Armando G. Tejeda

Correspondent

The newspaper La Jornada
Saturday, July 20, 2024, p. 24

Madrid. Last Monday, at around eight in the morning, a small wooden boat was spotted a few kilometres from the Canary Islands port of La Restinga, carrying 56 people from sub-Saharan Africa, dehydrated, frozen and terrified after spending more than eight days adrift on the high seas.

Among them were a two-year-old girl and a 20-year-old man who arrived on land in critical condition and died hours later in the public hospital on the island of El Hierro.

It is estimated that in the past 18 months around 60,000 migrants have reached European soil via the Canary Islands route, of which more than 7,000 are minors, most of whom were travelling alone.

In the migration crisis in Europe, the Canary Islands in Spain and Lampedusa in Italy are some of the areas with the highest mortality rates, due to a lack of resources, the overcrowding in which migrants who reach land alive survive, and the lack of public resources to care for them.

The dramas are daily and relentless. For example, on July 7, a boat with 147 migrants arrived on the island of El Hierro. They were adrift for 12 days, several of them without water or fuel. A nine-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy were travelling, the former with her mother, a 24-year-old Guinean who hoped to join her husband in Europe, while the latter did so with his father. But the lack of water and food caused the death of their respective parents and the children witnessed how other passengers threw their bodies into the sea to avoid infections and to take off weight. Both have since been admitted to a hospital on the island, still in shock and in very poor health.

There is also the case of Makam, 19, who arrived in the Canary Islands from Mali, fleeing the war. In Spain he lives in a migrant reception centre: I am still afraid of dying, of the sea; the journey was very difficult.He has no parents and is alone in Europe. He does not even know about his family’s situation in Mali due to the war.

The regional president, Fernando Clavijo, from the regionalist party Coalición Canaria, explained his desperation at the situation, in which he recognizes that Spain violates all international treaties on respect for children.

He predicted: If half of what is expected to happen in arrivals between now and the end of the year occurs, we will not have the capacity or physical space to serve them..

I refuse to believe that we live in a country that does not want to guarantee the rights of children who could be our children, siblings, nephews or grandchildren. These two children are still in shock, lost in thought. They may have seen their parents sink forever into the sea or those around them did everything possible to prevent them from witnessing it, but they know that they died..

The number of orphans among minors increases

Since their arrival, both have been on the list of minors under the care of the Canary Islands government and, as soon as they are discharged from hospital, they will be transferred to a centre appropriate for their age and receive psychological care. Clavijo recognises that the resources are scarce for the high concentration of migrant minors in orphanhood who are in their territory; it is estimated that in Spain there are around 13,200 minors in this situation, of which 5,700 are in the small Canary Islands archipelago.

Hence the urgency for the other autonomous communities to open their doors to them and speed up the procedures to do so, since when dealing with minors the bureaucratic process is more laborious, complex and time-consuming.

At a meeting chaired by the central government, the majority of the autonomous communities agreed to transfer 370 minors. The only region that refused to join the plan was Catalonia, whose nationalist government headed by Esquerra Republicana claimed that its reception centres were saturated and demanded autonomy for its migration policy.

The shock plan depends on the approval of a reform of the immigration law which would make the reception of these minors compulsory.

By June, more than 19,000 people had arrived in the Canary Islands, three times as many as in 2023 in the same period, and the local government fears that 2024 will end up well above last year’s record of 40,000.

Another boat carrying 66 people was rescued yesterday, the government delegation said. It is estimated that there are around 300,000 migrants waiting in Mauritania to board a wooden canoe and begin the deadly journey.