Family members of missing Dominican migrants will now be able to
search for their relatives on-line.

An agreement signed today between IOM Santo Domingo and the
regional office of Save the Children Sweden is paving the way for
the Network of Missing Latin Americans (Red Latinoamericanos
Desaparecidos, RLD by its Spanish acronym) to become operational in
the Dominican Republic.

There are an estimated 1.4 million Dominicans living abroad, the
vast majority in Puerto Rico, the US State of New York City, and
about 140,000 in Spain.

Although only eight official Missing Person Reports have been
filed with authorities, it is estimated that each month some 20
Dominican migrants go missing while attempting the perilous journey
by boat to Puerto Rico.

The RLD, already up and running in Belize, Bolivia, Chile, Costa
Rica, Ecuador Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, and Puerto Rico, is an
on-line search tool.  The individual or organization
conducting the search can look at photographs of missing migrants
by country, or input the person’s name, age, and
gender.  They can also log on to add the name of a missing
person.

More than 17,000 names of migrants from 10 participating
countries are already on the network.  The 10,000 successfully
closed cases and the 350,000 hits per month, confirm the need for
the Website.

Some 250 governmental and non-governmental organizations are
collaborating with information for the Website "paragraph-link-no-underline" href=
"http://www.latinoamericanosdesaparecidos.org" target="_blank"
title="">www.latinoamericanosdesaparecidos.org

The Dominican Republic has become the 11th country to join the
network with its own Website href="http://www.dominicanosdesaparecidos.org" target="_blank"
title="">www.dominicanosdesaparecidos.org

Other countries joining in the near future include Argentina,
Brazil, and Mexico.

Funding for the project in the Dominican Republic comes from the
Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) through
Save the Children Sweden, the US State Department’s Bureau
for Population, Refugees and Migration through IOM and the
Organization of American States.

For more information contact:

Fanny Polanía

IOM Santo Domino

Tel: +1.809.683.4636

E-mail: "mailto:fpolania@iom.int">fpolania@iom.int