Archive for November, 2019
Thousands of people from Vietnam are smuggled to Europe every year on a route filled with violence and hardship.
Saturday, November 2nd, 2019“Vietnamese smugglers call it the “CO2” route: a poorly ventilated, oxygen-deficient trip across the English Channel in shipping containers or trailers piled high with pallets of merchandise, the last leg of a perilous, 6,000-mile trek across Asia and into Western Europe.
Compared to the other path — the “V.I.P. route,” with its brief hotel stay and seat in a truck driver’s cab — the trip in a stuffy container can be brutal for what some Vietnamese refer to as “box people,” successors to the “boat people” who left after the Vietnam War ended in 1975…..”