The risk of dying aboard a small boat on the journey between the coasts of Africa and the Canary Islands has increased in the last year. In the first semester of this 2023, more than 7,500 people have arrived in the Canary Islands, which is 20% less than a year earlier and yet, those who died at sea remain at almost 800, according to data from the NGO Caminando Fronteras. . The balance is that one in ten does not arrive.
Mortality is growing in what is considered the deadliest immigration route as a result of the changes applied in the protocols for action at sea and derived from agreements reached between Spain and Morocco, by which the rescue is left in the hands of the Moroccan gendarmerie. Although Maritime Rescue ensures that the protocols have not changed and that rescues are being managed today in the same way as two years ago, NGOs such as Cear and Caminando Fronteras consider that, since April 2022, when the Government of Pedro Sánchez gave a shift in the position of Spain with respect to the Sahara and placed itself on the side of Morocco, the behavior of the Spanish rescue services at sea have changed, an extreme that is denied by Salvamento Marítimo. “There is a more manifest presence of Morocco, which usually arrives late and badly,” says the coordinator of Cear in the Canary Islands, Juan Carlos Lorenzo.
The omission of relief, they denounce, has become one of the strategies used for migration control, as pointed out by the founder of Caminando Fronteras, Helena Maleno, who affirms that the increase in deaths is not due to the difficulties of the route itself , but to the denial of protection for those who try to reach the Canary Islands.
In the opinion of the NGOs, the chances of arriving alive are reduced on the deadliest immigration route in the world, aboard very precarious boats and over distances that can exceed 800 kilometers. “Coordination should have the maximum rigor and the rescue would have to be a priority,” says Lorenzo.
Maritime Rescue sources reject any accusation of omission in the rescues and assure that practically every day the Sasemar 101 plane leaves to search the Canary Islands area to see if it finds any cayuco. In the same way, they send notices to merchant ships in the area and ask them to collaborate in case they detect any vessels. “Aerial means are used and when a boat or cayuco is found, it is sent to the air force,” these sources indicate. As specified, the coordination centers make technical decisions at all times, adjusting to the established international search and rescue procedures.
In their attempt to reach Spain, immigrants not only face the harsh journey at sea. Before boarding, they have to overcome the harshness and violence with which the Moroccan security forces try to prevent their attempt to leave. On more than one occasion, the Moroccan military has shot them to avoid boarding, especially when the immigrants are sub-Saharan Africans, as the coordinator of Cear in the Canary Islands points out.
The last case that has been verified occurred on May 25, when a boat with two people with gunshot wounds arrived in Gran Canaria. The survivors recounted that on the trip they had to throw three more people overboard who died from the shots, while a young Malian man was left lying on the African coast fatally wounded by a bullet. “They started shooting when we were in the zodiac. I counted to four bursts, it sounded pun, pun, pun. It was terrible, there was a boy next to me, he grabbed me and then I fell into the water with him. We were still close to the beach, I don’t know how I saved myself. On the shore I saw the boy who had clung to me. He was dead. I looked at the soldiers and told them ‘you have murdered him,'” one of the survivors of the shots told Caminando Fronteras, who was left on the ground, unable to get on the boat that arrived in Gran Canaria. He along with other detainees who could not undertake the trip were taken to the desert, to absolute nothingness, to prevent them from trying again, as detailed by Helena Maleno.
This is another of the usual practices in Morocco, agree Santana, Lorenzo and Maleno. “Morocco is using unusual violence to prevent them from leaving,” says the coordinator of Cear in the Canary Islands, who points out that Morocco is carrying out raids in different cities on the coast among sub-Saharan immigrants and takes them inland, to border areas with Algeria. to curtail any attempt to exit, even if they do not even have that claim. “We have cases of people who were in Tangier, working and looking for a living however they could, and suddenly they have been arrested and taken to areas where there is nothing,” he says.
In this sense, the Migration expert Txema Santana calls on the Spanish Government to put order in the commitments made with Morocco to try to stop departures from its territory. “Spain must designate an independent body to ensure the commitments signed,” he says.
Another of those “barbarities” denounced by the NGOs is the lack of identification of the fatalities of irregular immigration, who are buried in common graves without their families being aware that it has happened to them. As Caminando Fronteras denounces, families suffer the denial of the right to the truth by public administrations. “No administration assumes responsibility or opens an investigation,” says this NGO.
