African migrants nabbed in Costa Rica seek new life

San Jose, Sep 4 (EFE).- A total of 41 African immigrants, some of them professionals, who risked their lives crossing the Atlantic in search of a better life, found themselves detained in Costa Rica on Friday waiting to be accepted as refugees so they can get a fresh start.

This is a phenomenon repeated more and more often in countries like Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, which the authorities of those countries attribute to people-trafficking rings that promise to take undocumented migrants to the United States or Canada, only to leave them stranded on these tropical coasts.

Costa Rican authorities believe that these 41 Africans were brought here by traffickers to whom some paid as much as $7,500, while defenders of human rights recall that they come from areas shattered by wars and conflicts.

The Ethiopian "D.G." arrived on June 25 in Costa Rica on a boat from Venezuela, he told Efe. He and three other Africans came ashore in the Caribbean province of Limon, at the end of a week when authorities found 28 other Africans stranded in different parts of the country.

"The crossing lasted about eight days of constant sailing, without food through choppy seas with giant swells. We crashed, the boat's motor failed and we were adrift for days," the Ethiopian said, adding that he thought they were going to "lose their lives."

The 41 Africans are sharing small cells with other illegal immigrants at a detention center in San Jose.

Nine of them were deported from Nicaragua, since the procedure used by authorities in the region is to send illegals back to the last country they came from, so that repatriation of Africans is not unusual from Panama to Colombia, or from the latter country to Venezuela, for example.

Now the 23 Eritreans, 9 Ethiopians, 8 Somalis and 1 Guinean are hoping to be given refugee status that will allow them to live legally in Costa Rica.

The director of the detention facility, Julio Aragon, told Efe that all the immigrants were undocumented, "which gives the idea that they were victims of a people-smuggling ring, because in such cases the criminals destroy the victims' documents to control them."

The official also speculated that the ring could be based on the Honduran coast.

"That would explain why they haven't been able to reach their destination, because of the current political situation in Honduras (scene of a recent coup d'etat), and they see a chance to stay here and live in Central America," Aragon said.

The director said that in most cases immigrants flee their own countries because of war or because "they persecute them for their religion, beliefs or force them to join the army."

The Ethiopian said that on April 30 he left his native land on a bus to Kenya because he supported a political party in opposition to the government.

From Kenya he went to Sudan, from there to Spain to fly to Caracas, where he went down to Venezuela's Caribbean shore to find a boat to Costa Rica.

"Though there are cultural and language barriers, I hope to find my kind of work in Costa Rica - I graduated in company management," the young man said, adding that he didn't mind "starting from scratch."

Claire Lecaudey, area director for the ACAI consultancy, which works for the U.N. Refugee Agency, told Efe that it is important that these people be given refugee status "because they all come from countries in conflict and deporting them would be the worst thing for them."

She said that they are in detention because they entered the country illegally, but that they will be released "when their status is normalized."

That could take a maximum of three months, during which time the migration authorities must determine if they are to be granted refugee status. EFE