21 brothers and cousins, one boat, no survivors: the Diop family and the invisible victims of the Canary Islands route

The Diop family home stands right by the sea, in a neighbourhood of Mbour where fishermen's pirogues land on the beach every morning. Low rooms, walls in cement render, a sand-floored courtyard crossed by washing lines, a tin roof. A modest house, but inhabited.

In the first days of August 2024, 21 young men left this house. All belonged to the family — brothers, cousins. They took the route tens of thousands of West Africans have taken since 2020: cayuco, Atlantic, the Canaries. They wanted to work, to send money home, to give the family a future.

On 22 September 2024, their boat was found 70 kilometres off the coast of Dakar. It was drifting empty. There were no survivors.

What was left in the house

The eldiario.es report, filed today from Mbour, describes a scene currently being repeated in hundreds of West African households: a courtyard where only the voices of small children and the crowing of cockerels make the noise that once belonged to a large extended family. With the 21 sons, the Diops have lost in effect a whole generation — the generation that was supposed to carry the house, the parents, the little ones.

The parents, Amata and Yatma Diop, pose with a large poster showing photographs of the missing. Most were in their early twenties to early thirties. Some families in the same situation refuse to accept the death of their relatives until they have seen a body — that is a cultural and psychological reality. Others, like the Diops, seek out publicity, if only to make sure the world does not forget that these 21 people existed.

Why Senegal specifically

The Senegalese share of the Canary Islands route is not a coincidence. Since 2023, Senegal has been the main country of origin — at least 35% of all migrants arriving on the Canaries are Senegalese. The reasons are a combination of political instability (heavy protests in 2023, which ended under brutal repression), economic crisis and a fisheries crisis that has pushed coastal towns like Mbour to the edge — international fishing fleets have stripped the stocks, and local fishermen are losing their livelihoods.

If you grow up in a fishing household, you see the sea every day. If you have no work, you see it as the only way out. It is a brutal logic, but it explains why 21 people from a single family leave at the same time.

The numbers no one wants to know

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) recorded at least 868 deaths and missing on the Canary Islands route in 2023 — up 55% from 2022. In October and November 2023 alone, 444 people died.

But the IOM numbers are, in the organisation's own words, «minimum figures». The Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras, which systematically interviews families in West Africa about missing relatives, reaches significantly higher figures — for 2024, it estimated several thousand deaths on the Atlantic route. The real figure probably lies somewhere in between, possibly closer to the NGO's estimate.

Why the difference? Because a cayuco with a hundred people on board, which simply vanishes, leaves no record. No passport, no formal report to any authority, no missing-persons file. Only a house in Mbour or Dakar or Saint-Louis where phones ring that no one picks up.

The Diop family is not the exception. It is the rule, made visible.

What this has to do with the papal visit

In two weeks, on 11 and 12 June, Pope Leo XIV will visit the Canary Islands. His most important stops are precisely the places tied to this tragedy: the port of Arguineguín, where cayucos have been arriving since 2020 — and the Las Raíces migrant centre on Tenerife, where many survivors later live. In Arguineguín, the pope will lay a floral tribute to the sea — a memorial for thousands whose names nobody knows.

The Diop family will not be there. They sit in Mbour, holding posters of their sons. But if the gesture in Arguineguín is being made for anyone, it is for families like this one. On the other side of the Atlantic, in houses where you can still see the sea, but where no one is watching for the boats any more.

What remains to be done

The question of what needs to change on the Canary Islands route has no simple answer. Spanish and EU policy focus on border control and return agreements — little of that has brought the death toll down. NGOs are demanding legal migration routes, study and work visas, targeted investment in West African coastal economies, especially in fisheries.

What is undisputed: as long as a cayuco from Mbour looks more rational economically than staying, more boats will sail. And as long as that is the case, families like the Diops will hold up posters — and reporters like Alicia Justo will photograph them, so that somewhere, in a newspaper on another island or another continent, someone briefly pauses.

That pause is not much. But it is more than nothing.