Q24N (VozdeAmerica) BOGOTA — Some eight migrants were rescued this week by the Colombian Navy after being abandoned by traffickers on the small island of Cayo Pescador, near the San Andrés (a small Colombian island off Nicaragua in the Caribbean), an event that is not isolated and is part of a growing number of incidents that highlight the risks faced by people on this irregular migration route to the United States.
In 2023, some 500 migrants were found shipwrecked or adrift on the high seas as a result of strong waves caused by adverse weather conditions. So far in 2024, the Colombian Navy has rescued 224 migrants.
In addition, 70 people are missing after setting sail on illegal boats from San Andrés bound for Central America, according to official data.
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The well-known “VIP route,” as the Colombian Attorney General’s Office has called it, is perceived by migrants as a “safer” route to the US border than the dangerous Darien jungle between Colombia and Panama.
This is the case of Dennis Paredes, a Venezuelan migrant who lived in Peru and took this route in the hope of reaching the US. However, Paredes never reached his destination. The illegal boat he was traveling on disappeared in the waters of San Andrés in October 2023.
A “man charged my husband US$2,600 from Colombia to the US. The route he offered my husband was the San Andrés route, which was supposedly a safe and fast route, because he told him that in three hours he would be in Nicaragua, and from there the entire journey would be by land,” Nelly Durán, Dennis Paredes’ wife, told the Voz de America.
Since then, Durán, along with 70 other families of missing people in these waters, have begun the search for their loved ones, for which they created the NGO Milve or International Committee of Relatives and Friends of Missing Venezuelan Migrants.
Lieutenant Jhonny de Jesús Saltarín told VOA that despite the risks of sudden changes in the waves due to weather conditions, people continue to choose this route and assume the risk of their boats disappearing at sea.
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“The irregular migration dynamic continues, especially due to the situation in Panama. Boats with more than 30 people no longer set sail, as occurred in previous years; now they travel in smaller groups, of 10 or 8 people,” said Saltarín, head of operations at the San Andrés Coast Guard Station.
In this regard, the Missing Migrants Program of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) points out that, in addition to the natural conditions that cause shipwrecks and disappearances, many of these are the responsibility of traffickers.
Nelly Durán blames these mafias for the disappearance of her husband. “We have joined the families of other boats and there we realized that this is a modus operandi: in San Andrés, the coyotes, the guides, handpick which boat passes and which does not,” she said.
The IOM adds that it has documented 105 reports of disappearances on the route from San Andrés to Nicaragua, many of which would have been forced disappearances by illegal groups dedicated to human trafficking.
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In this context, Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro announced on Wednesday that he had agreed with his Panamanian counterpart, José Raúl Mulino, to “evaluate” a legal route to regulate the passage of migrants through the Darien Gap, in order to prevent them from falling into the hands of mafia networks and human traffickers in that region of the continent.
“They want to build a single legal route, controlled by the two governments, that offers incentives for those who wish to cross to choose that route and not fall into the hands of the mafias. I think it is an idea that we can continue to develop,” said the Colombian president.
For her part, the expert in international migration and director of the Human Rights Research Group of the University of Rosario, María Teresa Palacios, warned that the risks faced by migrants on these routes “will persist” because the “structural conditions of inequality, lack of opportunities and access to rights for migrants from Latin American countries have not disappeared.”
“Let us remember that most of our countries have inequality patterns in terms of economic growth and job integration, which drives people to seek a better tomorrow,” Palacios concluded.
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