Carl Hiaasen. Published Monday, September 2, 2001 in
The Miami Herald
The indictment of two alleged alien smugglers gives hope that the U.S.
government is serious about cracking down on a dangerous and cold-blooded
commerce.
Three children and three adults drowned off Key West on a blustery night in
July when a smuggling run turned to disaster. What happened was beyond the realm
of nightmares.
Roberto Montero-Domínguez and Osvaldo Fernández-Marrero have
been charged with conspiracy, attempted smuggling for financial gain and
attempted smuggling resulting in death. If convicted, the Miami-Dade men could
be sentenced to die.
Prosecutors are making a big show out of the case because indictments are so
rare. Refugees often are reluctant to testify, as are the family members who
paid for the illicit passage.
This time, though, some of the survivors went before a grand jury. It has
been speculated that the government offered not to repatriate them to Cuba in
exchange for their testimony.
That would give defense attorneys something to chew on. Still, it's a
breakthrough for prosecutors to get willing eyewitnesses in an alien-smuggling
case.
The outlaw trade is booming, thanks partly to the dry-foot immigration
policy that allows Cuban migrants to remain here if they make it ashore by any
means.
That was the prayer of those 26 people who were met on a beach east of
Havana and crammed on a 27-foot speedboat, which had come from Florida to get
them.
The trip back was calamitous. According to authorities, the passengers
became frantic as the waves grew to eight feet and the boat began to wallow. At
that point, one of the two alleged smugglers pulled a gun and ordered everyone
to calm down.
When the migrants rushed to the back of the boat, it pitched bow-over-stern
and sank. The shouts of the survivors were heard by the crew of a passing
freighter.
As a bleak irony, the wife and two daughters of one of the alleged smugglers
were among those who perished.
Both men have pleaded innocent and have yet to present their accounts of the
voyage. Don't be surprised if they cast themselves in heroic roles, claiming
they didn't do it for money but rather to rescue others from communist
oppression.
Whatever their story might be, the crossing from Cuba was no casual pleasure
cruise.
Ask yourself what kind of a captain sets out across rough seas in the dead
of a night, on a grossly overloaded vessel with only two or three life jackets.
It's a textbook smuggler scenario. They're paid thousands of dollars per
head, so they pack as many bodies on board as possible. Only greed breeds that
kind of recklessness.
Ask yourself who would get on such a precariously crowded craft, and the
answer is obvious: Anyone desperate and determined enough to get to the United
States.
Sadly, that hunger of the heart is where the profit lies for the alien
smuggler. What makes the trade so repugnant is its exploitation of human
longing.
Whether a migrant is Cuban or Haitian, he or she usually has relatives
waiting in Florida and always the promise of a brighter future. The stronger a
person's desire to come here, the more they're willing to pay -- and the greater
the chance they're willing to take.
Cashing in on the immigrant dream is a scummy tradition as old as the high
seas. Twenty years ago, plenty of free-lance captains made a killing off the
Mariel exodus, gouging big bucks from anxious families trying to get relatives
out of Cuba before Castro slammed the door.
Today's profiteers do so with no invitation from Fidel Castro. The trips
usually are made at night with fast boats that deliver their human cargo to the
Bahamas or, increasingly, to the Keys.
Nobody knows how many refugees have died on these crossings, or under what
dreadful circumstances. There are known instances of panicky smugglers ordering
all their passengers into the water, whether the passengers could swim or not.
That was the scene a few years ago when a group of terrified Haitians was
forced overboard off a Broward beach. Tragically, several drowned.
More recently, suspicious trauma injuries have been observed on bodies of
Cuban refugees that were found floating in the Keys. Who knows what happened.
As long as there's money in it, there'll always be smugglers. However, a
successful prosecution of Montero and Fernández would introduce a serious
new element of risk for those who traffic in human desperation.
Copyright 2001 Miami Herald | 
