When a boat containing 14 bodies washed up off the coast of Tobago in May 2021, it made local news. Authorities traced the boat 3,000 miles back to Mauritania in West Africa, but the identities of those inside were a mystery.
Across the Atlantic, Associated Press video journalist and reporter Renata Brito took notice. She had covered the migration crisis in Europe extensively and noticed that the boat found off of Tobago was similar to the boats arriving in the Canary Islands in Spain. A West African migrant boat getting lost and drifting all the way to the Caribbean was virtually unheard of, but she wondered if that was what had happened.
A month later, another boat from Mauritania showed up in Turks and Caicos. This one contained the remains of 20 people. There was definitely something going on, Brito thought, and she reached out to Tobago authorities to see if they had any more information about the first boat.
“I kept calling police and authorities in Tobago to see if they made any progress in their investigation, thinking once they find out what happened, I’ll report on it,” Brito said. “But that didn’t happen. The investigation stalled. And so at some point, we decided, well, let’s see if we can find out what happened.”
Nearly two years and several transcontinental reporting trips later, Brito and AP visual journalism editor Felipe Dana were able to identify 33 of the 43 people who are believed to have boarded the boat that was found in Tobago. The effort required DNA testing, police documents, and interviews with dozens of friends and family of the migrants. The resulting 4,500-word investigation, “Adrift,” and an accompanying mini-documentary published last month.
The story opens with the discovery of the boat in Tobago before taking the reader through the AP’s journey to identify the men who had been on board.
“The lack of political will and global resources to identify dead and disappeared migrants mean such resolutions, even partial ones, are rare. Each year, thousands of families wonder about the fate of loved ones who left their homes for Europe. Few ever find out,” Brito and Dana write in their investigation. “This is the story of one boat and the people it carried from hope to death.”
Every year, conflict, poverty, climate change and political instability force tens of thousands of migrants to flee to Europe. Many make the crossing via the Mediterranean Sea, but European nations have spent billions of dollars trying to crack down on those crossings. As a result, more and more migrants attempt to reach Europe by traversing the Atlantic from northwest Africa to the Canary Islands, according to Brito and Dana’s story. It is a longer and more dangerous route.
Using a contact list extracted from a SIM card found on the Tobago boat, Brito and Dana identified one passenger as a Mauritanian taxi driver who had gone missing. At the same time, they combed through Facebook pages for families of missing migrants to identify people who could have been on the boat.
Dana said that when they started reporting, they kept waiting for authorities or an international organization working on migrant rights to solve the mystery. They eventually realized that the cross-border nature of the issue made that difficult. Trinidad and Tobago didn’t have diplomatic relations with Mauritania, and when local authorities reached out to the Mauritanian government, they never heard back.
“There is a complication when it comes to navigating across borders and across continents. We’re talking about three continents here. The boat arrived in the Caribbean, came from Africa, and they tried to reach Europe,” Dana said. “Some organizations operate in some countries that can help, but they don’t operate across all these continents in a way that is easy to navigate.”
Journalism, Brito said, was able to “connect those dots and to link those stakeholders.”
Brito and Dana traveled to Mauritania and interviewed friends and family members of the migrants who had boarded the boat. It was one of the most difficult parts of the reporting process, they said. Most of the families had no idea what had happened to their loved ones; many of them didn’t even know where Tobago was. Rumors had led some to believe that their sons and husbands were in prison somewhere or that smugglers were the reason for their silence.
“It was a very delicate moment of having to deliver news that suggested that their loved ones were dead,” Brito said. “And then we had to kind of separate that from the reporting and earning their trust and seeing if they wanted to talk to us, if they wanted to tell their story, if they wanted to go on camera.”
Brito and Dana were able to determine that 43 young men from West Africa boarded the boat sometime between Jan. 12 and 13, 2021. They departed from Nouadhbibou, Mauritania, and headed for the Canaries. But 135 days later, their boat washed up in Belle Garden, Tobago.
Though Brito and Dana were “99%” sure of their findings, they couldn’t say they were completely certain without DNA confirmation. Getting DNA tests done was important not just for the story, but also for the families, Brito said.
Arranging DNA tests turned out to be another logistical challenge. One mother in Mali reached out to the Red Cross, but the organization told her that they didn’t offer those services in her country.
In the end, Brito and Dana hired a private lab in Senegal that could take a DNA sample under the standards required by Trinidad and Tobago. The mother traveled to Senegal, and her sample was sent to Tobago, where authorities confirmed that her son was one of the deceased. The process took months to organize.
Throughout their reporting, Brito and Dana learned of other “ghost boats” that had drifted thousands of miles off course and landed in the Caribbean and the coast of Brazil. They spent some time investigating the boat that had arrived in Turks and Caicos and were also able to find some of those migrants’ families with the help of identification documents found on board. They decided to focus their story on the Tobago boat because it was the one “with the most mystery and information uncovered,” Brito said.
In 2021, seven “ghost boats” were found, but Dana said the actual number of boats that leave West Africa for the Canaries is unknown. The people who successfully make the journey are the “exception.”
“There are more stories to be told of other people — who I’m sure have really interesting life stories and reasons for having decided to risk their lives — that we don’t know of,” Brito said.
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