A boatload of Haitian refugees founders in the Florida surf
It was near dawn and La Nativité, a rickety 30-ft. wooden sailboat crammed with 63 Haitian refugees, was bobbing to ward the Florida coast near Fort Lauderdale. Winds of up to 30 m.p.h. lashed the sea, and waves as high as 5 ft. swept over the homemade vessel. Less than 60 yds. from land, La Nativité was suddenly swamped and its passengers spilled into the sea. Only when survivors, dazed and tearful, were spotted wandering the high way near the wealthy town of Hillsboro Beach did residents realize what had happened. Soon police were dragging the bod ies of the less fortunate refugees out of the surf. The toll: 33 dead, including two pregnant women.
By midmorning, all of the victims had been recovered. Their bodies were laid amid the seaweed on the private beach. Many of the dead had been badly battered and their clothes shredded by the pounding surf. One woman clutched a fist ful of sand. A man had his shirt twisted around his neck. Among the meager belongings washed up on the beach: a copy of the New Testament, wrapped in plastic to protect it from the water. It was the worst such accident since some 50,000 illegal immigrants from the poverty-stricken Caribbean nation began arriving on U.S. shores ten years ago. "It's the kind of thing that was waiting to happen," said Florida Governor Bob Graham. "There probably have been other boatloads lost at sea that we never knew about."
At first, authorities were mystified about the voyage of La Nativité. Two of the survivors, all of whom were brought to Miami's Krome Ave nue North Detention Center, where 1,300 other Haitian refugees are being held, first claimed they had come via the Bahama Islands. They left Cap-Haïtien in northern Haiti on Aug. 26, they said, and spent the next 31 days sailing through the Bahamas; they subsisted by catching crabs to eat and licking the rainfall off leaves, until finally setting off Oct. 18 on the last leg of their journey to the U.S.
Yet autopsies performed by Broward County Medical Examiner Dr. Ronald Wright appeared to tell a different tale. He repotted that most of the dead had eaten a hot meal of pork, chicken and rice less than two hours before they drowned. Since the food could not easily have been cooked on the overcrowded boat, Wright concluded that the Haitians had eaten on a large freighter run by smugglers and then were herded onto La Nativité a few miles from shore. Said Wright: "To me that's hard and fast proof they were dumped off from a mother ship."
That explanation seemed plausible to U.S. officials, who have long suspected that many Haitians pay smugglers $ 1,000 to $2,000 each to make the 600-mile jour ney to Florida. The refugees routinely deny that they bought their passage, but that may be because they will need to rely on the smugglers to bring them back again if they are deported from the U.S.