Mamadou landed in Spain on January 28, 19 years after leaving.
He was one of the tens of thousands of Senegalese who landed in the Canary Islands in the so-called cayuco crisis of 2006, but the European dream did not work out well for him.
“I lasted two years, but without papers it was very difficult to find work and I returned to Dakar,” he said this week in the transit area of terminal 4S of Madrid's Barajas airport.
Now, at 45 years old, he had stopped in Madrid to travel to Nicaragua, passing through El Salvador first, with the final objective of crossing the United States border irregularly.
“I am strong, I feel young to start again.
I don't think the route, nor finding a life there, is more difficult than what I've already been through,” he laughed.
Mamadou was surrounded by people.
Around the bathrooms, another 30 Africans (mostly Senegalese, but also Mauritanians) were dozing on cardboard on the floor, waiting for the same flight connection that would leave the next day.
The scene has become common.
“We have seen flights with up to 80 Senegalese together.
This did not happen before,” says an airport worker who began to notice this intense traffic of Africans in September.
The airport is that place where almost no one notices who comes or goes, where one can even live without attracting the attention of travelers, but if you look closer you notice that this new phenomenon is quite visible.
Lately, it is common to find large groups of young Africans in the terminals waiting to board to Central American countries, which do not require an entry visa.
When asked, the answer is similar: the plan is to take a bus or taxi route from there that will take them to the Mexican border.
Once in Mexico they will have to survive the dangerous criminal ecosystem that does business with the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who try to enter the United States every year.
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Request asylum in Barajas: two weeks sleeping between the floor and a cot with two small children
The arrival of Africans to the wall that protects the country with the highest GDP in the world skyrocketed last year.
On a route dominated by Latin Americans, the incursion of Africans coming from the other side of the Atlantic has caught the attention of US authorities.
The New York Times
published a report a month ago highlighting how this route had grown in such a short time, encouraged, among other things, by growing European anti-immigration sentiment.
Furthermore, traveling by plane with a stopover in Spain to disembark in Latin America is legal and, although more expensive, is an alternative to the very dangerous journey by cayuco to the Canary Islands, where almost 40,000 migrants disembarked last year.
The American land journey also entails multiple threats, but these are not as well known as those in the Atlantic.
One of the passengers in transit on their way to Latin America to embark on the route to the United States.Claudio Álvarez
According to government data referred to by the American newspaper, the number of Africans detained at the United States border grew by more than 300% and went from 13,406 in fiscal year 2022 to 58,462 in the same period referring to 2023. They came especially from Mauritania (15,263 people), Senegal (13,526) and Angola and Guinea, with more than 4,000 migrants each.
They are a small part of the 2.5 million intercepted migrants, but the comparison is more striking if you go further back.
In 2018, for example, only seven Senegalese and one Mauritanian were intercepted on that border between Mexico and the United States, according to data from the US Border Patrol.
It was a non-existent route.
The most recent change is that the travel packages offered by agencies and facilitators began to include a stopover in Madrid-Barajas, one of the main airport
hubs
with Latin America, with more than 50 million travelers annually.
Before, the stopover was, above all, Türkiye.
Many emigrants are encouraged by the number of calls on social networks.
TikTok, for example, is full of travel offers, animations with maps of the journey through five countries, images of Senegalese people on airplanes and videos of expeditions crossing tropical forests with their backpacks on their backs.
The route costs between 7,500 and 9,200 euros, according to calculations made by the American news agency Associated Press.
This is without counting the extortions that migrants will encounter along the way.
The main destination is Nicaragua, where entry requirements are lax and cheap, although they usually pass through Bogotá and San Salvador first, where since November the Government of Nayib Bukele has been charging Africans and Indians an entry fee of more than 1,000 euros in a context of pressure from the United States to control migratory flows towards its southern border.
The shuttle through Nicaragua also avoids the dangerous Darien jungle, which, controlled by armed groups, marks the border between Colombia and Panama.
That Senegalese and Mauritanians are exploring this new route is no coincidence.
The two nationalities are protagonists on the migratory route to the Canary Islands and, although they do not suffer an armed conflict in their countries, they offer plenty of reasons to emigrate.
In Mauritania, the last country in the world to officially abolish slavery – it did so in 1981 – its black population denounces multiple abuses.
And 56.9% of the population lives in a situation of multidimensional poverty that limits education, health, standard of living and employment indicators, according to official data.
In Senegal, in addition to the economic difficulties and rampant inflation, a political climate has entrenched itself in which opponents of the Government are persecuted, to the point that classes have been suspended at the country's most important university, the Cheikh- Anta-Diop, in Dakar, to deactivate one of the main sources of protests last year.
The relationship with the asylum
The emergence of this new migratory route through Barajas is part of the context that explains the rapid increase in asylum requests at the Madrid airport, a phenomenon that ended up causing the overcrowding of hundreds of asylum seekers and the intervention of judges, the Ombudsman. of the People and the Labor Inspection.
The rebound began this summer with Somali citizens, who were joined by, among others, Senegalese, Moroccans and Mauritanians.
All of them with tickets to Latin America.
Although there is no official data that allows us to refine the profile of the applicants, there were two types of circumstances among the Africans: those who took advantage of their stopover in Madrid to request asylum, already determined to try to stay in Spain;
and those who, in reality, actually wanted to make the route to the United States, but due to various circumstances they could not reach their destinations and were returned to Barajas.
The latter, once in Madrid and with no other option than to return to their country of origin, requested asylum.
In the month of January alone, 864 requests were registered at the airfield, mainly from Senegalese, according to police data.
After weeks of chaos and overcrowding, the situation is somewhat more controlled, with around 200 applicants waiting for their request to be studied and whether or not they will be allowed to enter Spain.
The flow has slowed down, above all, because it is no longer so easy for Senegalese to make a stopover in Madrid.
Although the Government will impose a transit visa on them on February 19, the Spanish embassy in Rabat asked Morocco to anticipate this measure and prevent all Senegalese who intend to stopover in Spain from boarding without an entry visa to Schengen territory.
The others stranded
Abdoulaye is embarrassed to cry, so he covers his face with his hands and sobs silently.
Sitting on the floor of the transit area of terminal 4 of Madrid-Barajas, this young Senegalese man, thin as a wire, refuses to tell what has made him so sad.
He has broken, like this, suddenly.
Finally, he takes a breath and, with red eyes, explains that he has been lying on that floor for seven days, without easy access to food, without showering.
That he was going with several friends to El Salvador to try to enter the United States irregularly, because he wanted to emigrate but never in a cayuco.
But that he could not board and that, next week, when he manages to get on the plane, he will have to undertake that dangerous and exhausting path alone.
The transit area of the Barajas satellite terminal, where Mamadou was also waiting for his connection, is also a reflection of this migratory alternative.
There, where disembarking passengers are separated between those who pass the police checkpoint to collect their luggage and those who drag their suitcases, rushing not to miss the next flight, a kind of waiting limbo has been created.
Not everyone who wants to get to Latin America succeeds on the first try, and problems arise that force them to delay their trip much longer than desired.
Airlines have to verify a series of requirements before letting them fly, such as that they have a return ticket or that the numerous connections that await them have some consistency.
A common problem has been the payment of the exorbitant fee that El Salvador has imposed, the usual connection for those who want to reach Nicaragua, and which the airlines must collect in advance.
“You can only pay by card and it hasn't worked for many here,” explained a group of Senegalese last Sunday.
Two migrants sleep in a hallway in the transit area of Barajas T4.Claudio Álvarez
This Friday, in addition to Abdoulaye, three other Senegalese, two Indians and half a dozen Egyptians were waiting for their next flight, but the passengers vary every day.
For weeks, they have huddled in the most hidden hallways with blankets and cardboard.
The area has nowhere to buy food, so they depend on the willingness of travelers and workers who can travel between that area and the restaurant area to feed themselves.
“If you come back, could you bring me some milk?” asks Abdoulaye.
Mamadou, for his part, sent EL PAÍS an audio via WhatsApp this Saturday: “I'm already in Mexico.”
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