Two cayucos about to burst have made history on the Canary Islands migratory route. The first arrived in El Hierro on October 3 with 271 people on board and the shocking image of the barge, barely 25 meters long, entering the port attracted newspapers, radios and televisions to the westernmost of the Canary Islands. Never before had so many people been seen in a single canoe and that milestone ended up being a before and after on the route that has broken all arrival records in the month of October. Just 18 days later, another cayuco with 320 people shattered the previous record.
Neither of the two ships should have come so loaded, but a good part of these two trips that began in Senegal were the result of hopelessness, mischief and chaos. Five of its occupants tell what happened, why the boats became overcrowded and how they ended up in El Hierro. His story transcends numbers and reveals the desperation of thousands of people to leave their country, even without knowing what they will find when they reach their destination.
The one with the 271 occupants was the fourth canoe launched into the sea by a group of fishermen from Joal, a coastal town southeast of Dakar. It also ended up being the last. Although the authorities resort to the mafia’s imagination to explain irregular immigration, what three of its occupants describe is more like a fix between neighbors. Organized—and with thousands of euros invested—but a fix that, furthermore, did not go as expected. “Those who organize these trips are normal people who have seen the demand and take advantage of it. These are people who end up putting their own family in the canoe,” explains Mbaye, one of the occupants of the barge.
The demand, indeed, is increasing. The departure of thousands of young people from Senegal has strongly reactivated the Canary Islands route and more than 32,000 people have already landed on the islands aboard precarious wooden boats. It is a historical record and there are still almost two months left to close the year. They emigrate from Senegal, attracted by a more prosperous life in Europe, but they are also fleeing a political environment that is beginning to be suffocating. Mbaye, a member of the main opposition party, now banned, left because he felt threatened. “I have many friends in prison for demonstrating,” he says. “The president made it clear that those of us who did not agree with his government had to leave and there are mercenaries to remind us,” he explains.
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The trip by canoe from Senegal to the Canary Islands costs between 600 and 1,000 euros and depends on the value of the canoe. This one, painted in colors, was one of the new ones and cost 14 million CFA francs (about 21,350 euros). It is told by Hakim, another of the occupants, who knows well the man who led the organization of the trip. “They do the math… They add up the price of the canoe, plus the price of gasoline, plus the price of food… And they calculate how many people they need to cover expenses and make money,” he explains. According to these numbers, this barge was to transport 150 people who would pay 1,000 euros each. “But at the time of leaving, more than 350 people appeared on the beach wanting to go up. It was chaos,” agree its occupants in a cafeteria in the center of Madrid.
The ship’s owners had devised a system to fill it and organize boarding. They printed 150 numbered tickets that they distributed to those who paid their fare. Some were given up to ten pieces of paper so that they could promote the trip among their friends and they could come for free. Until then, everything was going well, but there were people who falsified the tickets and sold dozens of places that did not exist.
On the night of September 26, more than three hundred people tried to get on the boats that would take them to the cayuco, anchored about 21 kilometers to the north, very close to Mbour. In charge of the boarding were four burly men, Senegalese wrestling professionals, although there was no way to establish order there. “We couldn’t fit on the boats, they forced people who had paid to get off,” Mbaye recalls.
![Disembarkation of 271 people in the port of La Restinga (El Hierro), on October 3.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/dYRWQmFxL8f7jw9jPDLc6g60Q8A=/414x0/filters:focal(2001x1149:2011x1159)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/ZDJWTJTJXLUOJEF3BPXJOHHHYE.jpg)
The large group, with their small backpacks on their backs, finally reached the canoe, equipped with two engines of 40 and 60 horsepower. Four people, paid by the organizers, were responsible for navigation and they, in turn, had the help of other occupants like them. “Many of us are fishermen, we know how to navigate,” they explain. It is to these captains whom the Spanish police pursue when they arrive on land to accuse them of a crime of favoring clandestine immigration, but with these arrests the heart of the supposed mafia is rarely attacked, nor is it necessarily successful. “When we approached land, we changed position. I, who had the GPS, hid and threw the device and the phone into the water,” explains Mbaye. “When we arrive, no one says who was driving the canoe,” adds Hakim.
In the GPS that guided this boat and that was in the hands of Mbaye, three destinations had been registered: Gran Canaria, Tenerife and El Hierro. The canoe first headed towards Gran Canaria. “It is closer and easier to get to, but when we approached the coast of Nouakchott (Mauritania), we came across a fishing boat. They greeted us, but we thought they would report us, so we changed the route to get away from the coast,” explains Hakim. And so they headed towards El Hierro, the last piece of land they could go to before getting lost in the Atlantic.
The trip lasted eight days and became complicated after the fourth, when the canoe was sailing near Western Sahara. The good conditions in which many of the migrants disembarked in October have arrived have conveyed the feeling that the journeys were easy. The hoax has even been circulated again that there are mother ships that transport the cayucos and release them once they are near the Canary coast. “From the fourth day onwards it was hell,” maintains Mamadou, the quietest of the three. They barely ate (there was only couscous and cookies) and it was impossible to sleep due to lack of space. The occupants began to lose their minds.
“People go crazy at sea, they can’t sleep at night and they have hallucinations,” explains Hakim. “You get disoriented. Keep in mind that we had seen nothing but sky and water for more than four days,” he describes.
Shipwrecked delusions are common in the stories of shipwrecked people, sailors, and migrants and are caused by fatigue and lack of sleep. In the middle of the sea, aboard a canoe, there are those who announced that they were going to buy tobacco and jumped into the water without turning back. “Many began to get angry, shouting that they were dying or that they would never see their families again… They bit each other and we had to tie their hands and cover their mouths…” explains Hakim. “One looked at me and, instead of seeing me, he told me he saw a goat,” Ibrahima laughs now. “If there were just a few it is manageable, but there were at least a hundred people in that situation,” adds Mbaye.
The days dawned clear, but the sea was rough due to the gusts of wind. There were times when the waves left the canoe suspended six meters high. They sailed against the breeze. “The engines were taking us at about 17 kilometers per hour, but with the waves we did not exceed eight,” explains Mbaye. “It was very complicated,” he concludes.
Criminals with machetes
A couple of weeks later, on October 14, another ship with similar characteristics began to fill up on the high seas. Chaos prevailed here too.
![Cheick Abdulaja, one of the occupants of a canoe that arrived in El Hierro on October 21 with 320 people on board, poses in Almería.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/grOrMo5HWMItLg5Jpd-PkMGfq64=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/WXXMFPA7JNGAXG6OTXYI6WW3EQ.jpg)
Cheick Abdulaja notified his mother that he was leaving that same morning, when he was heading to the beach. He was the second of the children to leave that same month. “She was in shock“, remembers Abdulaja in Almería, where he is welcomed. That day the wind was whipping the trees. “A lot of people had already died and we were a little scared about the time,” he remembers.
At nine in the morning a small boat with 15 people on it began to transport the emigrants to the large cayuco. The women and children went first, but there were hundreds of people in the sand desperate to get on. Boarding was canceled and did not resume until the afternoon. “There were a lot of fights, everything was out of control,” Cheick recalls. “We thought there would be about 150 of us, but it started to get complicated. There were people who wanted to leave because it was not safe and the organizers offered to refund their money,” explains Ibrahima with a permanent smile and a toothpick in his mouth. “It was difficult for those who came from the interior of the country and were not familiar with some of the codes of those of us who are from the sea. In a situation like this you have to prevail, you have to be strong,” she adds.
As if that were not enough, a group of criminals appeared on the beach. MalfaiteursThey call them evildoers in French. Men armed with machetes who wanted to get into the canoe by force. “The organizers also carry machetes to confront them. But the bad guys won,” explains Ibrahima. The survivors of the first cayuco describe a similar assault during their embarkation.
After days of hallucinations at sea, in which dozens of people were gone, the 320 occupants sighted the mountains of the island of El Hierro. “Everyone’s heads returned to their place,” says Ibrahima. “We started screaming, we were happy.”
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