Jose Salvador Alvarenga appears weak in 1st public appearance after purported year lost at sea
WELLINGTON -- The Salvadoran man who says he spent more than a year drifting across the Pacific Ocean before finally making landfall in the Marshall Islands last week made a brief public appearance Thursday looking much weaker than he did earlier in the week.
Jose Salvador Alvarenga greeted about 50 officials and media at the Marshall Islands Resort hotel where he is staying. Sporting a haircut and a shave, he was assisted into the room by two people while others stood by ready to help.
Speaking in a low voice, he thanked the
government and his friends for their help, but declined to take questions. The
Associated Press listened into the meeting by cellphone and had it described by
an official who declined to be named because he wasn't authorized to speak to
the media.
Alvarenga's spritely appearance Monday when he greeted hundreds of well-wishers in the capital Majuro after making landfall last week on a remote atoll had many questioning his story. He earlier told officials he left Mexico in late 2012 with another fisherman, who later died, for a day of shark fishing when a storm threw them off course and they began drifting.
Officials at the meeting said Alvarenga needed to be taken back to the hospital for more medical checks and it would likely be three or four days before he was fit enough to travel back to El Salvador.
Also speaking at the meeting was the Marshall Islands foreign minister, Phillip Muller, and Mexican diplomat Chris Clay Mendoza.
Muller said the Marshall Islands was happy to live up to its humanitarian obligations and do everything it could to assist Alvarenga.
Clay Mendoza said he'd immediately departed from Manila for the Marshall Islands after initial reports indicated Alvarenga was a Mexican national. He said he was now assisting El Salvador in its efforts to repatriate Alvarenga.