https://jacobin.com/2025/01/canary-islands-spain-migrant-deaths
2024 is over, but not before hitting a historic high for the number of
people dying at Spain’s borders. According to data from the NGO
Caminando Fronteras, at least 10,457 people died or disappeared trying
to reach Spanish territory by irregular maritime routes over the last
twelve months — a 58 percent increase from 2023. The vast majority of
these victims (9,757) were trying to reach Spain’s Canary Islands, off
the West African coast — as the European Union (EU)–sponsored crackdown
in the central Mediterranean and the war in Mali forced tens of
thousands of people to risk their lives on treacherous, long-distance
routes on the Atlantic Ocean.
Largely traveling in traditional wooden fishing boats known as cayucos,
migrants taking this route can spend between four days and two weeks on
the ocean — with many such journeys complicated further due to the
frequency of engine failures on these vessels. “The boat began to
drift; we were being carried away by the waves,” recounts T. D., a
Malian survivor of one such tragedy. As food and water ran out onboard
his cayuco, T. D. tells Caminando Fronteras that “lives were
extinguished one after another.” “I thought I’d be next, but it was my
brother,” he continues. “I told him not to drink seawater, to hold on,
but he kept drinking, then vomiting, and then he sat down and stopped
speaking. I couldn’t bring myself to throw his body overboard; some
other people did it instead.”
Before being rescued, T. D. and the other survivors were forced to
witness a whole family die: “The father ended up throwing himself into
the sea once he’d placed the last of his children into the water. We
had no strength left to stop him.”
Among the thousands of others who also lost their lives were the
approximately two hundred people who set sail on a cayuco from Mbour,
Senegal, in mid-August. Senegalese fishermen came across the boat over
a month later, drifting almost fifty miles off the coast of Dakar.
Onboard were thirty bodies in a state of advanced decomposition, while
the rest of the passengers were missing, presumed dead. The most recent
victims were the six unidentified people buried on El Hierro, the
smallest of the Canary Islands, on December 13, having died of
hypothermia on their four-hundred-mile crossing from Mauritania.
“As the number of lives lost rises unrelentingly, the Spanish State
continues to pursue policies focused on controlling migration, with
support from Europe, and to deny their impact on the right to life,”
Caminando Fronteras’ end-of-year report insists. “These [border]
policies are based on dehumanizing and criminalizing migrants, leaving
them vulnerable to human rights violations and rendering their lives
disposable.”
In this respect, the phenomenon of mass death at Spain’s borders cannot
simply be understood as a series of isolated tragedies. Those who have
lost their lives are victims of Fortress Europe’s brutal border regime,
which, in the name of disincentivizing travel by migrants and refugees
from the Global South, forces them to expose themselves to ever greater
mortal dangers. Yet the historic surge in migration to the Canaries
over the last eighteen months also points to the limited effectiveness
of such containment policies — which, while condemning so many to
suffering and death, only fraudulently claim to address the deeper
reasons why people would risk such a journey.
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