Dominican Bones Line Pathway to States

Mauricio Nunez saw the 10-foot wall of water that would kill more than 40 fellow Dominicans, and he finally knew the true madness of their quest.

Theirs was a dream turned to obsession that had brought death to scores before them.

The 38-year-old orthopedic technician was packed into a wooden canoe with 75 other Dominicans: students, secretaries, homemakers and professionals. They had spent at least $700 each, traveled all night in an overcrowded bus, gone hungry for two days on a deserted beach and headed out across the 70 miles of swelling seas toward Puerto Rico. Now it would end just 15 minutes off the Dominican shore.

This is what life--and death--is like on the most dangerous and second-most-traveled back route into the United States.

It is a journey driven by ambition, orchestrated by organized crime, sanctioned by corruption and perverted by middle-class values gone awry. By all accounts, the flow has added thousands of illegal migrants to the U.S. population in recent years, both on the mainland and in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

This clandestine route, little-known outside the Caribbean, is traveled mostly by Dominicans. It carries them across the Mona Passage to Puerto Rico, and then, for many, on to the U.S. city of their choice. Flights to the mainland from Puerto Rico are domestic, requiring a minimum of documentation that is easily forged back home.

U.S. officials say the 1 million Dominicans in the United States constitute the largest migrant community in proportion to a homeland’s population; the Dominican Republic has 8.2 million people.

This Caribbean path to the promised land also draws human cargo from as far away as Turkey, Pakistan and China, swelling the ranks of more than 100,000 illegal immigrants in the Dominican Republic itself. The Asians often must remain here for years, raising money and making contacts for the costly passage to Puerto Rico.

Closely linked to the growing, multibillion-dollar cocaine-smuggling trade that runs from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico and then on to the mainland, the human traffic--carried on motor-driven canoes known as yolas--generates an estimated $200 million a year, corrupting Dominican officials who are bribed to aid or ignore the trade.

This flesh trade has defied the best U.S. efforts to curb it, including frequent Immigration and Naturalization Service crackdowns here and in Puerto Rico, intensified Coast Guard operations in Mona Passage and beefed-up Border Patrol contingents.

Statistics have varied wildly from year to year and from U.S. agency to agency--for example, arrests dropped to about 2,000 in fiscal year 1997 compared with nearly 8,000 the previous year--but most officials agree that the more than 30,000 Dominicans arrested by U.S. authorities since 1992 attempting the journey are a fraction of those who succeeded.

In recent months, U.S. officials said, statistics indicate that the traffic is increasing--even after such potential deterrents as the mass drownings in March. The Coast Guard and Border Patrol arrested more than 1,500 migrants along the route during the past six months, nearing the 1,900 arrests logged during the entire previous year.

Dominican, U.S. and European analysts blame the increased traffic at least in part on a fast-growing Dominican economy that has enriched its wealthy and left the hopes and expectations of the nation’s middle class and poor far behind.

“The Dominicans who migrate illegally don’t do so because they’re starving to death here,” said Dominican analyst and publisher Anibal de Castro. “Relatively speaking, they’re poor, but they don’t go abroad because of the present. It’s because of the future. They have no hope that tomorrow will be better than today.”

“It’s a very complex situation,” added Paolo Oberti, resident coordinator of the United Nations’ development programs here. “People feel that the economy is growing well, but people’s pockets aren’t doing well at all.”

Boom Touches Few

In fact, last year’s 8.2% growth rate for the Dominican economy ranked among the world’s highest, and the government is projecting an additional 5% to 6% growth this year. But that growth mostly has been in financial sectors that create few jobs and touch few middle-class lives, let alone the 60% of Dominicans who live in extreme poverty.

As a result, the yola trade that Dominican illegal migrants use to escape that economic cycle attracts a vastly different clientele than the far more trafficked route across the U.S.-Mexican border. The Dominicans’ back door route is frequented by better-off, better-educated illegal migrants, including professionals such as Nunez, the orthopedic technician who tried the March crossing only after his wife had failed on four previous attempts.

It also is far more dangerous and arduous than crossing California’s southern border. Although there are no accurate statistics for the death toll in Mona Passage, Dominican navy and U.S. Coast Guard captains say they have found human bones littering the small shoals and islets between the Dominican and Puerto Rican shores.

Most Dominicans who succeed in landing in Puerto Rico, unlike many of their Mexican counterparts, never intend to leave U.S. territory. Once in the commonwealth, the illegal migrants can board a flight to anywhere in the United States without immigration documents, as one would on any domestic U.S. flight.

“By and large, Dominicans go to the United States because they want work, and they find jobs in niches where Americans don’t want to work,” said Edwin Cubbison, the U.S. consul general in Santo Domingo, whose visa section ranks among the world’s busiest. “But in New York City, they’re welcomed, and they quickly put down roots there.”

The sheer crush of Dominicans seeking to enter the United States legally each year helps explain the thriving, illegal yola trade.

In fiscal 1997, Cubbison’s consulate handled 152,049 cases of Dominicans seeking immigrant or visitor visas. About half of them were refused--many after State Department anti-fraud investigators based here found sophisticated forgeries of official birth, marriage and other documents that reflect a counterfeit trade that also is booming.

“We’re awash in these documents,” Cubbison said. “We’ve had people who literally falsified themselves out of existence in the process of creating new identities for themselves to get a visa.”

“And many times, when we tell someone they’ve been rejected, they just laugh and say, ‘Hey, no problem, I’ll just take a yola,’ ” said one anti-fraud investigator who asked not to be named.

Added a prominent Dominican analyst: “If today, the U.S. government says all Dominicans who want to come can do so, this country would empty out.

“For the yola passengers, Puerto Rico isn’t the promised land; it’s a bridge to the United States,” said the analyst, Miguel Guerrero, who is a former spokesman for Dominican President Leonel Fernandez. “The Dominicans aren’t going to Puerto Rico to stay there. They’re headed for Chicago, New York or Miami. And they’re going because they believe--falsely--that there’s more for them there than here.”

Hard Lessons

Jose Luis Cosme is among the growing ranks of Dominicans who say they learned the hard way that the great American dream is, for them, a nightmare. The lesson was reinforced when Cosme’s niece left unannounced to join the ill-fated yola trip that also carried Nunez.

Carmen Rosario Cosme, 22, was one of those who drowned when the 10-foot wave swamped the yola March 21. Her uncle, President Fernandez’s civilian representative in Nagua, wept as he recalled how a single journey plunged his family and this town on the northern Dominican coast into despair.

“She didn’t need to go,” Jose Cosme said. “She had two jobs. She was a secretary in the local courthouse and a public school teacher. Her income was more than good. But she didn’t tell anyone she was going.”

If she had asked, Cosme would have told her of his own life working in a supermarket and in other odd jobs in Manhattan’s embattled Washington Heights neighborhood, the Dominican community’s drug- and crime-plagued heartland in the United States.

But Cosme, who has earned U.S. residency status that allows him to travel legally to the United States, said he has no plans to go back.

“The most important thing that creates this illusion of a dream are the Dominicans who live in the United States for many years and, when they come back here to visit, they’re covered with gold chains and gold rings and buying new cars,” the 35-year-old said. “We see this and believe the life there is paradise. But it’s false.

“My life there was much worse, much poorer, much more desperate than here. It’s a false dream.”

That’s what Felix Giro tried to tell his wife, Margarita Roja Ulloa, when she decided to take the same yola in March. The couple fought about it for weeks, as the wife of Nagua’s master auto mechanic sold used clothes and borrowed money for the fare--and her death.

“I told her, ‘You make the decision. The responsibility is yours. But I’m telling you not to go because you don’t need to go. I make a decent living. And what of our three children? They need a mother,’ ” the 30-year-old Giro recalled. “Now, they have none.

“Look, I do want to go to the United States. I have a brother in Philadelphia. He’s been there for seven years. But I’m patient. I don’t want to go illegally--never, never, never. My children need at least a father.”

Mauricio Nunez said it took the horror of his three days en route to convince him. The hospital technician and his wife, registered nurse Maria Estela Bautista, said they decided Nunez should attempt the journey after she was caught and sent back by U.S. Border Patrol officers during earlier tries.

“We thought she had bad luck. Maybe mine would be better,” Nunez recalled in the couple’s small but tidy home. “Of course, we were wrong.”

‘The Trip From Hell’

Nunez’s voice broke as he narrated what he called “the trip from hell.” Most who ended up aboard the yola were from Nagua and began their journey three days before more than half of them would die. They packed into a bus at 2 a.m. and journeyed through the night to the southeastern coastal town of La Romana--one of the principal yola launching sites.

They pushed off before dawn in the 30-foot yola that police later learned was built in only three days and powered by a 70 horsepower outboard motor. Heavy seas forced them to stop on the nearby Dominican island of Isla Saona, where they spent two days without food and water. Fifteen minutes after they set off again, they were swamped by the towering wave.

“Five of us found each other in the water,” Nunez recalled. “We swam for 16 hours until we reached shore. But only two of us made it. We watched our three companeros go down.”

News of mass drownings caused hardly a ripple outside the Dominican Republic, but it triggered an outcry at home: Survivors accused a Dominican naval officer of assisting the journey’s organizers, and Fernandez’s government launched an investigation that targeted top migrant smugglers for the first time.

Dominican authorities recently arrested the man they identify as the chief organizer of that and dozens of other yola trips. The suspect had escaped from a Puerto Rican jail last year, where he was serving a 10-year sentence for smuggling drugs, Dominican officials said.

The naval officer also was arrested. Several recruiters--known here as buscones--were indicted, as were the two yola captains, who are fugitives. Witnesses alleged that one of the captains grabbed a plastic tank that a female passenger was using to stay afloat after the yola capsized. The woman drowned, according to the Dominican indictment.

“I think this case is a big blow to the yola trade,” said Francisco Dominguez Brito, the chief prosecutor in Santo Domingo, who is leading the investigation. “Of course, it’s all up to the judge now. But we’re charging these organizers with manslaughter, and hopefully that will have a deterrent effect.”

Recent evidence suggests otherwise.

A few days after the drownings, even as Nagua mourned its dead, residents say another group left town for Puerto Rico. And in the weeks since, the Border Patrol has found several abandoned yolas on Puerto Rican shores--left behind by those who had made it at least partway to their dream.

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Perilous Passage

The most dangerous and second-most-traveled back route into the U.S. carries Dominicans and others across the swelling seas of the Mona Passage to Puerto Rico.