The phone rang at three in the morning. Yermi Santoyo woke up and looked at the screen. It was an unknown number.
“Are you Darielvis’s husband?” -said a man in Spanish, after translating what another had said in English- She is hurt.
-Wound? Did she fall into the river?
-Nerd. He has to come.
-But what happened?
“If you want to find out, you have to get here so I can give you strength.”
The man hung up and Yermi jumped up. Give him strength? She felt a mist cloud over her head. She had no idea what she could do.
Yermi had last spoken to his wife, Darielvis Sarabia, two days earlier, when she was boarding a boat that would take her and the children from Tucupita, in eastern Venezuela, to Trinidad.
Tucupita is the capital of Delta Amacuro, one of the Venezuelan provinces closest to the Trinidad coast, and one of the main departure ports for Venezuelans who escape by boat to seek 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 defines as “one of the main displacement crises in the world.”
Venezuelan migrants navigate the tributaries of the Orinoco, which cross the geography of Delta Amacuro and flow 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 nearby and they took a bus to Hospital de Sangre Grande, northeast of Trinidad. They arrived just before dawn, after two and a half hours of travel.
Darielvis was in the emergency room, lying on a stretcher, her left shoulder bandaged and her clothes stained with blood. Two Trinidadian police officers guarded her.
-What happened my love? Yermi asked, afraid of the answer.
“We lost the child,” she replied, trembling.
They left Venezuela on Friday, February 4, 2022, when the government commemorated 30 years of the coup d’état led by former President Hugo Chávez, and marked the beginning of Chavismo as a political movement.
The children were named Danna and Yaelvis. She was 2 years old. The 1.
The mother and children navigated the rivers of Delta Amacuro and waited until Saturday night to set sail. It was easier to evade Trinidadian patrols in the dark.
However, a Coast Guard vessel intercepted the boat as it approached the Trinidad coast on the night of Saturday, February 5.
Darielvis told her husband that the child was sitting on her lap. They shined their lights on them and called a halt, but the boat driver got nervous and tried to back up.
Shots were heard.
She covered the boy with her body to protect him, but a bullet went through her left shoulder and hit Yaelvis.
“His little head was blown up.” I saw it in my hands,” she said to her husband.
The crew shouted that there were women and children in the boat and the shooting stopped.
The guards separated Darielvis from her son’s body to take her to the hospital.
Danna, the oldest, stayed with the rest of the boat crew.
Self-defense
A 720-ton, 59-meter-long ship was patrolling the southern coast of Trinidad when it detected a vessel that had crossed the border into Venezuelan maritime waters, the Trinidadian Coast Guard reported in a statement on Sunday, February 6.
The ship’s authorities sent a boat to intercept the speedboat.
The officers called through megaphones, honked the boat’s horn, aimed the searchlight and released flares to force the boat to stop. However, the note states that the boat insisted on “evading” the ship.
“The ramming effort of the suspect vessel, which was larger than the (…) of the ship, caused the crew to fear for their lives and, in self-defense, they fired on the suspect vessel’s engines,” continued the release.
When the boat stopped, the Trinidadian Coast Guard officers discovered that there were “illegal migrants on board”, who were not seen because they “remained hidden”.
They found an “adult illegal migrant” who was bleeding and holding a child. “Sadly, the baby was found to be unresponsive,” the Coast Guard explained.
They were Darielvis and his son Yaelvis.
pray for the baby
Days later, a Trinidadian fisherman denied the Coast Guard in a statement to the Trinidadian press, in which he asked to remain anonymous.
The fisherman was traveling with two other people in a boat in the Moruga area, south of Trinidad, when they spotted a boat in trouble.
The crew changed to the fishermen’s boat to reach the shore, but were intercepted before reaching dry land.
“We saw this boat, it had no lights or anything. We saw a flare. We didn’t know if they were bandits or coastguards. With the first flare they launched, we heard several shots,” the Trinidadian newspaper Guardian quoted.
“They launched a next flare with several more shots. After the second flare, they sent out a third one where they lit a light on their boat that said Coast Guard Halt.”
A woman got up and was injured. “I see a big hole in the baby’s head. She was crying. She was bloody”, she added in reference to Darielvis.
Coast Guard officers wore ski masks, the fisherman said. They approached the boat in two smaller boats and took aim at them. “They were cursing and asking for drugs and weapons.”
They forced the fishermen to remain in the boat with the body of the child, while the crew members were transferred to the official boats.
“Then they called me to come up to the front and pick up the baby and pray for him. I did what they said because I was very scared,” the fisherman told reporters.
“Why did you have to shoot?”
Former Trinidadian prime minister and opposition leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar said she felt “wrenching pain” seeing the Coast Guard “fire on a migrant boat, killing a baby.”
“You say they came to ram you, you could have taken evasive action. Why did you have to shoot? Was that what you called reasonable force?” she questioned.
Trinidadian Prime Minister Keith Rowley responded in a Facebook post that the border patrol attempted to “stop a vessel that refused to respond and acted aggressively in compliance with legal, reasonable and professional orders under international law and protocol.”
And he finished in capital letters on Yaelvis’s death: “IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!”
BBC Mundo did not receive a response to the request for an interview with spokesmen for the Coast Guard or the Ministry of National Security of Trinidad and Tobago.
Trinidadian lawyer Nafeesa Mohammed, specializing in children’s rights, believes that the Coast Guard acted without taking into account the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees or the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
“Refugees and asylum seekers are victims and need protection, not persecution,” he said in an interview with BBC Mundo.
“The Coast Guard is charged with protecting our borders and conducts its affairs in a military manner. They do not respect human rights or humanitarian considerations, ”he specified.
The Venezuelan government asked to investigate the death of Yaelvis.
“Dad”
The couple and the children lived in the house of Darielvis’s grandmother, who took care of her since she was 15 years old, when her mother died of cancer.
Now the grandmother is 80 and moves in a wheelchair.
In June 2021, Darielvis and the children were so thin that Yermi decided to go to Trinidad to look for work and send remittances.
He even sold his mobile phone to collect the 200 dollars that the trip from Tucupita cost.
Unlike her family, the boat that Yermi took managed to reach Morne Diablo beach, south of Trinidad, without being detected.
He worked for eight months in Trinidad as a day laborer on farms.
He called the children every day, before leaving in the morning, during the lunch break and before bed. She wanted to prevent them from forgetting him.
“Dad,” Yaelvis replied when he saw him by video call.
When he felt confident enough to ask for a favor, Yermi obtained a loan from his boss for 2,000 Trinidadian dollars (almost US$300) to put his wife and children on that boat.
The coyotes that transport Venezuelans from Delta Amacuro avoid specifying where they will arrive. The maneuvers to avoid “the coastal” prevent them from knowing in which part of the island the passengers will be able to disembark.
When they reach the beach they do not dock on the shore. They order the passengers to jump into the water and come ashore, although many do not know how to swim.
Dana’s return
“And Dana, where is she?” Yermi asked his wife in the hospital emergency room.
-They took her. Find me my girl,” she replied.
The police told Yermi that he could visit his wife between 4:00 and 5:00 pm every day, but for the first three days he was not allowed to see her.
Officials from the Venezuelan embassy accompanied him to look for his daughter Danna. On the third day they found her at the Chaguaramas heliport, a military installation where people who enter Trinidad illegally are detained.
Yermi got out of the car and tried to approach the main Chaguaramas building, but two guards blocked her path.
Danna appeared holding the hand of a stranger. When they handed it to Yermi, she started crying and she didn’t recognize him. He hugged her and reminded her that she was her daddy. She told him that everything would be fine, they would stay together forever.
The girl went to the bathroom frequently during the following days. Yermi wondered if she had drunk dirty water. She screamed and cried at dawn, waking up startled by nightmares.
He stopped working while his wife was hospitalized. It took him at least two hours to go from home to the hospital, and another two to return. He always accompanied by Danna.
Yermi sensed that his wife avoided crying in front of him. She was “the strong one”, just like Darielvis’s mother when she was receiving cancer treatment.
Although the policemen told Yermi that she could accompany Darielvis for at least an hour a day, they would not allow her to stay for more than 30 minutes.
The cops authorized Danna to go in to see her mom. She managed to kiss her and tell her that she loved her, but the girl did not show much interest in the reunion, as if she did not recognize her.
Darielvis was hospitalized for nine days, until she underwent shoulder surgery.
Since she looked so thin and listless, Yermi asked to speak to a doctor, she wanted to know if her blood values were normal, to confirm that her body could withstand surgery.
However, no one responded.
She recovered from the operation and was released after her son’s wake.
Of the group that traveled on that boat, Darielvis and her daughter were the only ones who received authorization from the Trinidadian government to stay on the island.
The others were deported by boat to Güiria, a Venezuelan town located 516 kilometers north of Tucupita.
The shelter
The Trinidadian Prime Minister has indicated that the island, of 1.39 million inhabitants, does not have the capacity to receive refugee applicants from Venezuela, a country of 28 million.
“If you are going to apply for asylum in Trinidad and Tobago, or anywhere in the world, you have to show that you are personally at risk, under attack because of your race, religion, politics or whatever,” Rowley declared in December 2020. .
“His ambition for a better life through economic change does not apply to asylum anywhere in the world,” he added.
Venezuela lost four-fifths of the size of its economy as of 2014, the most severe economic contraction in modern western hemisphere history.
In this scenario, Delta Amacuro appears as one of the poorest states in Venezuela.
No one has dared to tell Darielvis’s grandmother what happened. She is still waiting for her granddaughter and her children to call her to tell her how her trip to Trinidad went.
Source: Eluniverso
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
