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?”
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to