By Amanda Roberson Tico Times Staff
Police have discovered that some of the 56 Chinese migrants who were discovered lost at sea off the Pacific beach of Playa Guiones Saturday paid as much as $35,000 to be transported from their country without knowing their final destination, explained Vice-Minister of Public Security Ana Durán at a press conference yesterday.

While investigating these shipwrecked migrants, who were recently brought to a shelter in San José, police discovered that six of them were carrying round-trip airline tickets from China to Bogota, Colombia, with layovers in Hong Kong and Paris, Durán said.

From Bogota, they were taken by truck to Guayaquil, Ecuador, and from there, they headed north in a boat that broke down in Costa Rican waters.

Police suspect the three Ecuadorians and two Peruvians aboard the shipwrecked boat were “coyotes” transporting the Chinese to the United States or Canada, common destinations for migrants from poor countries, Durán said. The Prosecutor’s Office is investigating these five people.

The Chinese aboard “weren’t clear where they were going,” she said, explaining that the migrants’ passports had been taken away from them and they had been sedated in Ecuador before getting on the boat.

Authorities are in the process of trying to fly the 16 who have tickets back to Colombia. Police are contacting airlines to find out if the other 40 also have tickets; if they don’t, Costa Rica will go through “standard immigration procedures” to deport them.

In the meantime, the 50 adults in the group are being held at a police shelter, and the six minors are being sheltered by the Child Welfare Office (PANI).

It costs Costa Rica about ¢1.2 million ($2,300) per day to provide food and shelter to these migrants, and the legal processes to deport them cost as much as $5,000 per person, Durán said.

These are “huge costs for the country,” she said. “We are a country that protects human rights, but these situations are arising that are draining the resources we have,” she said.