A canoe with 20 bodies arrives in Brazil from the Canary Islands

Some media in Brazil have suggested the hypothesis that it could be a group of Haitian refugees, but the appearance of the boat (elongated, with a white hull and blue interior) has made numerous families in Africa agree that it is a canoe. Mauritania, said a spokesperson for Caminando Fronteras, a group that regularly notifies the Spanish authorities of departures and keeps its own count of lost boats.

This is not the first time that similar cases have been known: since 2021 there are seven, According to the Associated Press agency, although the currents of the Atlantic often lead boats to drift and all traces end up being lost.

In 2023, Caminando Fronteras reported 6,007 deaths or disappearances in boats bound for the Canary Islands, 395 of them in cayucos that set sail from Mauritania. Only in the first three months of the year, from January to March, the organization is aware of 22 Mauritanian canoes lost on the Atlantic Route, with more than 1,500 people on board.

On the migratory route from West Africa to the Canary Islands, cases of boats or canoes that They are shipwrecked on the high seas without any of their occupants surviving.but it is also common for some boats to drift and be dragged south and west by the currents.

Two canoes arrived in the Caribbean in 2021

In those cases, their occupants perish from thirst and almost never appear, because the ocean swallows their bodies. However, it is not strange that some of these canoes find themselves after months in the Caribbean or on the coast of Brazil after drifting more than 4,500 kilometers; It is not common, but there are numerous precedents.

Without going any further, in 2021 one appeared in May with 14 bodies on a beach in Tobago and another in June with 20 bodies in the Turks and Caicos Islands, both in the Caribbean. In the first case, an investigation by the Associated Press agency managed to prove that it was a canoe that left Nouadhibou (Mauritania) and identify 33 of its 43 occupants, after tracing the calls and contacts of a recovered SIM card. from the mobile phone of one of the deceased.

In the fall of 2023, the cayuco route was strongly reactivated, bringing the Canary Islands to unprecedented numbers of immigrant arrivals (almost 40,000 in the balance of the year).

Then, the vast majority left in large boats with between 150 and 300 occupants from Senegal, 1,200-1,400 kilometers from the Canary Islands (10 to 12 days of sailing, if all goes well). At the beginning of the year There was a notable change and the bulk of the departures has moved to Nouadhibou and Nouatchok, in Mauritania (between 800 and 1,100 kilometers away from the islands, five to seven days).

According to figures published by the Ministry of the Interior, 83% of the boats with migrants arriving in the Canary Islands in the first quarter of the year had departed from the coast of Mauritania, although not only (nor mostly) with nationals of that country: also They transport people from Mali, Senegal, Ivory Coast or Guinea.

Increasingly risky routes

For this reason, both the Commissioner for the Interior, Ylva Johansson, and the Spanish Minister, Fernando Grande Marlaska, will travel to Nouakchott in March to negotiate with the Mauritanian Government new police control measures for the departure of migrants to the Canary Islands, which have reinforced the agreement. that already existed in that same area with that country.

Caminando Fronteras maintains that “the impact of the increase in control in the area has been terrible, because the focus has not been placed on search and rescue, when detours (toward spaces further away from the coast) to avoid controls are much more lethal. ».

The Spanish NGO has already received numerous calls after the news of the boat found in Brazil became public.

“Any vessel that appears, even thousands of kilometers away, opens hope to the thousands of families who long to know the truth,” a spokesperson for the organization told EFE, who hopes that the Brazilian authorities will make the identifications “with speed, to know, at least, where they came from.

Two Mauritanian citizens who are desperately searching for relatives lost on the Route have been in contact with the EFE agency in recent months. One of them is Ali Sokhona, an emigrant already established in Spain, where he arrived by cayuco in 2006.

«In my town alone there are 20 missing people»

Sokhona already lost two cousins ​​in 2020 in a canoe that left Nouadhibou for the Canary Islands. Now, her family is experiencing a new misfortune: Three more cousins ​​have disappeared in a canoe that left in January.

“We know nothing about them. There are eight people from my town in that boat, nothing… The entire boat is lost. Three of my cousins ​​were on it, their parents call me every day to ask me if we know anything about them, if they have arrived,” he says.

«It’s being terrible. In my town alone there are about 20 missing people from various cayucos. In the surrounding towns, 10, 20 or 30 in each one. The entire Soninke community is very, very sad,” he continues.

This Mauritanian emigrant, who lives and works in Valencia, is aware that no one survives that long in a drifting canoe – he knows this from experience, because he himself made the route to the Canary Islands twice, in 2006 and 2007 -, so already He is just looking for any information with which his family can begin grieving.

«The same thing happened to us three years ago. Someone tells them that they are alive, that they are in Portugal, in Alicante… I ask them, who told you? If in a boat with 70 or 80 people on it, no one calls, that means there has been an accident. No survivors. Those of us who are in Spain know it, but those who are still in Mauritania think that they are lost, in a forest or somewhere there. And it is not like that”.