By Vir B. Lumicao
Somewhere on dry land in the North Pacific, a brown man who may not remember his name, his loved ones, or his origin, could be drawn to the seaside everyday, staring at every passing ship, straining to listen to messages from the waves.
If his reckoning is right, he has just turned 40 and, except for his fuzzy memory, he is hale and hearty, and shares a home happily with an old couple who he has come to know as his parents.
Some 13 years after disappearing in mysterious circumstances in the North Pacific while on board the Taiwanese fishing vessel Tah Yuan II, Filipino seaman John Morales Lopez is still alive, his Hong Kong OFW mother believes.
“As a mother, I can sense that John is still alive.”said domestic worker Carmen Grace Morales, 55, in a recent interview with The SUN in Yau Tong.
In March this year, Morales went home to Nueva Vizcaya to attend the graduation of John’s 16-year-old daughter Diane, and the absence of her father again relived for the family painful memories of his disappearance. Diane was just 3 when Lopez disappeared.
Little is known about the circumstances of Lopez vanishing in the high seas on Sept 6, 2003. But Morales’ tale indicated her son was a victim of human traffickers who prey on the gullibility of jobless rural men to fill the demand for slave labor in Asia’s fishing industry.
The whole episode began when Lopez, just back from being a security guard at the Iglesia Ni Cristo in Manila, met a woman in Barangay Bintawan, Villaverde, who was recruiting able-bodied men purportedly for jobs on an international container carrier.
Lopez, a Philippine Maritime Institute graduate and licensed deck officer, insisted on applying despite Morales’ objections, saying the US$500 monthly salary was tempting, and that the recruiter had said that most of his farm peers had already boarded ship.
Despite her qualms, all Morales could do was advise her son to “take care” when she rang up Lopez on June 24, 2003, as he waited for his flight to Singapore where he was to board the container ship. “Remember you have a family waiting for you” were her parting words – a caution due to stories about sailors having women at every port, and abandoning their families back home.
Three years after Lopez vanished, crewmen of the Tah Yuan II who came home told Morales her son had suffered from intense homesickness as he was thousands of kilometers away from land.
“Nagpaalam daw siya sa kapitan na gusto na niyang umuwi ngunit sinabi sa kanya na nasa gitna ng dagat pa sila,” the mother recounted.
Lopez got so distressed that on Aug. 29, 2003, nine days before he disappeared, he jumped into the rough waters of the Northern Pacific but was rescued by his fellow crew. After that, the Taiwanese captain chained him in a lower-deck cabin so he wouldn’t do silly things again. On the ninth morning, the captain told everyone Lopez was gone.
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| Wife and children are also waiting. |
Lopez’s next of kin, his wife Marie, was informed of the tragedy only in October, more than a month after it happened. Morales said she had contacted the “managing agency” in Singapore named Beverly Agency, the broker in Taiwan, and the fishing boat operator for details on the case, but was told her son was considered “still missing”.
She went to the Consulate to seek help, but despite providing staff there all the details and documents, nothing happened.
“Kaya ipinaalam ko sa kanila noon, iyon nga po I’m just a simple OFW,” Morales said with bitterness. “I feel in my heart, as a mother, buhay siya kaya nga po lahat ng details ko ay nasa net, inilalagay ko po tunay kong pangalan, nagbabaka-sakali. DFA ang may mga koneksiyon. Wala po akong kakilala na maging tulay para po makahingi ng tulong kung ano po ang nararapat. I had all the details of the company, the ship, the broker in Taiwan, in Singapore,” she said.
Eventually, a seafarer sibling of Hong Kong old-timer Jun Paragas connected Morales to the Maritime Industry Authority, the Philippine shipping sector watchdog, and the family was able to secure a half-million-peso insurance payout. The case was considered closed after that.
The case is just one of many tragic incidents on Taiwanese fishing boats on the high seas involving young Filipinos who had fallen for the lure of supposedly high-paying jobs offered by neighborhood recruiters.
These dream merchants turn out to be acting for people in Manila who are mere sub-agents of “managing companies” in Singapore contracted by manning brokers in Taiwan for the country’s large fleets of ocean-going fishing boats.
The seafarers’ travails are documented in the report, “Troubled Waters: Trafficking of Filipino Men into the Long Haul Fishing Industry through Singapore” written by Sallie Yea and published in December 2012.
Yea says the Singapore government is aware of the travails of the Filipino seamen who arrive in the city-state and are picked up by foreign vessels at its port. But she says the government has not a single report of seamen like them having been trafficked.
The research said that “although the Singapore government recognises that these men are exploited (in international waters), because men are labouring outside the country and are therefore not issued with work permits for Singapore, they are not covered by Singaporean regulations governing the employment of foreign manpower”.
In Yau Tong, Lopez’s mother Morales, who has been working in Hong Kong for 21 years, is still hopeful about reuniting with her son. She says a clairvoyant consulted by her friend had said Lopez is in another coastal country, mentally lost but otherwise healthy and in the care of an elderly couple who pulled him out of the sea years ago.
Guided only by a mother’s intuition, she feels her son is still alive, and dreams of the day when she would see him again.
