Dangerous Haitian smugglings have left 26 women dead in two months. Why are the women dying?| Editorial

For decades, Haitian boats illegally headed for South Florida have come packed with young men seeking to escape the troubled island. Few women, no children.

But there’s been a shift in recent months during the most significant surge of Haitian arrivals in nearly two decades: Many more women are making the voyage, and dying when those overcrowded smuggling boats capsize en route to Miami.

That happened on Sunday when an overloaded 30-foot migrant boat flipped in rough waters off The Bahamas, spilling everyone into the dark ocean seven miles off New Providence just after 1 a.m.

In the fight for life that ensued, 15 women perished, along with a toddler, a little girl. One man died, while some 30 other men survived apparently by climbing atop the capsized boat until Bahamian authorities rescued them.

Flashback to a month ago off Puerto Rico, when another migrant boat capsized. The bodies of 11 women were the only ones recovered., although some were believed to be lost at sea.

Female victims

Whether men or women, such deaths have are an ongoing tragedy. We have no definitive societal or migratory explanation as to why so many women - 26- have died in the last two months trying to make it to Miami. Still, we can’t help but take note of the disparity and wonder what it means.

As Haitians increasingly take to the sea to escape economic and political crises, not to mention gang-related kidnappings in their country, are more women joining that flight? But why are they becoming collateral damage?

We have seen hundreds of Haitians, helped by smugglers, trying to get to the U.S. using new travel patterns and routes that lead them to Key Largo.

The numbers released Monday tell the story. Since Oct. 1, 2021, the Coast Guard has interdicted 6,352 Haitian migrants. In all of 2021, they interdicted 1,527 Haitians. And in 2020, the number was a mere 418.

Is Haiti becoming more unlivable? It seems so. Is help coming? Doubt it. The Biden administration has had a hands-off approach to the island country, even after a presidential assassination last year, and it continues to look away.

We don’t have answers, only theories underscoring the dangers for women, and every Haitian, of joining such risky sea voyages led by unscrupulous smugglers, who don’t care about safety but about the $5,000 a head they’ll receive.

A local expert told Miami Herald Caribbean Correspondent Jacqueline Charles that the high number of female deaths in the last two months may be that many Haitian women don’t know how to swim. At the same time, men often work in the marine and fishing industries and are comfortable in the water.

Louis Herns Marcelin, a Haiti-born social scientist at the University of Miami who studies Haitian migration, said it’s difficult to know why more women appear to be dying than men without additional information on all passengers taking these chances.

“Women are mostly involved in commercializing the products that result from fishing or the like,” he said. “In addition, swimming activities, even for leisure, are more common among men than for women.” That’s one explanation.

Another possibility may be that women were placed below deck to be hidden from sight and protected from the weather. But when the boat capsized, they were trapped underwater. One survivor of the latest tragedy, a woman, survived by breathing in an air pocket in the hull among several dead passengers.

And why were there so many women on board to begin with? Were they accompanied or traveling alone?

Stop Hiring smugglers

Regardless, photos of the 15 women’s bodies now circulating on the Internet are hard to stomach and too graphic to publish. Imagine how desperate these women must have been to make such a perilous journey across the sea when they cannot swim, a bitter lesson on how smugglers can get their innocent passengers killed.

Hiring a smuggler, a process usually financed in Miami by relatives is both an act of desperation and love. We understand the motivation. But it might be time for relatives to reconsider putting their relatives in peril, even out of an act to help them.

The hard reality is that the odds of making it to Florida alive appear to be decreasing for Haitians.

The smuggling of humans from Haiti must stop before more bodies, like the ones of these 15 women, end up on display on a pier.