Vol. 71/No. 22      June 4, 2007

“Our boat flipped over and they just left us out there,” said Dona Daniel, 23, to the Associated Press. Daniel is one of the 78 survivors who were locked up in a detention center and then sent back to Haiti. “We thought they were bringing us to shore, but they took us further out to sea.”

Daniel’s two brothers drowned. Sixty-one bodies were recovered. More than a dozen are still missing.

Lovderson Nacon, 19, told the Associated Press how the patrol boat ran over people after they were tossed into the water. “The people who knew how to swim lived. The people who didn’t drowned.”

Other survivors described how police beat them back with clubs as they tried to pull themselves aboard the cop boat.

The Turks and Caicos Islands is a British colony in the Caribbean north of Haiti and east of Cuba.

The Miami Herald reported May 11, “Haitian immigrants form an essential low-income work force here, [in the Turks and Caicos] laboring to build luxurious beachfront homes, collect trash and carry suitcases for tourists. Many say allegations in the capsizing underscored their belief that they get treated like second-class citizens compared to locals, known in the Turks and Caicos as ‘belongers.’”

The Turk and Caicos government disputed the migrants’ accounts. They and the British government are investigating.  
 
 
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