Hundreds missing off west Africa as charity calls for 24-hour rescue resources

Three boats carrying hundreds of people between them are still missing along the so-called “Atlantic” migration route between west Africa and the Canary Islands, according to an aid organisation that sounded the alarm earlier this week.

Caminando Fronteras (Walking Borders) says a boat that was found by the Spanish coastguard on Monday was not one of the three – said to be carrying more than 300 people – about which it had raised an alert.

The Spanish coastguard said it rescued 86 people – six of them women – from a “cayuco”, or “open canoe”, after its plane spotted their boat more than 100km south of the Canary Islands.

Caminando Fronteras had 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 worried about their fate. Two other boats, one with about 65 people and the other with up to 60, have also been missing for more than two weeks, the Spanish aid group said.

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“Our organisation is… concerned about the lives of these people, the pain of their families and the fact that with every passing minute we are losing some precious time to find them alive,” said Caminando Fronteras in a press release sent to The Irish Times.

It called for the permanent 24-hour presence of search resources and collaboration between the Spanish, Moroccan and Mauritanian states to save lives along the route.

The Atlantic route has become increasingly popular in recent years as EU efforts to block other routes to Europe have made them much more dangerous. Many west Africans previously would have taken journeys north to Libya, and across the sea to Italy, where the EU, through its policies, has been accused of trapping people in a country where they face war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Caminando Fronteras said there had been an increase in boats leaving Senegal since the end of May, when there were clashes between security forces and protesters over the treatment of opposition leader Ousmane Sonko, amid concerns that Senegalese president Macky Sall would run again for a third term.

In April an investigation by the Associated Press found that boats full of dead bodies, which seemingly took off from west Africa while attempting to reach the Canary Islands, were washing up in the Caribbean and in Brazil. In 2021 at least seven such boats were found.

Last year 15,682 people reached the Canary Islands by sea, according to the UN’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM). The organisation said 45 shipwrecks were recorded, resulting in the deaths 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 nearly 1,000 people died on the route in the first half of this year. In 2021 the organisation says 4,404 people died or disappeared trying to reach Spain – around 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.