Nearly 300 Haitians fleeing the poverty of their earthquake-ravaged homeland have been stuck for a month in the Peruvian Amazon, where a gate to what they saw as a better life in Brazil has abruptly closed.
Mostly educated and in their 20s, they have taken refuge in a stuffy church in the Peruvian border town of Inapari since Brazil stationed federal police along the border early last month to stop a wave of illegal immigration.
The 273 Haitians in Inapari sold all their belongings and paid big fees to unscrupulous travel agents to fly to Peru through Panama or Ecuador. They planned to cross overland into Brazil, where a growing economy has attracted about 4,500 desperate Haitians since the earthquake two years ago — only to find that the border was closed when they arrived.
Photo: Reuters
“We don’t have money and we are so far from Haiti ... we just ask Brazil to let us in,” said Joniel Clervil, 22, speaking in the English he learned in university before the January 2010 disaster ended his studies.
Having run out of cash, the group is relying on donations of rice and beans from the Brazilian border town of Assis Brasil. It is not clear if they will eventually be able to stay in Brazil or Peru, or be deported.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, in an attempt to manage the influx and discourage “coyotes” who take advantage of the immigrants, said during a visit to Haiti on Feb. 1 that her country would award 100 humanitarian visas per month in Port-au-Prince in the next five years, while tightening border security.
Brazil also has said it would give humanitarian visas to all Haitians already in Brazil, but that future migrants would be turned back at the border unless they had obtained proper visas before leaving Haiti.
Peruvian President Ollanta Humala has tried to help shut down what the governments regards as a human trafficking route by signing a decree last month requiring Haitians to obtain a tourist visa before entering Peru.
The Haitians stuck in Peru left home before the changes took effect and they are now in bureaucratic limbo. The governments say they will hold a meeting next week where they could decide the Haitians’ fate.
Brazil has Latin America’s largest economy and it now faces a very “First World” problem as a place that draws immigrants looking for work. It is increasingly viewed as an alternative to the US, which has stepped up deportations of undocumented immigrants during the worst economic downturn since World War II.
Rene Salizar, a Peruvian priest, said Brazil’s clampdown was inevitable. He said there has been a constant stream of Haitians at the border since a magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed 300,000 people and left 1.5 million homeless in Haiti two years ago.
“I saw this coming more than a year ago. Groups of between five and 20 were arriving daily,” said Salizar, who has arranged for the Haitians to stay in the town’s church and his house.
Brazil’s ties to the poorest country in the Americas grew after it led a UN peacekeeping mission to Haiti as part of a broader push to assert itself as a global leader.
“Brazil has a commitment to help the Haitian people and their country ... this includes those Haitians who want to come work in Brazil — so long as it’s within a limit that can be absorbed by the labor market,” Brazilian Ambassador to Peru Carlos Alfredo Lazary Teixeira said.
Stories of ample jobs, especially in construction as Brazil gears up to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, led the Haitians to fly-by-night travel agencies that promised them passage into Brazil for US$3,000.
There is a chance Brazil could allow the Haitians to apply for humanitarian visas at the Brazilian embassy in Lima, but most of the Haitians do not have the two soles (US$0.74) hotels in Inapari charge to use the bathroom. None of them have the bus fare.
“My mother sold everything she had to pay for this trip,” Esther Pierre, 26, said in her native Kreyol. “If I go back now, how am I going to help my family?”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver