The terrifying odyssey of a boat that went to the Canary Islands and ended in Brazil

Brazil, with 8,000 kilometers of coastline and thousands more kilometers of river waters, is accustomed to odysseys and shipwrecks. A propitious setting for truly incredible stories — such as that of the fisherman who survived 11 days adrift in 2022 inside an industrial freezer without knowing how to swim and surrounded by sharks — to almost forgotten dramas — such as the sinking of a sister ocean liner of the Titanic,the Spanish Prince of Asturias, which ran aground on Carnival night in 1916 and in which hundreds died. But what happened last week has caused enormous surprise because it is almost unprecedented: a boat with nine bodies that, according to the Federal Police, set sail from Africa towards Europe, towards the Canary Islands, lost its way on the high seas and its desperate passengers died one after another of thirst and hunger.

That of cayucos pushed by sea currents to the other shore of the Atlantic is a relatively recent phenomenon that can be seen in Brazil and the Caribbean. Tiny, if compared to the Mediterranean. But it reflects the monumental dangers of trying to reach a Europe increasingly fortified with laws, walls and fences.

The last known ghost boat lost in the Atlantic ran aground a week ago in an area of ​​shallow waters off the northern coast of Brazil. Without an engine or rudder, he was drifting. It was found by fishermen near the island of Canelas, in the State of Pará, in the Amazon. Frightened by so many decomposing bodies, they raised the alarm. The superintendent of the Federal Police in Pará, José Roberto Peres, thought they were foreigners because there was no news of any shipwreck on the Brazilian coast, as he explained last Friday afternoon in a telephone interview from Belém.

Immediately, he sent agents to rescue the boat and the bodies, and mobilized, as Interpol dictates in these cases, the Brasilia Disaster Victim Identification team. Within hours, they were on the ground. The delicate task of moving the boat with the lifeless bodies to dry land required effort, skill and patience. The forensic experts then took all kinds of samples, dental, DNA… which they will analyze from now on. The laborious task of identifying the victims and trying to reconstruct the tragedy began.

A document from Mauritania and another from Mali, with an entry stamp in Mauritania on January 17, 2024, revealed the African origin of the occupants of the boat and that they probably set sail from the latter country. The police do not rule out that the ticket included other nationalities. Thanks to the seal they know that the canoe left after that date, explains the superintendent. For now, they do not know the sex and age of the deceased.

lethal route

Although the Atlantic route to the Canary Islands is one of the deadliest in the world, the Spanish archipelago has seen four times more people arrive in cayuco so far in 2024 than in the same period in 2023, according to UNHCR (the UN Agency for refugees). Perhaps the spectacular increase in the migratory flow to the Canary Islands in recent years is driving this new phenomenon. The Spanish Red Cross is making appeals on social networks in order to gather detailed information about canoes with unknown whereabouts, Efe report.

Brazilian police investigators are convinced that the boat, with capacity for 30 or 40 people, was lost on the high seas. “We believe that as they died, they were thrown into the water. The last ones left, the nine, no longer had the strength to do that,” explains Peres from Belém, 4,200 kilometers from the Mauritanian coast. In this Amazonian city the nine still anonymous people who dreamed of prosperity and Europe will be buried.

The Federal Police believe that there were considerably more passengers, at least 25, because that is the number of layers of rain they found on the boat. Twenty-three raincoats, dark green; two, yellow. There was also Mauritanian cash. Perhaps they traveled even more, because between them they carried 27 cell phones that, if investigators manage to extract information from them, could be gold in locating their loved ones, knowing who the migrants were and what their desires were.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has documented the death or disappearance of more than 63,000 people while migrating in the last decade; almost half drowned in the Mediterranean.

There was born the phenomenon of what specialists call ghost boats, those that could not launch an SOS, alert the families, a journalist, an NGO or the authorities. The ones that no rescue team is looking for because they don’t know they set sail. For those who are not on board, they only come into existence when someone finds them. By then, the migrants are already dead.

“We began to detect the phenomenon in 2021,” Edwin Viales, from the IOM Missing Migrants Project, reveals in an interview. Seven boats with bodies were located that year in the Caribbean – in Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the coast between Nicaragua and Honduras… – and one that arrived in Fortaleza (Brazil) with three bodies and 27 cell phones. That Brazilian case had little media impact compared to this one. In 2022 and 2023, other ghost canoes arrived in the Caribbean, also with African corpses. All coming, as far as is known, from Mauritania.

“They come to this side of the world because they are trapped in the Canary Islands current, the same one that brought Christopher Columbus to America. They are diverted due to extreme weather events or because the boat suffers damage. As they are not prepared for long overseas voyages, they run out of supplies, they die of dehydration and starvation,” explains Viales by video call from San José (Costa Rica).

Viales, regional monitor for the Americas of this IOM project that documents disappearances and deaths of migrants in transit, estimates that in those three years the loss of boats in the Atlantic has caused the death of 85 Africans, not including the nine who are waiting to be buried in Brazil, and counting only the bodies that arrived in cayucos. “They are usually mummified, which makes identification very difficult,” he says. He highlights the speed with which the Brazilian police have reacted in this case and emphasizes that “the real numbers are much higher.”

Brazil is a country built by millions of slaves and then by immigrants arriving from Europe, Arab countries and Japan in recruitment missions organized by the authorities to replace black labor after the abolition of slavery. Except for the indigenous, every Brazilian is descended from foreigners. Perhaps for that reason or because it is very far from the major migratory routes, there is almost no political debate around immigration and the immigration policy is generous. If anything, the sudden landing of Venezuelans in one of the least populated states, Roraima, caused tension in recent years, but nothing comparable to the high-voltage debate that it generates in Europe or the United States.

The fishermen who came across the canoe thought that the remains belonged to Haitians seeking refuge in Brazil. But, as soon as the video they recorded when they came across the horrendous scene began to circulate, those who know the Nouadhibou (Mauritania)-Canary Islands route well ruled out Haiti. The elongated shape, white hull and blue interior told them that it was one of the typical Mauritanian fishing boats that migrants also use. Superintendent Peres, experienced in human trafficking investigations, emphasizes that the statistics reflect only “the tip of the iceberg.” “Who knows how many more people have disappeared at sea looking for a better life, not much better, just a little better,” he concludes.

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