News Desk

Earlier this week, a boat travelling off the coast of Haiti has caught fire, killing at least 40 people, as reported by the International Organization for Migration on Friday.

The IOM said the boat had left Haiti and heading towards the Turks and Caicos, carrying 80 migrants. There were confirmed to be 41 survivors rescued by Haiti’s Coast Guard as of now. The IOM’s chief of mission in the country, Gregoire Goodstein, said in a statement that the tragedy was to blame on Haiti’s “spiraling security crisis” and the shortage of “safe and legal pathways for migration”. He said that Haiti’s socio-economic situation is in agony, and that the recent string of extreme violence has only led Haitians to resort to even more desperate measures.

Right now, Haiti is facing problems of gang violence, a collapsing health system, and depleting access to essential supplied, which has led many of them to take extremely dangerous journeys out of the country, in hopes of a better life.

Crisis in the Caribbean nation grew rapidly when gang warfare erupted earlier this year, forcing the then-government to resign. Since then, the number of migration attempts by boat has increased, according to data provided by the IOM.