The AP investigation included interviews with dozens of relatives and friends, officials and forensic experts, as well as police documents and DNA testing. These migrants are as invisible in death as they were in life.

Caminando Fronteras, a Spanish migrants’ rights organization, recorded more than 4,000 dead or missing on the Atlantic route in 2021, with at least 20 boats vanishing after departing from Mauritania. The men in the Tobago boat, for example, are not included in this number. But that’s likely a fraction of the real death toll. In 2021, at least 1,109 people died or disappeared trying to reach the Canaries, according to the International Organization for Migration, the deadliest on record. “The sea conditions there are extremely harsh,” he said. Vélez wasn’t surprised to learn of migrant boats appearing in the Caribbean – that is where floating devices dropped by scientists on the West African coast naturally drift. But for those to arrive, many more must have departed, said Pedro Vélez, an oceanographer at the Spanish Institute of Oceanography. That crackdown, along with other factors such as economic disruption from the pandemic, pushed migrants to return to the far longer, more obscure and more dangerous Atlantic route to Europe from northwest Africa via the Canaries instead.Īrrivals on the Atlantic route jumped from 2,687 in 2019 to more than 22,000 two years later, according to Spain’s Interior Ministry. These “ghost boats” - and likely many others that have vanished - are in part an unintended result of years of efforts and billions of dollars spent by Europe to stop crossings on the Mediterranean Sea. In 2021, at least seven boats appearing to be from northwest Africa washed up in the Caribbean and in Brazil.

Evidence found on the boat - and its style and color as a typical Mauritanian “pirogue”- suggested the dead were likely African migrants who were trying to reach Europe but got lost in the Atlantic. The vessel that reached Tobago was registered in Mauritania, a large and mostly deserted country in northwest Africa nearly 3,000 miles (4,800 km) away. For nearly two years, The Associated Press assembled puzzle pieces from across three continents to uncover the story of this boat - and the people it carried from hope to death.

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