Fourteen bodies, fourteen broken lives on a beach in Tobago, and many questions: Who were they? How did they get there? How did they die? This was the starting point of the investigation that the reporters of the Associated Press (AP) agency Renata Brito and Felipe Dana carried out for almost two years until they discovered the story of the vessel and the people who they went there, which found death instead of the new life they were looking for.
Journalists discovered that the drifting boat, which was found near a beach in Trinidad and Tobago in May 2021, had left months earlier from Mauritania, on the other side of the Atlantic, bound for the Canary Islands and that it had been swept away by the currents of the ocean. “They were trying to get to Europe, but, like many other people, they never made it. Very often, the bodies of migrants who die at sea are never found and the families do not get to know what happened to them", the report narrates.
According to the article, fishermen from the town of Belle Garden, on the island of Tobago, found the boat on May 28, 2021 and alerted the authorities so they realized that there were only dead bodies on board.
They recovered clothes, 1,000 West African CFA francs and half a dozen corroded mobile phones, with SIM cards from Mali and Mauritania. The remains were sent to the cadaver repository of the Trinidad Forensic Science Center, where they are still kept.
The AP investigation, which included interviews with dozens of family members and friends, officials and forensic experts, as well as police documents and DNA evidence, concluded that 43 young men from Mauritania, Mali, Senegal and possibly other nations in the West Africa were on board the ship. The journalists managed to identify 33 by name.
The list of telephone contacts taken from the card of one of the crew was the clue that allowed them to trace where the boat had left. By calling contacts, they identified the first victim, Soulayman Soumaré, a taxi driver from Sélibaby, in southern Mauritania.
AP reporters traveled to the North African country to speak with dozens of family members and friends and piece together what happened. There they discovered that Soulayman had disappeared a year earlier, along with dozens of young people from the surrounding villages. They had set sail from the fishing town of Nouadhibou on a boat carrying 43 people to the Canary Islands on the night of January 12, 2021. Due to sea currents, they ended up in Tobago.
The journalists traveled to the Mauritanian town of Bouroudji, where eleven of the disappeared came from, and communicated the information they had gathered to the families. The objects found in the cayuco, especially the clothes they wore, allowed many families to recognize their children. Finally the Red Cross collected 51 DNA samples from relatives of 26 missing migrants in the hope of identifying the other bodies at the Trinidad Forensic Science Center, but there are still no results.
In a telephone conversation with La Vanguardia, reporter Renata Brito states that she found out about the strange find on the beaches of Tobago through the press. "Some people from Spain saw it and we suspected it, because it was a cayuco. We thought it could be a lost boat that, in reality, was heading for the Canaries", he comments. After contacting the local police, they informed her days later that it was indeed a boat arriving from Mauritania, one of the usual departure points for migrants heading to the Spanish islands. "I thought that cayuco was the tip of the iceberg. How many more must have been lost!” laments the journalist.
"Everything came to a standstill and I thought that, perhaps, as a journalist I could help act as a bridge", explains Brito, who acknowledges that the singularity of the case made the work of the Trinidadian investigators difficult.
Indeed, as Brito suspected, the cayuco de Tobago was just another vessel. In 2021, about seven ships that appeared to come from West Africa appeared in the Caribbean and Brazil. They all had dead bodies on board.
Renata Brito and Felipe Dana report that these ghost ships are in part "an unintended result of years of efforts and billions of dollars spent by Europe to end journeys in the Mediterranean Sea", which "pushes migrants to take the most dangerous route from north-west Africa through the islands”.
Only the sea knows how many children, parents, friends or loved ones it has swallowed when they were trying to find a better future. "Many of the victims have not been identified, we could do this work ad infinitum," laments Renata Brito, who assures that the investigation to identify all the dead in Cayuco is not yet over. All victims must be named.
