On the afternoon of March 6, Gabriel Sacta was sitting on the couch at his home in New York, chatting on WhatsApp with his girlfriend, Lia Elizabeth Pulla, 22.
They were nervous, eager to see each other.
The young woman had just arrived in Freeport, in the Bahamas, to undertake a dangerous journey: crossing by boat to Florida clandestinely.
The last message from the young woman, almost at night, was: "Someone came, I have to leave you. I'll call you later."
But minutes passed without hearing from her, so at 6:43 pm the hlmbre wrote: "Love, are you okay?"
At 7:22 pm the message was marked as read, but no one responded.
[All times mentioned in this report correspond to the East Coast]
Mayra Campoverde, the young woman's aunt, was also restless waiting for a message from her niece.
She had promised to confirm the departure time for Florida, the last leg of his long journey from Ecuador.
But the hours passed and the young woman's cell phone was still silent.
For the past two months, she had been sending her boyfriend and aunt the precise locations of the safe houses where the coyotes were taking her via WhatsApp.
[This is the agony of the family of a disappeared Ecuadorian]
Her dream, like that of the other four Ecuadorians who traveled with her from Guayaquil, was to arrive in New York, where her relatives were waiting. "She wanted to start from scratch, get away from the insecurity and lack of opportunities that exist in Ecuador," says her groom.
The five Ecuadorian migrants left Guayaquil on January 7, 2021 with the illusion of arriving in the US to start a new life.
Family Street
[The boyfriend of the disappeared Ecuadorian reveals the conversations he had]
It is the same wish expressed by the other four immigrants: Cristian Paul Calle, 38;
his brother Juan Carlos Calle, 41, and his wife, Carolina Calle;
and María Eliza Vera, 45, a friend of the family.
All are natives of the Ecuadorian province of Cañar.
The last that was heard of them is that that Saturday, March 6, they arrived in Freeport at 8 am in a motorboat from the island of Bimini after a three-hour trip.
They were sheltered in a pink house with 14 Haitian migrants, in a neighborhood where the backyards are connected to canals that flow into the Atlantic Ocean.
Three coyotes on the Caribbean route
The five Ecuadorians decided to embark on their journey to the United States via the Caribbean route.
Some acquaintances had been successful in 2020 arriving in Florida through the Bahamas, so they shared the details of the travel agency that helped them organize a trip in three sections:
1. From Guayaquil to Panama:
On January 7, 2021, they left Guayaquil for Panama with a representative of the Travel Sur travel agency called Jimmy.
It was he who sold them the coyote service disguised as a tour package.
"They promised to get to the United States, so the cost of the trip was a bit high: they paid $ 16,000 in total per person. A tourist trip never reaches that value," says Manuel Calle, brother of two of the disappeared.
Before leaving Panama, they had to pay $ 10,000 each.
The rest would be disbursed at each stage of the journey.
With this money, the airline tickets and hotels that they would use on the road would be covered, explained Manuel Calle.
The Nigerian citizen Paul Sunday Ibikunle, was one of the coyotes who participated in the journey of the five disappeared Ecuadorians. Calle Family
2. From Panama to the Bahamas
: Once in Panama, Jimmy introduced the five Ecuadorians to a contact of his, a Nigerian citizen named Paul Ibikunle.
He was Jimmy's liaison to facilitate the entry of migrants to the Bahamas and get the five seats on the boat that would take them from the Bahamas to Florida.
Paul Ibikunle charged them $ 3,000 each.
In Panama, they waited a few days while COVID-19 tests were carried out and they processed the health visa required by the Government of the Bahamas from foreign visitors.
Finally, they arrived in Nassau on January 17 and stayed at the El Greco Hotel.
3. From the Bahamas to Florida:
Back in Nassau, Jimmy gave them to a local coyote they called Tristan and returned to Ecuador.
They paid Tristan $ 1,500 each to secure his trip to the island of Bimini, located just 50 miles off the coast of Florida.
They were told that from there they would make the crossing to the United States.
On January 25 they left for Bimini in a motorboat from Nassau.
The journey took nine hours.
On this island they were housed for six weeks in safe houses.
According to Lia Elizabeth Pulla's boyfriend and aunt, the coyote always found excuses to postpone the final journey: sometimes it was bad weather;
others the Coast Guard patrols.
In the end, Tristan confessed to them that the trip had not been made because it was not profitable for him with only five people.
The Ecuadorian migrants traveled to Nassau, Bahamas, with Jime Wilberto Barco Macías, whom they knew as Jimmy (center).
It was he who organized the trip from Guayaquil.
Family Street
In Bimini they also paid the last $ 1,500 of their journey, but this time it was not through a cash transfer but with a bank deposit to a Wells Fargo account in the name of Nelson Mitchell, who lives in Lauderhill, Florida.
Noticias Telemundo Investiga could not locate Mitchell.
On Friday, March 5, Tristan, the Bahamian coyote, announced that the next day he would transfer them to the city of Freeport to travel from there to Florida with a group of Haitians.
After a two-hour boat ride, they arrived in Freeport on March 6 at 8 a.m.
Tristan promised them that that night they would leave for Boynton Beach, Florida, in the hands of an experienced captain, and with another 14 Haitians who were in the safe house.
They had to sail only 90 miles, and they were scheduled to land in the United States around 11 p.m., but the Ecuadorians did not respond to cell phone messages.
When hours passed without Lia Elizabeth Pulla responding to messages on WhatsApp, her boyfriend wrote to Tristan asking him about the group.
The coyote assured him that he left them in charge of the captain of the boat and that he had been calling the captain but he did not respond.
Shipwreck, kidnapping or prison?
On the afternoon of March 7, Tristan finally called Gabriel Sacta and told him that he had gone by plane to search the area (50 miles around from the supposed point of departure of the boat) and that he did not detect traces of any shipwreck. .
Two days later, Tristan turned off his phone and never again responded to calls from the relatives of the five Ecuadorians.
The young woman's aunt contacted the Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Bahamas Police, where she formally reported the disappearance of her niece.
No one could give him an account of his whereabouts.
Following Mayra's complaint, the Royal Bahamas Police published this notice of the disappearance of her niece Lia Elizabeth Pulla.
Campoverde Family
In his mind he contemplated three scenarios: they were shipwrecked, they were kidnapped, or they are in prison in the Bahamas.
The dream of seeing her niece with her in New York was beginning to blur.
In the last year, political instability in Ecuador (with 17 million inhabitants), added to the economic crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, left half a million citizens unemployed and the poverty level reached a third of the population, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics.
"The economic contraction and social discontent with the government's austerity measures have led more people to leave the country," says Jessica Bolter, representative of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington DC-based research institute that monitors the causes and effects of migration at the global level.
The number of Ecuadorian migrants detained while trying to reach the United States went from 1,513 in 2017 to 13,198 in 2019, an increase of 772%.
In the last four years, the Coast Guard has recorded a 50% increase in undocumented migrants attempting to enter the country irregularly by sea routes.
In 2017 they intercepted vessels with a total of 4,760 migrants, and in 2020 there were 7,583.
Most of these routes depart from the Caribbean to the Florida coast.
On March 3, the US Coast Guard detained a boat with 25 migrants from the Bahamas in the West Palm Beach, Florida area, three days before the disappearance of the Ecuadorians.
US Coast Guard / US Coast Guard District 7
Their families are in debt to pay the coyotes
Since the March 6, when they disappeared, their relatives in New York began knocking on doors and asking Jimmy, the representative of Travel Sur, about their whereabouts.
But nobody gave them clues.
They only managed to be scammed, they denounce.
Paul Ibikunle, the Nigerian coyote who had facilitated the trip from Panama to the Bahamas, asked relatives in New York, through WhatsApp audio messages, for another $ 1,500 for his contacts in the Bahamas to find.
According to what he told them, they were in a prison and had to bribe the Bahamian authorities to free them.
"We collected the money they asked us, we sent it to them, about a week passed, we demanded news, proof of life such as an audio, a photo, a call, but they never gave us anything," says Manuel Calle, brother of two of the missing.
Manuel Calle, is the brother of two of the disappeared Ecuadorians.
Family Street
In order to raise the $ 16,000 the trip cost, the five Ecuadorians had to take out bank loans, mortgage properties, and raise money through relatives and friends.
Since his disappearance, it is his families in Ecuador who are being pressured to answer for those payments.
"The creditors, the banks, are going against my mother. They are people over 70 years old and they live off my father's retirement, and they have nowhere to pay, but the banks are not interested in that," says Manuel Calle
This Thursday, the Investigation Unit of Transnational Crimes of Ecuador in collaboration, according to the Ecuadorian investigators, with the Investigation Unit of the Department of National Security arrested five people accused of human trafficking, among them, Jimmy.
His real name is Jime Wilberto Barco Macías, 61 years old.
Five homes and premises have been searched, including travel agencies, and documentation, six cell phones and $ 3,090 in cash have been seized, according to a statement that Captain Luis Naula of the Ecuadorian police sent to Noticias Telemundo Investiga.
However, nothing is yet known about the five missing.
The Ecuadorian Police carried out several operations in which they captured the members of the alleged human trafficking network related to the five disappeared Ecuadorians.
UNIDT-DGIN
Mayra Campoverde, aunt of the young Lia Elizabeth Pulla, and Manuel Calle, brother of two other of the disappeared, contacted 1800 Migrante, an organization that provides immigration services to Latinos in New York.
They also do free work to help Ecuadorian migrants in dangerous situations or with legal problems.
"Migrants live in a paradox: they do not have the capital to start a business, but they are looking for money for this irregular trip. They mortgage their houses, sell their goods, ask for loans ... they bet their lives," says William Murillo, spokesman for the organization, which denounces that the Government of the Bahamas is not providing the necessary collaboration in this case.
"A concentration camp operated by Immigration"
One of the hypotheses used by the relatives of the disappeared is that they are detained in a prison in the Bahamas and that they have not been granted the right to make a call.
A team from Noticias Telemundo Investiga traveled to the Bahamas to follow his trail.
In the main office of the Royal Bahamas Police, there is a record of the complaint made by Mayra Campoverde about the disappearance of her niece, but there is no information on any arrests, neither of her nor of her companions.
The Carmichael Immigration Detention Center in Nassau, Bahamas, has been singled out internationally for violating the fundamental rights of prisoners.Noticias Telemundo
The Carmichael Immigration Detention Center and Her Majesty's Prison also did not offer any information on the five missing.
At the main headquarters of the Bahamas Immigration Service they also claimed to have no trace of them.
However, according to Frederick Smith, a spokesman for Human Rights Bahamas, an organization that for years has denounced internationally the violations of human rights by the Government of the Bahamas to migrants, the fact that they have not provided information about them does not it's a guarantee they're not in the Carmichael Immigration Prison.
"That place is a concentration camp operated by Immigration and the Bahamian Military Forces," he says, "it is almost impossible for lawyers, relatives and the press to make requests to know who is being detained there."
Human Rights Bahamas denounces subhuman living conditions in the detention center and serious abuses such as rape and mistreatment.
Noticias Telemundo Investiga contacted the Bahamas Immigration Department but received no response.
The young Ecuadorian Jonathan Andrés, assures that he suffered discrimination and racism by the authorities of the Bahamas, when he was arrested for trying to cross into the United States in 2020.News Telemundo Investiga
Jonathan Andrés, another Ecuadorian immigrant who tried his luck last year by the same route, was held for four months in that prison.
After being arrested by the Royal Bahamian Police in Bimini, he spent weeks unable to communicate with his family.
"They told us we had the option of paying $ 1,500 to get out, or paying about four months in prison. But they didn't give us the option of calling by phone," says Andrés, who was deported to Ecuador after serving his sentence.
The hope that the families of the five Ecuadorian migrants have is that they have not been swallowed by the sea but rather by the Bahamas prison system, and that at any moment they will return deported to their country.
From Ecuador, the children of Juan Carlos Calle and Carolina Calle call Manuel Calle every day to ask him about their missing parents: "They tell me 'uncle, don't you know something about my parents?' I don't know anything either, I just give them hope that we will find them already. "