40 people rescued and several missing after boat capsizes west of Puerto Rico

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The U.S. Coast Guard said Monday that it rescued at least 40 people in open waters after their boat capsized several miles from a tiny, uninhabited island west of Puerto Rico.

Two people were found dead, with survivors reporting an estimated 60 people aboard, the agency said. Rescue efforts were ongoing as of Monday evening.

Survivors spent more than 12 hours in the water before a boat passing near Mona Island spotted them on Monday around noon and called authorities, helping rescue four people at that moment.

The Coast Guard said the makeshift boat capsized late Sunday following a fight in which people were severely injured by a machete, leading the group to jump into the water without life vests.

It wasn’t immediately clear where the people were from. A U.S. Coast Guard spokesperson said she did not have that information.

Migrants fleeing poverty and violence have long traveled from Hispaniola, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, to Puerto Rico and other islands, navigating the treacherous Mona Passage.

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Many of them do so on makeshift vessels that sometimes capsize in rough waters, with Monday marking the latest deadly voyage.

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In June 2022, 11 Haitian girls and women were buried in Puerto Rico after the grossly overloaded boat they were in capsized in open waters northwest of the U.S. territory.

Last week, police in the Turks and Caicos Islands detained a makeshift boat carrying 60 Haitian migrants, while in June, another 240 migrants from Haiti were detained near the archipelago.

Gang violence has displaced a record 1.5 million people across Haiti, where more than 3,050 people were reported killed from January to June, according to U.N. statistics. Armed men control an estimated 70% of Port-au-Prince and swaths of land in Haiti’s central region and beyond.