Posted on 10/20/2007 10:12:37 AM PDT by SwinneySwitch
MEXICO CITY — The bodies of two dozen people washed ashore Friday in southern Mexico, a state official said, after a boat believed to be carrying Central American migrants capsized in the Pacific Ocean.
Oaxaca's state government later released a statement saying three people were confirmed dead and 20 others missing following the shipwreck. It said there was one survivor and authorities were searching for bodies near the towns of San Francisco Ixhuatan and San Francisco del Mar, about 200 miles from the Guatemalan border.
It wasn't immediately possible to reconcile the different statements, but an official said that flooding was impeding access to some of the remote beaches.
Sergio Segreste, the Oaxaca state public safety secretary, said 24 bodies had washed ashore.
"This morning, we got a report that a vessel carrying undocumented migrants had capsized or gone down," Segreste said. "The assumption is that the cause of the accident was the rough weather."
Segreste later said authorities had found two bodies in the community of Pueblo Viejo based on information from a woman who survived the wreck.
The survivor was a 24-year-old Honduran woman who said the ship departed from Guatemala and that it capsized on Tuesday with more than 20 people aboard, according to Moises Hernandez, regional commander for ministerial police in Oaxaca.
Segreste said the local government in San Francisco del Mar reported that it had found 22 more bodies on the shore. But he added that public safety officers hadn't been able to access the area because two rivers had flooded there.
If confirmed to be migrants, it could be evidence that smugglers are increasingly turning to boats to transport Central Americans through Mexico, avoiding highway checkpoints.
Many illegal migrants have been stranded and looking for other ways north since service was interrupted this year on two railway lines they once used to hitch rides north on freight trains.
In August, thousands of U.S.-bound Central American migrants found themselves stranded near the Guatemala border after Connecticut-based Genesee & Wyoming Inc. withdrew from a 30-year concession to operate the Chiapas-Mayab line. For decades, migrants had relied on the train to carry them from to the U.S./Mexico border.
Ping!
If you want on, or off this S. Texas/Mexico ping list, please FReepMail me.
Bush’s Fault.
One can only hope this gets widespread coverage in the Guatemalan media as a warning to the next contingent.
Uh oh. I see it coming... lawsuits, ‘cause we don’t build man-made sand islands every few hundred yards offshore.
(just as we had lawsuits because we didn’t leave gallon bottles of water every few hundred yards in the desert).
Sad thing.
We can only hope it was loaded with molesters, rapists, and murderers, and not ordinary folks just looking for a better life for themselves and their families.
The RATS keep telling us what a horrible country we live in, and here are people risking, and in this case losing, their very lives, JUST TO GET HERE for a chance to make it.
The RATS are truly filled with venom and evil.
Outright invasion! And our Federal Government is doing little to stop it or discourage it.
A point that we should not miss which can be inferred from the article - Mexico is MUCH stricter with illegals on its southern border than we are on ours, exercising an incredible double standard when complaining about how we restrict their citizens trying to cross into the US.
Seems to me that Guatemalans and others heading north were fine - as long as they traveled all the way THROUGH Mexico on a US-owned and operated rail system. Now that their passage isn't so fluid and they might actually have trouble getting to the northern Mexican border, Mexican officials have begun to give them a much harder time - hence the boats.
Mexico throws fits concerning the "abuse" of theirs trying to get into the US, but Guatemalans et al - don't you dare enter Mexico illegally.
“Mexican Olympic Long-Distance Medley Swimmers Float Ashore!”
That caught my eye too. But Mexico raises a fuss if we do the same thing.
This time it really is. His encouragement of illegals led to this.
Too bad the Mexicans don’t have a source of cheap labor to build those sand islands for them.
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