It has not even made the background noise of a blip in the US Media, but so in the last 30 days, two boats carrying Venezuelans escaping to Trinidad and Tobago have sunk and possibly 50 or more people have drowned.
Truthfully nobody knows how many boats have been lost so far, there are no scheduled trips posted in a website for obvious reasons. But what shocked me was the reaction of some Venezuelans in Twitter about this: They were shocked that stuff like this was done by fellow countrymen.
Where the heck have you been people? There are close to 3 million refugees already outside the country via the southern border, why would not people try to escape to an island 6 miles away in the North East? My guess is that they figured it was too life threatening to attempt which also means History has been ignored when it comes to running away from the fruits of Socialism. How come you do not remember Cubans fleeing their island towards Key West? Or the Vietnamese Boat People? And for sheer life-risking we had the East Germans trying to come across the Berlin Wall. Have all these lessons of escaping Socialism and Communism been forgotten already?
They are doomed.
So sad.
“Why do you think you would be different?”
Because the last one was not real socialism.
One of the differences is that we spent months and many thousand flight hours looking for those sinking boats off ‘Nam and Cuba, and nobody is looking out for the folks off Venezuela because we can’t get closer than 12nm. Horrendous, no question. Based on past experience, figure that boat was overloaded by 100% at minimum.