The U.S. Coast Guard announced on Monday that it had rescued at least 40 people after a small boat capsized several miles from Mona Island, a tiny uninhabited islet west of Puerto Rico. Two people were found dead, and survivors reported that an estimated 60 people were aboard when the vessel overturned.
Rescue operations were still underway in the evening, according to the Coast Guard. Survivors had spent more than 12 hours in the open water before a passing boat near Mona Island spotted them around noon and alerted authorities, helping to rescue four people at that moment.
The boat, described as a makeshift vessel, capsized late on Sunday after a fight in which participants were severely injured by a machete. The incident forced the group to abandon the craft without life vests and jump into the water.
It was not immediately clear where the passengers were from. A Coast Guard spokesperson said that information was not available. Migrants fleeing poverty and violence have long crossed the Mona Passage from Hispaniola—shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic—to Puerto Rico and other islands, often on overcrowded, improvised boats that can capsize in rough seas.
This incident follows a series of similar tragedies. In June 2022, 11 Haitian girls and women were buried in Puerto Rico after a grossly overloaded boat they were on capsized northwest of the U.S. territory. Last week, police in the Turks and Caicos Islands detained a makeshift boat carrying 60 Haitian migrants, and in June another 240 migrants from Haiti were detained near the archipelago.
Haiti’s ongoing crisis has seen a record 1.5 million people displaced, with more than 3,050 deaths reported from January to June, according to U.N. statistics. Armed men control an estimated 70 % of Port-au-Prince and large swaths of the country’s central region.
Rescue efforts for the most recent capsizing remain active, with the Coast Guard continuing to search for survivors and missing persons in the waters west of Puerto Rico.
<small>Source: Yahoo News — read the original story there.</small>