Three hearses arrived at the cemetery this Monday afternoon. The MocanalIn Iron. The bodies of three of the nine victims of the September 28 shipwreck were transported in modest coffins. These are the three funerals that the Valverde City Council has agreed to host, three days after what is already considered the biggest migratory tragedy in the Canary Islands.
Around seven o’clock in the afternoon, the sun was already setting on Meridian Island, but the cold air did not prevent more than fifty people from saying goodbye to the “32”, “33” and “36”, thus identified anonymously, if this phrase is possible. . None of these participants had been called a week ago to say goodbye to these three people whose favorite flowers were also unknown. “Among some, we know, of J15” – also buried in Mocanal – “who was Muslim, because he was in the hospital of El Hierro and had time to speak before dying with boat footan infection that he was unable to survive,” Haridian Marichal, journalist and resident of El Hierro, tells us.
He belongs to a WhatsApp group made up of island residents, who understood the need for migrants who died on the coasts “not to leave alone”. Marichal recalls that thanks to this type of initiative, the verses of the Canarian Pedro García Cabrera were read during similar ceremonies: I went to the sea to look for oranges / something the sea doesn’t have / No one dared to explain to me / whether the waves come or go /.
The waves do not provide answers about the fate of the 54 missing people, whose searches continued during the burials. The silence of the ceremony was only broken during the first burial by the sound of shoes hitting the volcanic peak and by the rare but accurate words of Mamadou Agne, representative of the UN International Organization for Migration: “I didn’t want to come this way. , but you can rest.
And it was not the only non-governmental organization that wanted to say goodbye to the migrants, there were also the members of the Red Cross, dressed in the vests they wear when the cayucos arrive at the ports, which are perhaps being the first hug that people find when they set foot on earth. Between one grave and another, the mayor of Valverde, Carlos Brito, carried his corresponding share of the weight of the coffin and reaffirmed himself looking around him in the solidarity of the inhabitants of El Hierro, who in the face of goodbyes do something something so Canarian and so full of meaning, come along. “We have no other choice,” he says at the gate of the cemetery once the ceremony is over, where people stand for a while chatting outside, as if they had forgotten something inside.
Some are already commenting and talking about life, but there were also tears because people are mourning the death of their neighbors. “They welcomed me when I came from La Gomera, and I give all that love back to society and here no one is going to die alone,” says Marichal, who also stayed for a while to chat with the workers at the Temporary Care Center for Foreigners. . (CATE), which accompanies survivors to continue their journey in dignified conditions and leaves behind a disastrous and vehement political media management, both at community, national and regional level, of a global problem that affects human rights .
For its part, the island government of El Hierro agreed this Monday at the Council of Spokespersons to declare three days of mourning while waiting to know the details of the ceremony for the six other burials planned in the municipality of La Frontera.
54 missing
The search continues near the La Restinga quay with the background noise of the arrival of new boats. Today there were a total of two arrivals and a warning to the south of the island, so emergency services searched all night without success. The sea guards have had no respite and the rescuers have not been able to take off their plastic boots for almost four days. It is perhaps one of the few jobs that, due to their routine nature, is not standardized because you can breathe. in the air that something is wrong.
At sea, the patrol boat Río Tajo from the Civil Guard, a semi-rigid from the diving group and another from the Red Cross, plus one from Maritime Rescue, continue to be mobilized. There are also means deployed on land to detect if human bodies or remains of wrecks appear in the coastal area. By air, at sea, the patrol boat Río Tajo of the Civil Guard is mobilized, a semi-rigid from the diving group and another from the Red Cross, plus one from Maritime Rescue.
In the morning, the government delegate to the Canary Islands, Anselmo Pestana, put on the table one of the hypotheses that would explain the reason why the corpses do not rise to the surface and is due to the pressure exerted on large areas where the The sea goes down to a thousand meters deep, linked, he explains, “to underwater currents”.
La Restinga is a gift from the Atlantic, an indomitable ocean, a fishing village accustomed to receiving with suspicion the news that comes from the sea. These days there is a tense calm between neighbors, uncertainty, resignation and this way in which life resurfaces on a daily basis even after the worst collapses.
