The phone rang at 3 am. Venezuelan Yermi Santoyo woke up and looked at the screen. It was an unknown number. “Are you Darielvis’ husband?” asked one man in Spanish, after translating what another had said in English in the background. “She’s hurt,” he said.
“Wound? Did he fall into the river?” he asked. “No, no. You have to come,” replied the other, on the phone. “But what happened?”.
“If you want to find out, you have to come here so I can give you a hand,” replied the man.
He hung up. Yermi jumped. give strength? He felt his head spin: he had no idea what he could do.
Yermi had last spoken to his partner, Darielvis Sarabia, two days earlier when she boarded a boat that would take her and her two children from Tucupita, in eastern Venezuela, to Trinidad and Tobago.
Tucupita is the capital of Delta Amacuro, one of the closest Venezuelan provinces to the coast of Trinidad and one of the main departure points for Venezuelans who flee the country by boat to take refuge in the former British colony.
Six million people have fled or emigrated from Venezuela in recent years, an exodus that the United Nations Refugee Agency calls “one of the biggest displacement crises in the world”.
Venezuelan migrants navigate the tributaries of the Orinoco, which cross the geography of the Amacuro Delta and empty into the Caribbean Sea. Because of this, Yermi feared that his wife had fallen into the river.
‘What happened my love?’
Yermi called a friend who lived near his house. They took a bus to Sangre Grande Hospital in northeast Trinidad. They arrived just before dawn, after two and a half hours of travel.
Darielvis was in the emergency room, lying on a gurney, her left shoulder bandaged and her clothes smeared with blood. Two policemen were watching her.
“What happened, my love?” asked Yermi, afraid of the answer. “We lost the child,” she replied, shivering.
She and her children left Venezuela on February 4, 2022, a Friday, when the country’s government celebrated the 30th anniversary of the coup d’état led by former President Hugo Chávez – a milestone for Chavismo as a political movement.
The couple had two children: Danna, two, and Yaelvis, one.
The mother and children navigated the rivers of the Amacuro Delta and waited until Saturday night to set sail. It was easier to evade Trinidad’s patrols in the dark of night.
However, a coast guard vessel intercepted the boat as it approached the coast of Trinidad on Saturday night, February 5th.
Darielvis told her husband that the child was sitting on her lap. The police turned on spotlights and ordered the boat to stop, but the driver got nervous and tried to return.
Shots were fired.
She covered the boy with her body to protect him, but a bullet went through his left shoulder and hit Yaelvis.
“Your little head exploded. I saw it in my hands,” she told her husband.
The crew shouted that there were women and children on the boat and the shooting stopped.
Guards separated Darielvis from her son’s body to take her to the hospital.
Danna, the eldest, stayed with the rest of the boat’s crew.
self defense
A 720-ton, 59-meter-long ship was patrolling the southern coast of Trinidad and Tobago when it detected a vessel that had crossed the border into Venezuelan maritime waters, the Trinidad Coast Guard said in a statement Sunday, February 6.
The ship’s authorities sent a boat to intercept the speedboat.
Agents called the members of the boat through megaphones, honked the horn, pointed the searchlight and launched flares to force the vessel to stop, according to the entity. However, the guard claims that the boat insisted on “escape”.
“The ramming effort of the suspect vessel, which was larger than the ship, caused the crew to fear for their lives and, in self-defense, they fired at the engines of the suspected vessel,” the guard continued.
When the boat stopped, Trinidad Coast Guard officials discovered that there were “illegal migrants on board”, who were not seen because they “remained in hiding”.
They found an “adult illegal migrant” who was bleeding and holding a child. “Unfortunately, the baby did not respond,” the Coast Guard explained.
They were Darielvis and his son Yaelvis.
pray for baby
Days later, a fisherman from Trinidad and Tobago denied the coast guard’s version in a press release from the country, in which he asked to remain anonymous.
The fisherman was traveling with two other people on a boat in the Moruga region, south of Trinidad, when they spotted a boat in trouble.
The crew boarded the fishermen’s vehicle to reach shore, but were intercepted before reaching land.
“We saw this boat, it had no lights or anything. We saw a flare. We didn’t know if it was bandits or the coast guard. With the first flare they launched, we heard several shots,” he told the Trinidadian Guardian newspaper.
“They threw flares and fired shots. After the second flare they sent a third flare where they lit a light on their boat that said Coast Guard Stop.”
According to him, an injured woman stood up. “I saw a big hole in the baby’s head. She was crying. She was bloody,” she added, referring to Darielvis.
Coast Guard officers wore balaclavas, the fisherman said. They approached the boat in two smaller vehicles and targeted the migrants, he says. “They were cursing and demanding drugs and weapons.”
They forced the fishermen to remain on the boat with the child’s body, while the immigrants were transferred to official boats.
“So they called me to go to the front to get the baby and pray for him. I did what they said because I was so scared,” the fisherman told reporters.
‘Why did you have to shoot?’
Former Trinidadian Prime Minister and Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar said she felt “splitting pain” upon learning that the coast guard “shot at an migrant boat, killing a baby”.
“The guard says they came to attack her. They could have taken an evasive action. Why did they have to shoot? Was that what they called reasonable force?”, he asked.
Trinidad Prime Minister Keith Rowley responded in a Facebook post that the border patrol attempted to “stop a ship that refused to respond and acted aggressively in accordance with legal, reasonable and professional orders under the law.” and international protocol”.
And he concluded, in all caps, about the death of Yaelvis: “IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!”.
BBC News Mundo, the BBC’s Spanish service, did not receive a request for an interview with spokespersons for the Coast Guard or the Trinidad and Tobago Ministry of National Security.
Lawyer Nafeesa Mohammed, who specializes in children’s rights, believes that the guard acted without regard to the Convention on the Status of Refugees or the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
“Refugees and asylum seekers are victims and need protection, not persecution,” she said.
“The Coast Guard is in charge of protecting our borders and conducting their affairs in a military manner. They do not respect human rights or humanitarian considerations,” he said.
The Venezuelan government has called for an investigation into Yaelvis’ death.
‘Dad’
The couple and their children lived with Darielvis’ grandmother, who had taken care of her since she was 15, when her mother died of cancer.
Now the grandmother is 80 years old and uses a wheelchair.
By June 2021, Darielvis and the children were so thin that Yermi decided to migrate to Trinidad to look for work in order to send money back home to Venezuela.
He even sold his cell phone to receive the US$ 200 — the money was used to pay for Tucupita’s trip.
Unlike the rest of his family, Yermi managed to make it to Morne Diablo beach, south of Trinidad, undetected.
He worked for eight months in Trinidad as a day laborer on farms.
He called the kids every day, before he left in the morning, at lunchtime, and before bed. He wanted to keep his children from forgetting him.
“Dad,” replied Yaelvis when he last saw Yermi via video call.
When he felt confident enough to ask for a favor, Yermi got a $2,000 loan from his Trinidadian boss to put his wife and children on that boat.
The coyotes transporting Venezuelans from the Amacuro Delta avoid specifying where they will disembark. The maneuvers to avoid “the coast” prevent them from knowing which part of the island passengers will be able to stay.
When they reach the beach, they don’t stop at the shore. Passengers are ordered to jump into the water and disembark, although many cannot swim.
Danna’s Return
“And Danna, where is she?” Yermi asked his wife in the hospital emergency room.
“They took her. Find my girl,” she replied.
The officers told Yermi that he could visit his wife every day between 4pm and 5pm, but for the first three days he was not allowed to see her.
Venezuelan embassy officials accompanied him to look for his daughter Danna. On the third day of the search, they found her at the heliport of Chaguaramas, a military installation where people who enter Trinidad illegally are detained.
Yermi got out of the car and tried to approach the main building in Chaguaramas, but two guards blocked the way.
Danna appeared holding a stranger’s hand. When they gave it to Yermi, the girl started crying and didn’t recognize him. He hugged her and reminded her that he was her father. He said that everything would be fine, that they would be together forever.
The girl had diarrhea in the following days. Yermi wondered if she had been drinking contaminated water. At dawn she would scream and cry, waking up scared with nightmares.
He stopped working while his wife was in the hospital. It took at least two hours to get from the house to the medical center and another two to get back, always accompanied by Danna.
Yermi felt that his wife avoided crying in front of him. She was “strong”, as was Darielvis’ mother when she received cancer treatment.
Although the officers told Yermi that he could accompany Darielvis for at least an hour a day, they did not allow him to stay longer than 30 minutes.
The agents authorized Danna to see her mother. She managed to kiss her and say that she loved her, but the girl didn’t show much interest in the reunion, as if she didn’t recognize her.
Darielvis spent nine days in the hospital, until he underwent shoulder surgery.
As she looked thin and listless, Yermi asked to speak to a doctor. She wanted to know if her blood was normal, to confirm that her body could handle the surgery. However, no one responded.
She recovered from the operation and was released after her son’s funeral.
Of the group that traveled on that boat, Darielvis and his daughter were the only ones who received authorization from the Trinidadian government to remain on the island.
The others were deported by boat to Güiria, a Venezuelan town located 516 kilometers north of Tucupita.
the refuge
The Prime Minister of Trinidad indicated that the island, with a population of 1.39 million, does not have the capacity to receive asylum seekers from Venezuela, a country of 28 million people.
“If you are going to apply for asylum in Trinidad and Tobago, or anywhere else in the world, you have to show that you are personally at risk, under attack because of your race, religion, politics or anything else,” Rowley declared in December 2020. .
“The ambition for a better life through economic change does not apply to asylum anywhere in the world,” he added.
Venezuela has lost four-fifths of its economy as of 2014, the most severe economic contraction in modern Western history.
In this scenario, Delta Amacuro appears as one of the poorest states in Venezuela.
No one dared to tell Darielvis’ grandmother what happened to her great-grandson. She is still waiting for her granddaughter and children to call and tell them about their trip to Trinidad.
