The shipwreck of a canoe with 84 people on board occurred this morning in The Iron can become the greatest immigration tragedy occurred in Canary Islands in 30 years of boat arrivals, above what happened on February 15, 2009 in Los Cocoteros (Lanzarote), where 25 people died.
According to the first information available, Maritime Rescue has recovered nine bodies and is searching for 48 missing people, since only 27 of the cayuco’s occupants have survived, that capsized when he was going to be rescued, seven kilometers from the coast.
In recent years, social organizations and the United Nations Organization for Migration (IOM) itself have reported shipwrecks of canoes in the Atlantic with dozens dead and no survivorsbut to date the greatest tragedy that occurred in the Canary Islands continues to be that of Los Cocoteros.
On February 15, 2009, a boat sank a few meters from the coast of Los Cocoteros, in Guatiza (Lanzarote). 25 of its 31 occupants drowned.
It is by no means the worst shipwreck in the history of the Canary Route, which has swallowed entire canoes with more than a hundred people on boardbut after fifteen years it is still the one with the highest number of deaths that occurred in the Canary Islands.
The first shipwreck that shook consciences in the Canary Islands took place in 1999 in Morro Jable, in Fuerteventura, in which nine young people from Guelmin (Morocco) lost their lives. They had paid 4,000 dirhams each (70,000 pesetas at the time, 420 euros at the exchange rate) for getting on a six-meter boat that sank 300 meters from the coast and that was supposedly going to open the doors of the European dream.
Others may have happened before, but there were no witnesses or survivors to tell of their tragedy, no corpses to bury. If there were shipwrecks before, they were “silent”, as still happens so often on the Canary Route.
This summer, in addition to marking the 25th anniversary of the first shipwreck with deaths in the Canary Islands, we have also commemorated the 30th anniversary of the arrival of the first boat to the islands, which It occurred on August 28, 1994the day on which two young Sahrawis crossed by sea for the first time the 96 kilometers that separate the island of Fuerteventura from the African continent.
