authorities believe the two boats -- about 20 feet and 17 feet -- were traveling
             together, but say that contradictory versions from the three survivors have made it
             difficult to ascertain details.

             One survivor, in a telephone interview Monday from the Krome immigration
             detention center, insisted the boat he took left from Haiti, not the Bahamas. He
             met a survivor in the water in the pitch dark as they clung to a piece of debris, but
             he didn't know if the other man was from a second vessel.

             ``I don't know anything about a second boat,'' said Peter Pierre, 26. ``There might
             have been a second boat, but I did not see it.''

             Pierre said he was in a gas-powered wooden boat carrying about 25 other people
             that left his hometown of St. Marc in western Haiti on Feb. 28. The boat stopped
             in several places to refuel, but he did not know where. Nor did he know the
             names of his fellow passengers, he said.

             The dearth of information sowed anxiety among those waiting for news at the
             Haitian American Community Council in Delray Beach.

             Like others gathered at the council's offices in a small house by the railroad tracks,
             Bastien first heard the news of the sinking in a frantic call from Haiti: Her sister,
             Guerline Joseph, left home Feb. 20 bound for Florida and had not been heard
             from since.

             Her family fears the worst. In an interview on Creole-language radio, one of the
             survivors, Yvon Pierre-Louis, said he had tried to save a young woman on his
             boat who was from the small town of Pont Benoit, in Haiti's agricultural Artibonite
             region.

             That is her family's hometown, said Bastien, 27, who came from Haiti on a boat
             just four months ago, following the same time-tested smuggling route through the
             Bahamas that investigators believe the doomed group used.

             But Bastien, anxiously wringing her hands in her lap, said she tried to persuade her
             sister not to come, telling her how terrified she was when the boat carrying her
             stalled for three days at sea. So did the younger woman's fiance, Fremio Basse, a
             legal resident alien who told her to wait for a visa.

             ``She was hot to leave,'' he said. ``She went to wait in line for the visa, and it didn't
             work out. When I called her back in Haiti recently, she told me she was trying to
             go the shorter route.''

             The weekend's tragedy comes amid a sharp rise in the numbers of Haitians and
             Cubans apprehended at sea by the Coast Guard or making land on South Florida
             shores. Advocates say a political crisis in Haiti, complicated by worsening crime
             and job opportunities, are driving many to place their fate in smugglers' hands.

             In the Artibonite valley, Bastien said, Hurricane Georges decimated farmlands last
             year, forcing many to emigrate.

             The Coast Guard was alerted to Saturday's disaster at 2 a.m., when sailors on the
             Malta-registered Tomis Faith radioed that they heard screams in the water.
             Authorities initially said survivors claimed that a boat carrying 18 people started
             taking on water.

             But Coast Guard spokesman Marcus Woodring said Monday there may actually
             have been a fire on that boat. A second boat traveling with the first group, and
             carrying 20 men and five women, came over to help, he said. When passengers on
             the first boat boarded the second, it sank in the 70-degree water.

             By 8:30 a.m., the Coast Guard had rescued three men and recovered two bodies.
             Two other bodies were sighted, but sank. At midnight, after concluding that
             anyone in the water that long would have perished of hypothermia, Woodring said,
             the Coast Guard called off the search.

             That decision came under heated criticism Monday from Haitian community
             advocates, who accused the Coast Guard in a private meeting of discriminating
             against Haitian refugees by suspending the search sooner than they would have for
             other nationalities.

             ``That is absolutely ridiculous,'' Woodring said. ``The Coast Guard does not
             discriminate. I was stunned.''

             Woodring also noted that, as a matter of policy, the Coast Guard searches only
             for survivors, not bodies.

             ``They were not happy with that policy,'' Woodring said, referring to the activists.
             ``We search for people who may be alive. We cannot search for bodies. It would
             be an impossibility to do that with the resources that we have.''

             In a gesture of goodwill, he said, the Coast Guard agreed to launch two
             helicopters, one equipped with special night-vision equipment.
 

 

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