When the President of the Canary Islands takes several regional ministers to a reception center in Tenerife this Wednesday to show them the reality of migrant minors and ask them for help, perhaps he will tell them about the Z boat and one of the most recent tombstones in the cemeteries of El Hierro, that of Aissatou Camara.
Just five days ago, when he felt that "the political tension in Madrid was contaminating" the possibilities of reaching an agreement to share the guardianship of minors with the rest of Spain, Clavijo asked everyone: "Let's not lose the reference. We are talking about children."
"I refuse to believe that we live in a country where we do not want to guarantee the rights of boys and girls who could be our children, who could be our brothers, our nephews or our grandchildren," he lamented, before remarking that they are survivors of the deadliest route in the world and that many have been marked by terrible journeys.
Like the one of the boat that entered the port of La Restinga on its own in the early morning of Sunday, July 7, the last one to date in El Hierro. It reached land after twelve days of navigation from Senegal, with 147 occupants, two of them already corpses: a woman and a man identified as Z-8 and Z-147.
In the official register of rescues by islands, each boat is associated with a letter and its occupants are always assigned a code formed with that same letter and a number. If it is a corpse and no one can give information about their name, it will be the only data that appears on their tombstone, along with the date of their arrival in the Canary Islands.
Aissatou Camara, a 24-year-old Guinean woman, was close to being buried in that way. In fact, the code Z8 with the date of July 7, 2024 appears on the tombstone of her niche in the El Pinar cemetery.
But El Hierro is different, everything there is smaller, more familiar and human, and someone tried to find out Aussatu's name before giving her her last goodbye, even though not even 36 hours had passed since her death.
The people of El Hierro try with everyone. They also succeeded with Seckou Diallo, the man who lies next to her, who died in the boat that arrived a day before hers, the Y. With Z-147 they did not arrive on time.
Probably Aissatou's name was given by her daughter, a nine-year-old girl who is admitted to the small hospital on the island, in Valverde.
She is still in shock: she saw her mother die and has gone through the ordeal of having to tell the news by phone to her father, an immigrant who is trying to survive as he can in Europe, health sources and migrant support groups have told EFE.
With her in the health center is another child of about six years old who was traveling in the same boat. He was with his father, one of the seven migrants - some minors - who died before seeing land when they ran out of water. His body, like that of the other deceased, was thrown into the Atlantic.
The child is overwhelmed, locked in himself. He may have seen his father sink forever into the sea or those around him in that trance may have done everything possible to prevent him from witnessing it. But the child knows that his father has died.
The two have already been recognized as children in need of protection. They are already on the list of minors under the tutelage of the Government of the Canary Islands, with another 5,500 who arrived before them. As soon as they are discharged from the hospital, they will move to a center suitable for their age and the trauma they have suffered, sources involved in their reception have explained.
They are not the only ones crying these days at El Hierro Hospital. A woman from the same boat keeps asking about her son, she says he is only a few months old. She begs to see him since she is aware that she is in a medical center. 14 minors arrived alive on land in their boat, but none is such a small child.
On a route that killed 5,054 people from January to June, one every 45 minutes, it is not difficult to find tragedies. This is just one more. This is the story of the Z boat, two orphans and a desperate mother.
