On Tuesday, August 6, Luis Alberto Polanco went fishing for peas, picapica, and tuna with a friend and his son in the San Juan River area, in the Dominican province of María Trinidad Sánchez. A few hours later, they found a boat that did not seem local and that, apparently, did not have anyone on board. They got a little closer and about ten nautical miles (18 kilometers) from the coast, they noticed that it was a yola (a canoe) full of skeletons in a fetal position, one next to the other. “The bad smell was very strong, we were afraid of getting poisoned, so we did not look much,” the fisherman explained to local media, who notified the authorities.
Civil Defense has confirmed that 14 bodies were recovered, as well as Senegalese and Mauritanian identity cards. The boat also contained 12 packages of drugs; heroin or cocaine, according to the Dominican Navy. The discovery of the drugs adds even more mystery to this case, not only because the cayucos that leave the coasts of West Africa rarely carry drugs (among other things because of the probability that they will be found when they are rescued), but because several packages with the same inscription (HC1) on their packaging have appeared in different places, including neighboring Puerto Rico, in recent months. Although everything points to the boat’s origin being African, the appearance of the drugs makes authorities question whether they could have come from a Latin American country. “It is the first time that drugs have been found on a boat with missing migrants that I can remember,” says Edwin Viales, regional monitor for the Americas for Missing Migrants.
Although few details are known about the boat, the entire country is asking the same question: How did they get here?
The main theory that authorities are working on is that this is an African fishing boat, probably Mauritanian due to its white colour, which was heading to the Canary Islands (Spain) and which at some point lost its way and ended up dragged by the trade winds and currents up to 6,000 kilometres to the west. Given the state of decomposition of the bodies and the distance, it is estimated that the journey took at least a month, although they may have left several months ago, as has happened with other boats found in the Caribbean or Brazil.
The forensic experts who recovered the bodies, however, are cautious with their conclusions and say that the identification cards found on the boat do not really confirm that the skeletons belong to people from Senegal and Mauritania and that they will have to wait for DNA tests. The identification of the bodies, however, may take months or may never occur.
“We know that at high temperatures and in the open air, the body decomposes faster than if it is buried or in water,” Sergio Sarita Valdez, a forensic doctor, told the Dominican press. “There is the so-called Casper Law, which says: when there is free access to oxygen, the body decomposes twice as fast as when it is submerged in water, and eight times faster than when buried in the ground.” Currently, the remains are kept in the The National Institute of Forensic Sciences (INACIF) in Santiago and national institutions are in contact with the Senegalese women for a future repatriation of the remains.
This is the first time that the Dominican Republic has received a lost boat from the other side of the Atlantic. “It is something unusual,” Juan Salas, director general of Civil Defense, said by phone. “In the 58 years of history that the institution has, it is the first time that one has arrived from Africa.” Salas suspects that all the members were men, since no belongings of the baby or the woman were found. “We know that they have been dead for at least a month, but it is still too early to know. It is a huge unknown.”
The belongings found on the boat are the only clues that exist to construct a story. Apart from fanny packs, necklaces and a charger, the discovery of 28 cell phones leads investigators to believe that 28 people initially set sail, who died on the journey and who, perhaps, were thrown into the open sea. Of the 14 identity cards found on the boat, only three are legible and have not been completely eroded by the sun and salt water. Tall Yankhoba, born on May 31, 1991 in Pikine, Senegal; Wade Zidane, born on October 10, 2000, in Mbane, Senegal; and Yebba Abdouyale from Mauritania. It is impossible to identify the age or city of origin of the latter’s documents due to the deterioration of the document. Of the other passengers, not even the names are known. This is, according to Edwin Viales, from Missing Migrants, a reality as cruel as it is everyday.
According to data from Missing Migrants, a project of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) that counts migrants who have disappeared, two-thirds of the bodies found in the last ten years have never been identified. “This is a boat that arrived and we found it, but it is very likely that there may be more incidents like this that have simply not been recorded and are currently in international waters,” Viales explains via video call. “Ghost shipwrecks are becoming more common, especially on Caribbean routes.” The term “ghost or invisible shipwrecks” refers to boats that set sail without anyone, neither family members, nor authorities, nor the press, knowing about it.
The Costa Rican expert says he is already working with the IOM counterpart in Senegal to try to contact the families of the deceased migrants. In the last decade, at least 9,714 migrants have been found dead in Latin America on some migratory route. The NGO Caminando Fronteras estimates that in the first five months of the year 4,808 people have died or disappeared in the Atlantic trying to reach the Canary Islands; one person every 45 minutes.
A team of Associated Press journalists documented in 2021 the arrival in the Caribbean of Seven ghost ships, full of corpseswhich had apparently set sail from the Atlantic coast of Africa. In early 2024, history repeated itself with a boat adrift in Pará, Brazil, with at least 20 decomposing bodies of African people. Viales believes that the increase in migratory flows worldwide could lead to more episodes like these. “The only way to prevent the death of people migrating is with a greater number of safe, orderly and regular routes,” he concludes.
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