With the four boats with 739 occupants rescued this Saturday in El Hierro, the 31,678 arrivals of immigrants to the Canary Islands from the "cayuco crisis" of 2006 have been exceeded, the record that seemed unrepeatable for almost any scenario, but that has been blown to pieces in just one month. Of the migrants who arrived this Saturday, two had already died and two others died on land. Meanwhile, Lanzarote has not received precarious boats for two weeks.
The 14,976 people who arrived at the ports of the Canary Islands or were rescued by Maritime Rescue and the Civil Guard in the waters around them in October are not only unprecedented, but have turned around a route, the Atlantic, which was very active since 2019, but which had been on a downward trend for a year and a half.
The return of the cayucos that began to be perceived in the summer has changed everything: in October alone, they have transported as many migrants from Africa to the Canary Islands as had arrived from January to September, with figures of people on board never seen in that area of the Atlantic (up to 320 in a single boat, 50% above the largest boats seen in 2006).
Between what happened in 2006 and the situation now being experienced in the islands, there are similarities and differences, which these eight keys summarize:
Senegal
The massive departure of young people from Senegal has changed everything and connects this episode with the 2006 crisis. Since it was reactivated in the summer of 2019, the Canary route was used as a way of accessing Europe by Moroccan citizens, in percentages that fluctuated between 50 and 60% of all those who arrived, according to figures for 2020, 2021 and 2021 collected in documents from Frontex or the Ombudsman (the Ministry of the Interior does not disclose the nationalities of those who arrive).
On September 30, Senegal already equaled Morocco in the flow of migrants to the Canary Islands (3,050 and 2,949 out of a total of 14,564). Frontex has not yet published data as of October 30, but during that month the arrival of cayucos from Senegal has been constant, sometimes with five boats a day of 100 to 250 people each, and that of pateras with Maghrebi men and women on board, very sporadic.
It is a fact that connects this episode with that of 2006: then too Senegal unbalanced the balance, with 16,237 migrants arriving in the Canary Islands that year, compared to 3,633 from Gambia or 3,323 from Morocco.
Spain is no longer a transit country
In 2006, the majority of Senegalese migrants who set foot in Spain did so thinking of continuing on to France, Belgium or another French-speaking country. Only the Moroccans, with a previous migratory history to Spain and with very powerful family and friend networks throughout the country, arrived with the will to stay.
Sources from migrant associations present in the Canary Islands consulted by EFE specify that this is no longer the case: a good part of those who have disembarked in El Hierro or Tenerife in October came thinking of starting a new life in Spain.
Why? Because 2006 and the following years already built a notable Senegalese community in Barcelona, Madrid and other cities. And young Senegalese now have role models in Spain that then seemed unimaginable: a deputy in Congress, several actors, sports figures and even the president of a club in the second basketball league in the world, Gran Canaria.
The reception network
Íñigo Vila, director of the Emergency Unit of the Red Cross, points out that, to a large extent, Spain's humanitarian reception network began to be built with the cayuco crisis of 2006, the year that marked the ceiling of the arrival of migrants in pateras to Spain until 2018, when it reached almost 55,000, with the Strait crisis.
Then, large camps were improvised in military barracks. This time the network has centers throughout Spain and has served to decongest the places in the Canary Islands, with the so-called referrals to other autonomous communities. The tent is still used occasionally, but modules and fixed structures already predominate. The shameful image of the Arguineguín dock in the autumn of 2020 and the subsequent deployment of the Canary Islands Plan by the Ministry of Inclusion marked the way.
The minors
Reviewing the newspaper archives of 2006 allows us to verify that, then, the Government of the Canary Islands complained about the same thing that Fernando Clavijo (CC) complains about now, who in turn repeats what Ángel Víctor Torres (PSOE) denounced: the Canary Islands feels overwhelmed with the volume of minors it has under its tutelage, more than 4,500, almost half of whom arrived in the last four or five months.
Only this time the figures are much higher. In the cayuco crisis, 1,062 unaccompanied minors arrived in the Canary Islands, a number that the current episode doubles and almost triples (the arrivals between 2019 and 2022 must be subtracted from the 4,500). As was the case then, the Canarian Government demands to share responsibility with the rest of Spain, but, in this, the powers have not changed since 2006 and the transfers of minors to other communities do not reach half a thousand.
The SIVE and the NGOs that "monitor the sea"
17 years ago, the arrivals of cayucos to the beaches, directly, were very frequent, when not daily, which also exposed their occupants to a risk that they did not usually perceive: running aground on bottoms that they did not know and could be dangerous, capsizing and drowning a few meters from land (in fact, there were several fatal accidents like this).
In 2006, the Integrated External Surveillance System (SIVE) was already in the deployment phase. Its radars and sensors detect the pateras 25 or more kilometers from the coast and mobilize the rescues in advance on all the islands, almost with the sole exception of Lanzarote, where it has not yet been fully deployed.
And there is another different factor: since then, organizations such as Caminando Fronteras or Alarm Phone have been created, which collect notices from the migrants themselves or their families and transfer them to the authorities to activate Salvamento.
Some political sectors have accused these NGOs of collaborating with human trafficking networks for this operation. The reality is that the recipient of most of their notices is the Civil Guard and that the positions at sea they provide save lives.
Externalizing borders
Academic studies have been published that argue that the 2006 crisis in the Canary Islands left as its main legacy something that Europe has later repeated in other places: the externalization of borders. Between 2007 and 2008, Spain managed to get Morocco, Mauritania and Senegal to do the work of stopping migratory flows at the source, in exchange for cooperation and economic transfers.
Successive Spanish governments have continued to recognize Rabat, Nuatchot and Dakar as key partners in this task, but the reality is that the "externalization" of the border has worked intermittently, particularly with Morocco, with ups and downs closely linked to the state of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
Fewer land transits
Txema Santana, Migration advisor to the previous Canarian Government and expert in this field, emphasizes that the Canarian route is consolidating as a "regional route", which moves more or less people, but always focused on the neighboring countries of the area, unlike the Mediterranean, which collects flows from Syria, Afghanistan or Pakistan, even in more distant areas of Asia.
But he perceives a change in the story of the survivors: fewer and fewer say that they have crossed the Sahara or the Sahel walking or in improvised transport on their journey. Many of those who board a patera or a cayuco to the Canary Islands entered Morocco, the Sahara or Senegal by plane. "They have money to fly, they could come by plane to Spain, not by patera. Only we don't let them."
Deaths and disappearances
Rescue services and sea warning and support networks have improved, but hundreds of migrants continue to die in pateras bound for the Canary Islands each year. The World Organization for Migration, dependent on the United Nations, estimates that 3,599 people have lost their lives on this route since 2014, when it began its count.
However, it admits that it falls short, because it misses numerous "silent" shipwrecks, those in which a cayuco disappears completely and there is no one left to testify to what happened.
Organizations such as Caminando Fronteras keep their own count, to which they incorporate indirect information from families. For 2022 alone, its death toll for the Canary route was 1,784 people.
And, as in 2006, there is still no official record of deaths on the route or an office to help the families of the disappeared to find out what happened to that relative from whom they have not heard since they got on a patera, although bodies such as the Ombudsman have suggested its convenience.