Fifty people have died while travelling by boat from west Africa to the Canary Islands, a Spanish charity has reported.
At least 86 migrants were travelling in the same boat, which ran into difficulty having departed from Mauritania on January 2nd, said Helena Maleno, of Caminando Fronteras, an organisation that monitors migrant crossings to Spain. The Moroccan sea rescue service picked up 36 survivors on Wednesday, two weeks after they had set out, she said.
“They spent 13 days on a traumatic crossing without receiving help,” Ms Maleno wrote on social media. She said it was possible that there were more passengers in the boat who are as yet unaccounted for.
“We cannot just be witnesses,” said Fernando Clavijo, the president of the Canary Islands region. “The [Spanish] state and Europe have to act. The Atlantic cannot continue to be the cemetery of Africa.”
Although in recent years the majority of migrants travelling to the Canary Islands have been from sub-Saharan Africa, most of the passengers on the boat were reported to be have been from Pakistan. Recently, the Spanish authorities have noted an increase in arrivals to the islands of people originally from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Syria.
Last year, Spain registered 63,970 undocumented migrant arrivals, according to government figures, almost equalling the record of 2018. About three-quarters of them used the extremely hazardous route from north and west Africa to the Canary archipelago. The other routes used to reach Spain by boat were from North Africa to the Spanish mainland and the Balearic Islands.
A total of 10,547 migrants died while trying to reach Spain by boat last year, according to Caminando Fronteras, a 58 per cent increase on 2023.
Immigration has been at the centre of the political arena in recent months and it has become the biggest concern for Spaniards, according to a poll published by the national statistics institute in September.
Much of the debate has been driven by a failure to reach agreement on the distribution of about 6,000 unaccompanied migrant minors who are on the Canary Islands, with approximately 500 more in Spain’s north African enclave of Ceuta. The left-wing central government and the local authorities in the Canary Islands had hoped that regional administrations, most of them governed by the conservative Popular Party (PP), would agree to the minors being taken in across the mainland.
Pepa Millán, of the far-right Vox party, said “the message we have to give to the world is that those who come illegally will be returned to their countries of origins”.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International called for national and local authorities to improve the treatment of the minors. Virginia Álvarez, of the Spanish branch of the organisation, warned that “the system is abandoning these boys and girls”.
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