Violence and Death on the Atlantic Route to Spain

CANARY ISLANDS, Spain—On a warm November afternoon, just after 4 p.m., a brightly painted wooden boat — known locally as a cayuco — entered the harbor of La Restinga, a small fishing town on the Canary Island of El Hierro. Onboard were more than 200 men, women and children from sub-Saharan Africa. They had left days earlier from an unknown location on the West African coast. Behind them: the Atlantic Ocean. Ahead of them: a new life in Europe. They had made it.

On the dock waited officers from Spain’s national police and Guardia Civil, the Spanish military police, along with doctors, nurses and interpreters. They followed a strict protocol. The migrants disembarked. The weak were placed in wheelchairs. Every person was photographed. Medical staff examined them in shipping containers set up as makeshift clinics. Ambulances stood by. Sometimes, helicopters were needed. Sometimes, hearses.

The Nov. 3 boat was logged as case number 13877055. The vessel was given the code 223U. Onboard were 207 people: 178 men, 10 women and 19 boys. The suspected departure point: Banjul, Gambia. The migrants came from Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal and Gambia.

Usually, arrivals follow a routine: After the initial screening, migrants are taken by bus to a processing center in the village of San Andrés, then transferred to Tenerife and eventually the Spanish mainland, where they wait until their asylum claims have been processed. But something was different that day. Police officers and medics sensed something was off — something terrible had happened.

There were the vacant stares. The blank expressions. And then, one man with a deep wound in his chest. “Stab wound to the thorax,” the medics wrote in their report.

For the past 20 months, this tiny island of just 12,000 residents has become a hotspot in Europe’s ongoing migration crisis. Twenty-four thousand migrants arrived on El Hierro in 2024 alone, according to the Spanish government — more than half of all those who reached the Canary Islands and 10 percent of all the arrivals in the European Union. “We’re becoming the new Lampedusa,” warned island president Alpidio Armas over a year ago, referring to the small Italian island that has time and again been the main hotspot of the European migration crisis since 2015.

The situation has only grown more severe over the past year. While unauthorized migration to the EU as a whole has declined, crossings via the Atlantic route have spiked. For people from West…