BarcelonaThe year that is coming to an end, with a Christmas marked by the rescue of almost 600 migrants in 24 hours in the Canary Islands, was also the year in which the wreck of a cayuco with about sixty people on board, it raised fears from the first moment that it was the biggest migration tragedy documented in the archipelago. Figures that verify the terrible annual balance of the NGO Caminando Fronteras. the report Monitoring the right to life 2024which the organization presented this Thursday, places 2024 as the deadliest since the victims of the migratory routes to reach Europe crossing the Mediterranean have been counted (2016). From January to December 15, 2024, when they closed the collection of data for the report, 10,457 people have died on these routes, the equivalent of 30 every day.
The NGO has analyzed 293 tragedies on the different migration routes. Among them there are 131 boats that disappeared without a trace. Among the victims were 421 women and 1,538 children and teenagers, higher numbers than in previous years, when the vast majority of migrants trying to reach Europe by sea were men. The presence of women and children has grown even more on certain routes: as explained by the founder of Caminando Fronteras, Helena Maleno, in an interview with Catalunya Ràdio, 20% of the fatalities trying to reach Ceuta by sea are children and teenagers
As had already happened in previous years, the most lethal route (not only in the Mediterranean, but on a global scale) is the Atlantic towards the Canary Islands: this year 9,757 people have died or disappeared there. Caminando Fronteras has detected more boats that had left Mauritania, a route that has “consolidated as the main migratory corridor to the islands” and that has claimed 6,829 victims in twelve months. The NGO also points out that particularly dangerous routes have been consolidated, such as the Atlantic route to the island of El Hierro and the Algerian route to the Balearic Islands, which pose an even greater risk considering the distance and difficulty of the journey .
“Mourning without bodies”
Maleno, who has coordinated the report that takes stock of 2024, has also focused on the need to find missing people after a shipwreck. Since December 15, there have been 442 untraceable and he has referred to the suffering of relatives who are waiting to hear from them. “Many families are Catalan, they live in Catalonia, they are looking for their missing and they are mourning without bodies, without being able to bury them with dignity. This also marks the life of the communities in Catalonia,” he warned.
In his opinion, the main cause of this increase in deaths in the Mediterranean is “the inaction of governments”. In fact, one of the conclusions of the report that the NGO published this Thursday is that “rescue services arbitrarily assess the risk conditions of boats, despite the fact that they know that none meet the minimum standards of nautical safety”. For the entity, “this arbitrariness results in delays or inaction in front of vessels clearly at risk, which has led to shipwrecks and avoidable deaths”.
“Many tragedies are avoidable, it is not true that to cross a border you have to die and it is not normal that this is accepted”, added Maleno. The activist has also assessed that the omission of the duty to help migrants has been “established as a form of migration control”: “We should be ashamed”.
Source: www.ara.cat
