![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI've always associated The Globe and Mail with Toronto, contrasting it unavoidably badly with Prince Edward Island. The good thing about living in Toronto (nay, one of the good things) is that I don't have to count on picking up editions from Halifax or St. John's at 10 o'clock; no, I can just go to the vending machine on the corner at Queen Street West and pick up a copy as early as I'd please.
Today on the front page of Section A, above the fold, was a disturbing story about a shipload of illegal immigrants intending to proceed from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico that went badly wrong, amidst mass death and cannibalism. In a comparative perspective, the shift of the Dominican Republic from a country of immigration--receiving freed American slaves after its mid-19th century independence from Haiti and Japanese immigrants after the Second World War, even now absorbing ill-treated Haitian immigrants as described in fiction by Edwidge Danticat in The Farming of Bones--to a country of mass emigration is interesting. What's particularly horrifying, though, is this paragraph in the Globe and Mail story:
You can't help but wonder what horrors have already happened without anyone knowing.
Today on the front page of Section A, above the fold, was a disturbing story about a shipload of illegal immigrants intending to proceed from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico that went badly wrong, amidst mass death and cannibalism. In a comparative perspective, the shift of the Dominican Republic from a country of immigration--receiving freed American slaves after its mid-19th century independence from Haiti and Japanese immigrants after the Second World War, even now absorbing ill-treated Haitian immigrants as described in fiction by Edwidge Danticat in The Farming of Bones--to a country of mass emigration is interesting. What's particularly horrifying, though, is this paragraph in the Globe and Mail story:
"It's surprising and horrifying, but it's not something unheard of," Lt. [Eric] Willis [of the U.S. Coast Guard] said of the latest case. "We at the Greater Antilles section have heard of most of this before: the survival on breast milk, the resorting to cannibalism. They have occurred in these waters before."
You can't help but wonder what horrors have already happened without anyone knowing.
