海角大神

After over a year adrift at sea, castaway Jos茅 Salvador Alvarenga returned home to El Salvador this week.

The man who says he drifted some 6,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean landed last night at an airport outside San Salvador, where he was brought off the plane in a wheel chair and met by family, reporters, and fanfare. Weak, and seemingly overwhelmed, Mr. Alvarenga grasped a microphone but was unable to speak, putting his hands over his face.

鈥淚鈥檓 so happy to know he鈥檚 alive, that he returned. I want to give him a hug,鈥� Emma Alvarenga, an aunt, told the National Post.

Alvarenga washed ashore on an atoll in the Marhsall Islands late last month, and his story of survival has raised eyebrows. He said he survived on raw fish, turtles, and sometimes his own urine for 13 months. So far, some details of his story have been corroborated by reports from Mexican civil defense officials, who described a fishing boat having gone missing around the same time Alvarenga said he left from a coastal village in southern Chiapas. Though Salvadoran, Alvarenga had been living in Mexico as a fisherman for years.

Alvarenga and a companion, Ezequiel Cordoba, set out fishing and were swept away by bad weather, he said. The engines on their boat died and the radio broke.聽

Despite the attention this story has garnered internationally, it鈥檚 not the first time a Mexican fishing boat has gone missing for months 鈥� and delivered an incredible tale of survival.

In 2005, five men on a shark-fishing expedition went missing at sea for nine months. The three survivors were picked up by a Taiwanese tuna trawler that had set out from the Marshall Islands two weeks prior.

鈥淲hen the panga [small fishing boat] and the trawler converged, they were six hundred miles from Majuro [the capital of the Marshall Islands], twenty-seven hundred miles northeast of Australia, and five thousand miles from San Blas, [Mexico],鈥� Mark Singer reported in the New Yorker.

The men left the fishing town of San Blas in southern Mexico on Oct. 28, 2005. Unexpectedly strong winds and high waves threw a wrench into their plans to catch sharks, and sent them instead searching for an expensive bait-line that had detached from the boat. The men ran out of fuel during their search, and what was supposed to be an overnight fishing trip turned into nine months. The men had no radio, cell phone, map, or GPS.

Similar to Alvarenga, the men survived on birds, fish, and sea turtles. Mr. Singer writes:

When the men eventually returned to Mexico, they didn鈥檛 necessarily receive a heroes鈥� welcome. McClatchy reports that upon their return, "some Mexicans voiced suspicions that the fishermen were drug traffickers and had disappeared for months to avoid criminal charges.鈥�

The accusations didn鈥檛 quiet down until the Roman Catholic Episcopal Council of bishops dubbed the survivors 鈥渆xamples of faith.鈥�

There were few public accusations that Alvarenga and his fishing companion were mixed up in drug trafficking, and there was no trace of drugs in the boat, reports The Telegraph.

However, as Erik Vance wrote in Slate in December, it is quite common for fishermen to get looped into drug trafficking.

鈥淚n this area [Sonora, Mexico], it鈥檚 not blood in, blood out. Cartels have porous edges, where people drop in when they need the money and get out as fast as possible. And we are not talking about characters from聽Breaking Bad聽here 鈥� these are poor fishermen with no other choice. And mostly they hate it,鈥� wrote Mr. Vance, a science journalist who went to Sonora to research the demise of a number of important ocean creatures.

Alvarenga is expected to arrive in his hometown after he gets an OK from his doctors. In the fishing village of Garita Palmera, 60 miles west of the capital San Salvador, his parents and daughter 鈥� whom he hasn鈥檛 seen for 13 years 鈥� are anticipating his arrival.