GARITA PALMERA, El Salvador — A Salvadoran fisherman’s account of his survival after more than 13 months and about 6,500 miles in an open boat has proved a double miracle for his mother and father, who lost touch with him eight years ago and thought he was dead.
Comments by Jose Salvador Alvarenga’s joyful, sometimes tearful parents about their son may help explain how he survived, but they did little to dispel continued doubts about his tale.
His father, Jose Ricardo Orellana, 65, who owns a store and flour mill in the seaside Salvadoran town of Garita Palmera, described a strong, stocky young man who went to sea at age 14. “The sea was his thing,” Orellana said.
His mother, Maria Julia Alvarenga, 59, broke into tears after recounting a phone call with her son from the Marshall Islands. He told her he was well, staying at a hotel and getting food and medicine — but told his mother he didn’t know where he was.
“We hadn’t heard from him for eight years, we thought he was dead already,” said Alvarenga. “This is a miracle, glory to God.”
Alvarenga’s 14-year-old daughter, Fatima, said she didn’t remember ever seeing her father, who left El Salvador when she was just over a year old.
“I’m so very happy to know he’s alive,” said Fatima. “He’s alive and I’m going to see him.”
The parents said he was known in his hometown as “Cirilo,” a nickname that coincides with the first name of a man registered as missing with civil defence officials in the southern Mexico state of Chiapas. The civil defence office said a small fishing boat carrying two men, named Cirilo Vargas and Ezequiel Cordoba, disappeared during bad weather on Nov. 17, 2012, and that no trace of them or the craft was found despite an intense two-week search.
Alvarenga said his fellow fisherman, who he identified only with the first name of Ezequiel, died after about a month at sea and he tossed his body overboard. Alvarenga said he survived on raw fish, birds, bird blood and turtles before washing ashore on the remote Marshall Islands atoll of Ebon, 6,500 miles across the Pacific Ocean from the fishing hamlet of Costa Azul, Mexico, where he set out.
There was no immediate explanation of the discrepancy in dates given by Alvarenga and Mexican authorities or the survivor’s different names. Alvarenga said he set sail on Dec. 21, 2012, but fisherman in the Chiapas hamlet of Costa Azul said an overweight Central American man known as “La Chancha,” or “the pig,” had been lost since November 2012. Alvarenga may have used multiple nicknames, and seems fuzzy about details of his voyage.