More than 40,000 people have died or disappeared since 2014 on the different migratory routes around the world, recalled this Monday the Missing Migrants project, managed through the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
In the months since 2021 alone, the organization has documented 2,727 migrant deaths, of which almost half, 1,311, occurred in the Mediterranean.
The migratory route that crosses the Mexican border with the United States follows by number of victims, with 298 deaths.
In a statement released on social networks on the occasion of the International Day of Missing Persons, this UN-dependent program warned that the questions of thousands of families have remained unanswered and without the means to know the fate of their loved ones, the that even the right to a grave has been taken from them.
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"Families that have run out of news, struggling to find answers that they may not receive," the program highlighted.
Thousands of those migrants died when precarious boats chartered by transregional mafias dedicated to the lucrative smuggling of people were wrecked, whose trail could be traced until they sank in the waters, but thousands more of these deceased lost their lives in "ghost boats" impossible to follow. , depending on the program.
Last Friday, a woman and four men drowned when the precarious inflatable boat chartered by local mafias with which they tried to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa was shipwrecked off the coast of Libya, in the latest fatal shipwreck reported in the called the Central Mediterranean route, considered one of the deadliest in the world.
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According to the controversial Libyan Coast Guard, whose financing and alleged links with local mafias are denounced by international non-governmental organizations, another 30 migrants were intercepted and returned to port despite the fact that Libya is considered “an unsafe country”.
A week earlier, at least 17 people drowned when another inflatable boat sank off the coastal town of Zawara, close to the Tunisian border and one of the main centers of operations for local armed militias engaged in smuggling, mainly people, but also weapons, food, fuel and other products.
More than 22,000 people have been intercepted this year on the Central Mediterranean migration route when they tried to travel irregularly to Europe in precarious boats chartered by profitable gangs in Tunisia and western Libya.
Around a thousand more have lost their lives or disappeared at sea in different shipwrecks, the most serious of which occurred last April, when 130 people calling for help drowned off the coast of Libya.
This August alone, a hundred people have perished in three shipwrecks off Libya, a country plunged into chaos and civil war since in 2011 NATO contributed militarily to the victory of the heterogeneous rebel groups over the dictatorship of Muammar al-Gaddafi .
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