“There is a lot of talk about immigrants, but few of us can talk about our situation.” Ismael Ouattara has closely experienced the lethality of the migratory route to the Canary Islands. Now, after a trip in which he lost even freedom, he works to defend the rights of people on the move. Saving his daughter from genital mutilation pushed him to leave the Ivory Coast with his family. They traveled through Mali, Mauritania and Morocco on a journey that lasted three years and during which their second daughter was born. In 2021 they managed to raise enough money to get on a precarious boat that would take them from the Sahara to the archipelago. The trip was supposed to last three or four days, but it lasted 17. More than 19 people died. Among them, his partner and his young daughter.
“The poor condition of the two engines meant that we ended up drifting, passing the Canary Islands, until a cargo ship rescued us,” Ouattara recalls. The Ivorian knows well what the future would have been for all the occupants of the boat if the ship had not been there. “We would have been another of the boats that are lost at sea and no one knows anything else, leaving the relatives in eternal mourning not knowing where the people who were traveling in them are,” he points out.
Food and water ended on the fifth day. They reserved some for the children, who were able to eat and drink for two more days. The journey for minors becomes even more complicated. “Having to be calm, managing to keep them entertained during the trip, at critical moments is not easy,” says the survivor.
After the first week, everything “was pure hell.” “More than 19 people died. The first one who died gave us a terrible blow of reality and each person who left caused a desolation that was difficult to sustain,” recalls Ouattara. His little daughter died and, the next day, his partner also died. “The death of my little daughter was a very, very hard blow for me and my wife, and I believe that it was what caused her strength to weaken,” he says. “I survived to try to save my oldest daughter.”
five days
Only five days had passed since the death of his family when Ismael Ouattara entered prison. Her eldest daughter became an unaccompanied minor for a year and a half. The time that the Ivorian was in jail accused of being the boss of the boat. “Sometimes I don’t know how I was able to overcome and face everything that happened without going crazy,” he admits. Defending his freedom and being able to find his daughter was what kept him going.
After setting foot on solid ground, Ouattara spent two days in the Temporary Care Center for Foreigners (CATE) in Tenerife and was then imprisoned. The only evidence was a mobile phone that, according to him, a Frontex agent took from him. What they saw on his cell phone had no criminal evidence and after a year he was released. In all that time he never saw his court-appointed lawyer. “I only contacted her by phone on one occasion and what she told me was that if I was in a hurry to get out of prison, she would advise me to hire a private lawyer because I had a lot of work,” he says.
The Orahan association put him in contact with lawyer Sara Rodríguez. “Without it it would have been very complicated, since being in prison in a country you don’t know, with a language you don’t speak, where you are accused of such serious things, puts you in a situation from which it is very difficult to get out,” he asserts. .
In prison he tried to entertain his mind with sports, studying and helping other prisoners: “I decided from the beginning to learn Spanish, since I was clear that my daughter would forget our language and that it would be very difficult to communicate with her.”
keep hope
He was released from prison and Ismael managed to find his daughter. He was living with a host family and, as he had anticipated, he no longer spoke French. Ouattara criticizes that this is not taken into account in the reception system. “At some point they may have contact with their family again and the language barrier is a difficult obstacle to overcome,” he warns.
Having been close to the helm, holding a GPS or being pointed out by a canoe companion is enough for a migrant to go to prison. A report prepared by the entities Irídia and Novact states that, despite the fact that the regulatory framework requires Member States to impose sanctions on anyone who facilitates the irregular entry or transit of a person in the community territory, operations against migrant trafficking They end up chasing drivers who “very rarely are part of an organized clan.”
An exhaustive study prepared by the Canarian lawyer Daniel Arencibia concludes that Justice in the Canary Islands requests higher sentences for the accused than in other autonomous regions. The eight-year sentence is the most repeated among those requested by the Prosecutor’s Office, a sentence that is reduced if the accused accepts a plea. The time they spend with a criminal record and, consequently, proceeding to regularize it is also longer, being pushed into begging.
For those who have gone through the same thing as him, Ouattara advises “maintain hope and have motivation” to grow every day. For him, integration is also key. “I have made an effort to study, to take advantage of my time, both when I was inside prison and outside,” he says. Now he has specialized in immigration and human rights and works on different projects. “People who live in situations as hard as we emigrants do, learn to value the little things of every day and that, in itself, gives you happiness,” he concludes.
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