The Spanish coast guard says it has rescued 86 people from a “cayuco”, or open canoe, after an aid group warned that hundreds of people had gone missing on three separate boats which were trying to reach Europe.
The coastguard said one of its planes spotted a boat more than 100km south of the Canary Islands on Monday, and 80 men and six women were subsequently rescued. It is not clear what condition they were in or whether there were other people on board.
Caminando Fronteras, which translates to English as Walking Borders, previously warned that a boat carrying about 200 people had departed from Kafountine in southern Senegal on June 27th and family members of those on board were concerned about their fate.
Two other boats – one carrying about 65 people and the other up to 60 – have also been missing for more than two weeks, the aid group said.
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The so-called “Atlantic route” to Europe has become more popular in recent years, as European policies aimed at preventing migration have increased the dangers along other routes, such as the one through Libya and across the sea to Italy.
Last year, 15,682 people reached the Canary Islands by sea, according to the UN’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM), while 45 shipwrecks were recorded, resulting in the death or disappearance of at least 543 people.
Caminando Fronteras – which generally gives figures, based on regular monitoring, that are much higher than IOM’s – says that nearly 1,000 people died on the route in the first half of this year. In 2021, it says, 4,404 people died or disappeared trying to reach Spain, about 90 per cent of whom were trying to reach the Canary Islands. In 2022, the aid group put the number who died on the Atlantic route at 1,784.
In February, The Irish Times reported on how illegal overfishing by foreign vessels off the West African coast is one factor driving people to take this journey. Senegalese fishermen – struggling to survive because of decreased catches – are increasingly using their boats for human smuggling, said Yora Kane, the secretary general of SAGMS, a union for Senegalese seafarers. They pack up to 150 people into a boat and sail towards the Canary Islands, he said. “In bad times, when there’s no fish, there begins another bad time of migrants ... Because they can’t feed themselves they use these boats to go abroad, towards the Mediterranean and Europe. It’s obviously very risky and if they have bad weather ... those people don’t know how to balance the load. The boat can capsize.”
Last year, a Gambian man in his late 20s, who had made the more than 1,600km journey successfully, told The Irish Times that he stayed at sea for nine days, including two after food and water ran out. He said that each person on his boat had paid up to €550 for the journey.
“As I’m speaking to you ... you will have people preparing to take the risk,” he said on the phone from Spain, where he had found work on a farm. “Mostly it’s [because of] the lack of opportunity. In Spain, there is a difference, here at least when you work they are paying you, it can earn you a decent living – maybe not the life you want but you have healthcare, proper food, a place to sleep and if you convert [the euro] to your rates in Africa you get more, you [can] send money to your family back home.”
