A growing balance sheet: 56,800 migrants who died and disappeared in 4 years

Lori Hinnant and Bram Janssen / Associated Press

JOHANNESBURG – One by one, five by tomb, coffins are buried in the red earth of this poorly guarded corner of a South African cemetery. Scribbling on cheap wood attests to their anonymity: "Unknown B / Male".

These men were migrants from other African countries and almost all of them looking for a job in the flourishing underground economy of Gauteng Province, a name roughly translated as "gold country". Instead of fortune, many have died, the body unknown and unclaimed. – more than 4,300 in Gauteng between 2014 and 2017 only.

Some of these lives ended here, in the Olifantsvlei cemetery, in silence, among tufts of grass growing on tiny signs indicating: Pauper Block. There are coffins so tiny that they could only belong to children.

As global migration rises to record highs, its impact is far less visible: the tens of thousands of people who simply die or disappear on their journey will never be seen again. In most cases, nobody keeps track: hardly counted in life, these people do not register in death, as if they had never lived.

A report from the Associated Press has documented at least 56,800 migrants who have died or disappeared worldwide since 2014, nearly double the number found in the world's only official attempt to count them. # 39; International Organization for Migration United States. As of 1 October, the number of victims at IOM was over 28,500. The AP found an estimated 28,300 additional migrants dead or missing by compiling information from other international groups, requesting forensic records, missing persons reports and death records, and sorting data from thousands of interviews with migrants.

The balance is due to migration, which has increased by 49% since the beginning of the century, with more than 258 million international migrants in 2017, according to the United Nations. A growing number of people drowned, died in the desert or became prey to traffickers, leaving their families wondering what happened to them. At the same time, anonymous bodies fill cemeteries all over the world, like Gauteng.

The count of the AP is still low. More and more migrant bodies are discovered in the sands of the desert or at the bottom of the sea. And families do not always report that relatives have been reported missing because they emigrated illegally or because they left home without saying exactly where they were going.

The US official toll is mainly focused on Europe, but even in some cases, it falls away. The political trend is turning against migrants in Europe, as in the United States, where the government is severely repressing caravans from Central America trying to interfere. One of the results is that the money is running out so that projects can track the migration and its costs.

For example, when more than 800 people were killed in a shipwreck off the coast of Italy in April 2015, the deadliest disaster among Europe's seafarers, Italian investigators pledged to identify them and to find their families. More than three years later, under the new populist government, funding for this work is disappearing.

Beyond Europe, information is even rarer. Little is known about the balance sheet in South America, where Venezuelan migration is one of the largest in the world, and in Asia, the largest region in terms of the number of migrants.

As a result, governments significantly underestimate the record of migration, a major political and social problem in most countries of the world.

"It does not matter where you stand on the whole debate on the management of migration … it's always about human beings on the move," said Bram Frouws, head of the Center for Migration based in Geneva, which has investigated more than 20,000 migrants in the country. his 4Mi project since 2014. "It's about refugees or people looking for a job, they are human beings."

They leave behind families caught between hope and mourning, like that of Safi al-Bahri. His son, Majdi Barhoumi, left his hometown of Ras Jebel, Tunisia, on May 7, 2011, heading for Europe in a small boat with a dozen other migrants. The boat sank and Barhoumi has not had news since. As a sign of faith that he is still alive, his parents built an enclosure with a brood of chickens, a few cows and a dog to watch until his return.

"I'm just waiting for it. I always imagine it behind me, at home, in the market, all over the world, "said al-Bahari. "When I hear a voice at night, I think it comes back. When I hear the sound of a motorcycle, I think my son is back.

EUROPE: BOATS THAT NEVER ARRIVE

Europe has been the most cruelly visible migration crisis in the world. Images of the lifeless body of a Kurdish child on a beach, frozen tented camps in Eastern Europe and an almost senseless succession of deadly shipwrecks have been passed around the world, adding to the fury caused by migration.

In the Mediterranean, many oil tankers, cargo ships, cruise ships and military vessels dominate tiny overcrowded rafts, equipped with an outboard motor, for a one-way trip. Even the largest boats carrying hundreds of migrants are likely to fall when the light breeze turns into strong winds and waves further away from the shore.

Two shipwrecks and the death of at least 368 people off the coast of Italy in October 2013 prompted IOM to conduct a study on migrant deaths. The organization has focused on deaths in the Mediterranean, although its researchers advocate for more data from other parts of the world. This year alone, IOM has found more than 1,700 deaths in the waters that divide Africa and Europe.

Like the missing Tunisians of Ras Jebel, most of them started looking for work. Barhoumi, his friends, cousins ​​and other potential migrants camped in the bush at the seaside the night before their departure, listening to the roar of waves that would eventually sink their raft.

Khalid Arfaoui had planned to be among them. When the group knocked on his door, it was not his fear that held him back, but a lack of money. Everyone had to pay for the boat, gas and supplies, and he was short of about $ 100. So he sat inside and watched them go to the seaside campsite where, even today, locals spend the night before boarding for the night. 39; Europe.

Powered by a weak outboard engine and overloaded with passengers, the rubber raft rocked, probably after scrambling the rocks on an uninhabited island off the coast. Two bodies were recovered. The only survivor was found hanging on the debris eight hours later.

The Tunisian government has never counted his missing and the group has never made it close enough to Europe to attract the attention of local authorities. These migrants have never been counted among the dead and the missing.

"If I had gone with them, I would be lost like the others," Arfaoui said recently, standing on the rocky shore with a group of friends, all of whom were vaguely planning to leave for Europe. . "If I have the chance, I'll do it. Even though I'm scared of the sea and I know I could die, I'll do it. "

That day, he was accompanied by Mounir Aguida, 30, who had already made the trip once, adrift for 19 hours after the engine shutdown. At the end of August this year, he rushed into another raft with seven friends, feeling the waves slamming the thin bow. At the last minute, he and another young man jumped.

"It did not feel good," said Aguida.

The other six did not say anything – yet another group of young people from Ras Jebel lost by the sea. In the absence of sinking, survivors to rescue and bodies to identify, the six young men are counted in no balance sheet.

In addition to watching its own youth flee, Tunisia and to a lesser extent neighboring Algeria are transit points for other Africans heading north towards Europe. Tunisia has its own cemetery for unidentified migrants, just like Greece, Italy and Turkey. The one on the south coast of Tunisia is being serviced by an unemployed sailor named Chamseddin Marzouk.

Of about 400 bodies buried in the coastal cemetery since it opened in 2005, only one has ever been identified. As for the others who lie under piles of land, Marzouk could not imagine how their families could know their destiny.

"Their families may think that the person is still alive or will come back one day to visit," said Marzouk. "They do not know that those they are waiting for are buried here in Zarzis, Tunisia."

AFRICA: VANISHING WITH TRACE

Despite rumors of the "waves" of African migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean, many of them are migrating into Africa – 16 million – leaving for Europe. In total, since 2014, at least 18,400 African migrants have died while traveling in Africa, according to figures compiled from AP and IOM records. This includes more than 4,300 unidentified bodies in a single South African province and 8,700 whose travel companions reported their disappearance as they left the Horn of Africa during interviews with 4Mi.

When people disappear during their migration to Africa, they often remain without trace. IOM said the Sahara Desert could have killed more migrants than the Mediterranean. But no one will ever know for sure in a region where borders are little more than lines drawn on maps and where no government is looking for an extent as vast as the continental United States. The hard sun and swirling desert sands decompose rapidly and bury the bodies of the migrants, so that even when they present themselves, they are usually impossible to identify.

With a prosperous economy and a stable government, South Africa attracts more migrants than any other country in Africa. The government is a meticulous collector of fingerprints – almost all legal residents and citizens have a record somewhere – so the bodies without any documents are supposed to live and work illegally in the country. Fingerprints of corpses are possible, but there is no regular collection of DNA.

South Africa also has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world, and the police focus more on settling national cases than on identifying migrants.

"It makes sense, as sad as it may seem. You want to find the killer if you are a policeman, because he could kill more people, "said Jeanine Vellema, chief specialist of the eight morgues in the province. Migrant identification, for its part, is largely a problem for foreign families – and the poor, for that matter.

Vellema has tried to integrate the missing persons police system, set up a system of electronic registries of the morgue and establish a protocol whereby a DNA sample is taken from each set vestiges arriving at the morgue. She sighs, "Resources." It's a word that comes back ten times in a half-hour conversation.

The bodies are found in Olifantsvlei or in a similar cemetery, in anonymous graves. During a recent visit to AP, a series of open rectangles awaited the bodies of unidentified and unclaimed people. They did not wait long: a van arrived, stacked with about 10 coffins, five by grave. There were at least 180 tombstones for the anonymous dead, with several bodies in each grave.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is collaborating with Vellema, has launched a pilot project with a Gauteng morgue to take detailed photos, fingerprints, dental information and unidentified body DNA samples. This information goes into a database where, in theory, the bodies can be found.

"Everyone has the right to his dignity. And to their identity, "said Stephen Fonseca, regional chief of scientific police at the ICRC.

UNITED STATES: "That's how my brother slept"

More than 9,000 kilometers (9,000 km) apart, in the deserts that straddle the US-Mexico border, are the bodies of the migrants who perished trying to cross a land as ruthless as the waters of the Mediterranean. Many have fled the violence and poverty of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador or Mexico. Some are found months or years later as simple skeletons. Others are passing a last desperate phone call and are never heard again.

In 2010, the Argentinean Forensic Anthropology team and the local morgue of Pima County, Arizona, began organizing efforts to put names on anonymous bodies discovered on both sides of the border. . The "border project" has since identified more than 183 people – a fraction of the total.

At least 3,861 migrants have died and disappeared on the road connecting Mexico to the United States since 2014, according to the combined total AP and IOM. The count includes reports of disappeared persons from the Colibri Center for Human Rights on the American side as well as data from the Argentine group on the Mexican side. The tedious identification work can take years, hampered by a lack of resources, official records and coordination between countries – and even between states.

For many families of the missing, it is their only hope, but for the families of Juan Lorenzo Luna and Armando Reyes, this hope fades.

Luna, 27, and Reyes, 22, were brothers-in-law who had left their small town of Gomez Palacio, in northern Mexico, in August 2016. They had tried to travel to the United States four months earlier. but they had become exhausted to border patrol agents. have been deported.

They knew they were risking their lives – Reyes' father died an immigrant in 1995 and an uncle disappeared in 2004. But Luna, a discreet family man, wanted to earn enough money to buy a van, then go back to his wife and two children. the children. Reyes wanted a job in which he would not dirty his shoes and give his newborn daughter a better life.

Of the five people who left Gomez Palacio together, two men managed to get safe and one man turned around. The only information he gave was that the brothers-in-law had stopped walking and were planning to go again. It is the last one we know about them.

Officials told their families that they had searched the prisons and detention centers, but that there was no record of the missing men. Cesaria Orona even consulted a cartomancer about her missing son, Armando, and learned that he had died in the desert.

On a weekend of June 2017, volunteers found eight bodies near a desert military zone in Arizona and posted the images online in the hope of reuniting with their family. Maria Elena Luna came across a photo of Facebook showing a rotting body discovered in an arid landscape dotted with cactus and shrubs, the upside-up, one leg bent outward. There was something horribly familiar about the pose.

"That's how my brother slept," she murmured.

In addition to the bodies, the volunteers found a Guatemalan boy's letter of credit, a photo and a sheet of paper bearing a number. The photo was of Juan Lorenzo Luna and the number on the paper was for the family cousins. But investigators have warned that a wallet or identifiers could have been stolen, as migrants are frequently stolen.

"We all cried," said Luna. "But I said, we can not be sure before having the DNA test. Let's wait. "

Luna and Orona provided DNA samples to the Mexican government and the Argentine group. In November 2017, Orona received a letter from the Mexican government stating that Armando may be associated with bone remains found in Nuevo Leon, a state bordering Texas. But the test was negative.

Women are still waiting for the results of Argentine pathologists. Until then, their relatives are still among the counted.

Orona hopes that men will be locked up or detained by "wicked people". Whenever Luna hears about illegal graves or unidentified bodies in the information, the anxiety is acute.

"Suddenly, all the memories come back," she said. "I do not want to think."

SOUTH AMERICA: "Nobody wants to admit it's a reality"

The death toll has been virtually ignored in one of the largest population movements in the world to date – nearly 2 million Venezuelans fleeing their country's bankruptcy. These migrants crossed the borders by bus, boarded meager boats in the Caribbean and, when all else failed, walked for days on burning highways and snowy mountain trails. Vulnerable to the violence of drug cartels, to hunger and diseases that persist even after reaching their destination, they have disappeared or died by the hundreds.

"They can not stand such a difficult journey because the journey is very long," said Carlos Valdes, director of the Colombian National Forensic Institute. "And many times they only eat once a day. They do not eat. And they die. "Mr. Valdes said the authorities did not always recover the bodies of the dead, with some migrants entering the country illegally afraid to ask for help.

Valdes thinks that hypothermia killed some while they walk in the tundra, but he did not know how much. A migrant told AP to have seen a family bury someone wrapped in a white blanket with red flowers along the icy journey.

Marta Duque, 55, has been at the forefront of the Venezuelan migration crisis from her home in Pamplona, ​​Colombia. Every night, she opens her doors to accommodate families with young children. Pamplona is one of the last cities that migrants reach before venturing into an icy mountain, one of the most dangerous parts of the journey for migrants on foot. Temperatures dip well below zero.

She said that the inaction of the authorities had forced citizens like her to intervene.

"Everyone seems to be passing the ball," she said. "Nobody wants to admit that it's a reality."

These deaths are countless, as are dozens of people at sea. The missing persons reported in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador are also unrecorded. A total of at least 3,410 Venezuelans reportedly went missing or died during a migration to Latin America, the dangers of which would have gone relatively unnoticed; many died of diseases in Venezuela who could have easily found a cure in better times.

Among the missing is Randy Javier Gutierrez, who was crossing Colombia with a cousin and his aunt in the hope of reaching Peru to find his mother.

Gutierrez's mother, Mariela Gamboa, said that a driver had offered to bring up the two women, but had refused to take his son. The women agreed to wait at the Cali Bus Station, about 257 km away, but it never happened. The messages sent to his phone since that day, four months ago, have not been read.

"I am very worried," said his mother. "I do not even know what to do."

ASIA: A VAST UNKNOWN

The Asian region, which experiences the highest overall migration, also has the least information on the fate of those who disappear after leaving their country of origin. Governments do not want or can not account for citizens who go elsewhere in the region or in the Middle East, two of the most common destinations, although more and more pressure is being exerted.

Asians make up 40% of the world's migrants and more than half of them never leave the region. The Associated Press was able to document more than 8,200 missing or dead migrants after leaving their home country in Asia and the Middle East, including thousands in the Philippines and Indonesia.

Thirteen of the top twenty flyways from Asia are in the region. These include Indian workers traveling to the United Arab Emirates, Bangladeshis in India, Rohingya Muslims fleeing persecution in Myanmar and Afghans crossing the nearest border to flee the war. But with smuggling and large-scale labor trafficking, as well as violent displacement, the small number of dead and missing indicates that it's not safe to travel, but that it is rather a vast unknown.

Almass had just turned 14 when his widowed mother reluctantly sent him with his 11-year-old brother from their home in Khost, Afghanistan, in that unknown. The payment of their trip was to distance them from the Taliban and go to Germany via a chain of smugglers. The two men crowded together in a van with about forty people, walked a few days to the border, piled into a car, waited a bit in Tehran and walked a few more days.

His brother Murtaza was exhausted by the time they reached the Iran-Turkey border. But the smuggler said that it was not the time to rest: there were at least two border posts nearby and the risk of much younger children traveling with them making noise.

Almass carried a baby in his arms and held his brother's hand when they heard the cries of the Iranian guards. The bullets whistled as he fell madly into a ravine and lost consciousness.

Only the whole day and the next day, Almass fell on three other boys from the ravine who had also been separated from the group, then four others. Nobody had seen his brother. And although the youngest boy had his identity card, it was Almass's turn to memorize the essential contact information for the smuggler.

When Almass finally called home from Turkey, he could not bear to tell his mother what had happened. He said that Murtaza could not come on the phone but sent his love.

It was early in the year 2014. Almass, who is now 18, has not spoken to his family since.

Almass claimed to have sought out his brother among the 2,773 children reported to the Red Cross as missing en route to Europe. He also searched among the 2,097 adults reported missing by children. They were not on the list.

With one of the oldest exoduses in the world, Afghans face particular dangers in border countries that are neither safe nor welcoming. Over a 10-month period, from June 2017 to April 2018, 4Mi interviewed a total of 962 interviews with Afghan migrants and refugees around the world, routinely asking a series of questions about specific hazards had witnessed.

The migrants interviewed witnessed 247 deaths among migrants, who said they saw people killed in acts of violence committed by security forces or starved to death. This effort is the first time an organization has managed to grasp the dangers facing Afghans in transit to destinations in Asia and Europe.

Almass moved from Asia to Europe and now speaks French to the woman who hosted him in a 400-year-old middle-class farm in Limousin, France. But his family is lost to him. Their phone number in Afghanistan no longer works, their village is invaded by the Taliban, and he does not know how to find them – nor the child whose hand escaped him four years ago.

"I do not know where they are now," he said, his face anxious as he sat on a sunny bench. "They do not know where I am either."

Hinnant was reported in Ras Jebel, Tunisia, with Mehdi El Arem. Kristen Gelineau from Sydney, Australia; Niniek Karmini in Jakarta, Indonesia; Jim Gomez in Manila, Philippines; Lotfi Bouchouchi in Algiers; Mehdi Christine Armario in Bogota, Colombia; Maria Verza in Mexico City and Angeliki Kastanis in Los Angeles.

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