How to produce dead guerillas

“So you are the mother of the narcoterrorist leader”, the prosecutor of the city of Ocaña told her.
“No, sir. I am the mother of Fair Leonardo Porras Bernal.”
“One and the same, then. Your son was the leader of a guerrilla group. They had a shoot-out with Mobile Brigade 15 and he died in combat. He was wearing a guerrilla uniform and was holding a 9-millimetre gun in his right hand. The evidence shows that he used the weapon.”

©Pablo Tosco (Oxfam Intermón)

Luz Marina Bernal pointed out that her son Leonardo, age 26, had been mentally limited since birth, that his intellectual capacity was that of an 8-year-old, that he had never learnt to read and write and that he had a certified 53% disability. She told the officer Leonardo suffered from paralysis on the right side of his body, extending to the hand they said he had used to shoot the gun. He disappeared on January 8 and was killed on the 12th, seven hundred kilometres away. How could he be the leader of a guerrilla group?

“I don’t know, ma’am, this is what the military report says.”
Around twenty soldiers were guarding the mass grave where Luz Marina went to retrieve her son’s body, blocking her view. They gave her a sealed coffin. Eighteen months later, during the investigation, the coffin was reopened. It contained a human torso with six vertebrae and a skull stuffed with a t-shirt replacing the brain. They were, indeed, the remains of Leonardo Porras.

This is one of the cases that helped uncover the scandal of the false positives: members of the Colombian military were kidnapping young men from the slums, taking them hundreds of kilometres from their homes, killing them and passing them off as guerrilla fighters shot down in combat, in order to collect the bounties that had secretly been offered by the government of President Álvaro Uribe. The term ‘false positives’ refers to this fabrication of evidence.

Nineteen women whose sons were kidnapped and murdered by the military in early 2008 created the group Mothers of Soacha, demanding justice. By mid-2013, the Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office had received 4,716 reports of homicide allegedly committed by public officers (among them, 3,925 were cases of false positives). Navanethem Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, has reported that the investigations are few in number and very slow, that the soldiers linked to the crimes remain in service, are even promoted, and that their crimes are granted ‘systematic impunity’.

“We picked the dimwits”

Leonardo Porras disappeared on 8 January 2008 in Soacha, a slum on the outskirts of Bogotá. The city has been flooded with thousands of people that have become displaced by the Colombian conflict and hosts thousands of immigrants from around the country. Over the last twenty years, Bogotá’s population has increased from 200,000 to 500,000 inhabitants, many of whom are crowded into brick shacks with tin roofs, stuck in shanty towns crossed by invisible borders between paramilitary groups and traffickers.

At noon on January 8, Leonardo received a call. The only thing he said to the person on the other end of the line was “Yes, boss, I’m on my way”. After he had hung up he told his brother, John Smith, that he had been offered a job. He left their home and was never seen again.

In Soacha, everyone knew Leonardo, the ‘special education’ kid who always signed up for community work, who cleaned the streets and parks, worked at the church and ran errands for neighbours in exchange for tips. Some would take advantage of his enthusiasm: they made him haul bricks or mix cement at job sites, only to give him a thousand-peso bill (38 Euro cents) at the end of the day.

“He had no grasp on the value of money”, says Luz Marina Bernal, “but he really liked to help people, he was hard-working, very sociable and affectionate. Whenever he earned a few pesos he would bring me a red rose and a chocolate bar and tell me: ‘Look, mama, I thought of you’.”

Alexánder Carretero Díaz did understand the value of money: he accepted two ­hundred thousand Colombian pesos (around 75 Euros) in exchange for tricking Leonardo and handing him over to the military. Carretero lived in Soacha, a few streets away from the Porras Bernal family, and had been promising Leonardo a job as a palm sower on a farm for several weeks. On 8 January, having been the one who phoned him, he met with Leonardo and the next day they took the bus together to the city of Aguachica, some 600 kilometres away, in the department of Norte de Santander. There, he left Leonardo in the hands of soldier Dairo Palomino, of Mobile Brigade 15, who took him to Ábrego, another 150 kilometres away. “The boy was not normal, he didn’t talk much and he had a funny look”, Carretero told a judge almost four years later. The soldiers called Leonardo ‘the dummy’, he explained.

Carretero was one of the recruiters who supplied the soldiers with victims. Another recruiter, a 21-year-old man who was a protected witness during one of the trials, ­explained that they would mislead unemployed young men, drug addicts, petty thieves: “We would choose the dimwits, the ones wandering the streets, who were willing to go to other regions to earn money in weird jobs”. He confessed to deceiving and handing over more than thirty young men to the military, receiving 75 Euros for each one, the standard rate. He also did some business re-selling guns and bullets from the black market to the soldiers in Battalion 15, who would place these weapons on their victims to make them look like guerrillas.

Carretero handed Leonardo over to the military on January 10. After they took his papers of identification away, the boy became one more unidentified body of the alleged guerrillas that Mobile Brigade 15 claimed to have killed in combat at 2:24 AM on January 12, 2008, in the municipality of Ábrego. He was just another bullet-riddled body placed in a plastic bag and thrown into a mass grave. For the next 252 days there was no person, dead or alive, that was named Fair Leonardo Porras Bernal.

Luz Marina Bernal spent those 252 days searching for her son at police stations, hospitals, courthouses and morgues, getting up at five in the morning to scour the neighbourhoods of Soacha and Bogotá, in case her son had lost his memory and was sleeping on the street. Her son was probably partying, the civil servants would tell her, he must have run off with some girl. In August, bodies found in a mass grave in Ocaña were slowly began to be identified. These were the bodies of young men from Soacha, who had disappeared around the same time as Leonardo Porras. On September 16, a medical examiner showed Luz Marina Bernal a photograph.

“It was my son. It was horrible to see him. His face was disfigured by several bullet holes but I recognised him.”

The officials wanted five thousand Euros to exhume and transport the body, an exorbitant amount for a poor family from Soacha. In eight days, Bernal came up with the money by asking for loans. She rented a van and travelled to Ocaña with her husband and their son, John Smith. There, the prosecutor told her that Leonardo had been a narcoterrorist and that he had died in combat.

Uribe: “They didn’t go to harvest coffee”

Luz Marina Bernal, 54, is a woman of deliberate gestures with a quiet manner of speaking studded with piercing truths. Her pain and loss have evolved into rock-solid ­determination. She lives in one of the small brick houses of Soacha. Leonardo’s bedroom is now a sanctuary in memory of her murdered son, a tiny museum with photos, newspaper clippings and candles. Luz Marina holds up a framed portrait of her son: a young man with broad shoulders and an elegant cut, dressed in a black jacket, white shirt and light blue tie, who is looking at the camera with a firm jaw and bright light-coloured eyes. They are the same eyes as Luz Marina’s, who brings the portrait near her own face.

The smell of corn cakes drifts in from the kitchen, where John Smith Porras, ­Leonardo’s brother, is making breakfast. John Smith comes home occasionally, but has moved out of the house after receiving death threats. These threats are taken seriously. John Nilson Gómez, whose brother Victor was one of the Soacha victims, was killed “for not keeping his mouth shut.” Gomez was determined to find out who was responsible for his brother’s kidnapping and murder, despite the court’s passivity. After receiving threats over the phone and being ordered to leave town, someone drove up on a motorbike and shot him in the face. The Porras Bernal family is receiving similar threats to make them stop talking. Besides the phone calls, notes are slipped under their door and they have even been threatened face to face, out in the open.

Luz Marina opens an album. She collects the stories published in the newspapers over those days in September 2008, when the bodies of the Soacha men were found. She points at one of the headlines: “Grave found with 14 young FARC recruits”.

President Álvaro Uribe confirmed to the press that the young men from Soacha had been killed in combat: “They didn’t go to harvest coffee. They were there for criminal reasons”. Luz Marina Bernal slowly repeats the sentence, with a pained smile: “They didn’t go to harvest coffee. They didn’t go to harvest coffee. It was horrible to hear the president say that our children were criminals”.

Luis Fernando Escobar, representative for Soacha and defence lawyer before the ­administration, condemned the suspicious irregularities of these deaths. Three weeks later the scandal could no longer be covered up. It became clear that these young men were killed very far away from their homes, only two or three days after disappearing (rather than a month later, as Uribe had asserted to defend the idea that they had set up a gang). Furthermore, mistakes were made in an attempt to cover up the crimes: some of the victims were wearing boots of different sizes; others had bullet holes in their bodies but none in the guerrilla uniforms they were wearing when found; some of the bullet-riddled bodies were discovered in places where there was no evidence of gunshots having been fired. The soldiers claiming that the leader of this group was the mentally disabled young man was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Faced with this avalanche of contradictory evidence, Uribe had no choice but to appear again, this time accompanied by some generals and the Minister of Defence, Juan Manuel Santos (who is currently the President of Colombia). Uribe stated that “in some cases, the army has been negligent and has not followed procedures correctly, and this has allowed some people to commit crimes”. He subsequently announced the removal of 27 members from the military.

However, these removals were a mere administrative gesture. No investigations were carried out following the hundreds of reports of extrajudicial killings. In fact, the State did everything it could to hinder investigations. When General Mario Montoya, head of the army, had to step down over the Soacha scandal, Uribe sent him away to become ambassador in the Dominican Republic. Due to the growing number of reported and documented cases, Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Commission on Extrajudicial Executions, travelled to Colombia in June 2009. “Although the Soacha killings were flagrant and obscene”, he declared at the end of his stay, “my investigation shows that they are just the tip of the iceberg”. The term “false positives”, Alston observed, “provides technical cover for a practice that is, in reality, the premeditated and cold blooded murder of innocent civilians for the sake of profit”. He described the misleading recruitment, murders and cover-ups in detail and confirmed that the victims’ family members had been threatened when they dared to file reports. He furthermore rejected the claim that these were isolated crimes committed by “a few bad apples within the armed forces”, as Uribe’s government insisted. The large number of cases scattered throughout the country and the diversity of the military units involved indicated a “­systematic strategy”, carried out by “a significant number of elements within the army”.

A growing number of reports from United Nations envoys, international observers and Columbian human rights groups revealed that forced disappearances and ­extrajudicial killings were common practice among the armed forces and that the State was protecting the assailants. These reports detailed systematic errors in investigating the crimes and exposed malpractices in forensic examinations and the gathering of evidence. The sheer amount and repetitive nature of these errors clearly indicated an intention to hinder the inquiries and cover up the crimes. The reports further demonstrated the utter abandonment of those looking for their disappeared relatives, the threats to those who investigated, and the manoeuvres that were used to keep these cases out of court. Dozens of accused members of the military were released and given tributes with banquets served by the Ministry of Defence. As the Foundation for Education and Development (FEDES) in Bogotá put it: in Colombia, impunity is State policy.

President Uribe responded by claiming that “the majority” of the accusations were false and that they came from “a bunch of lawyers paid by international organisations”, filled with “hate and ideological bias”. He repeatedly expressed his support for the ­military: “We are saddened to see how our men are detained for questioning, when there is no threat of their escaping. We must defend our men from false accusations”.

Whereas the president made use of public funds to defend the members of the military accused of the murders, the family members of the victims received only silence from the institutions. The Mothers of Soacha decided to set up a monthly demonstration to garner support from the authorities, but when they told their stories to the press, they started receiving threats. On March 7, 2009, María Sanabria was walking along a narrow street when two men approached her on a motorcycle. The one on the back, without taking off his helmet, got off, grabbed Sanabria by the hair and pushed her up against the wall: “You old bitch, we want you to keep your mouth shut. We’re not playing around. If you keep on talking, you’ll end up like your son, with your face full of flies”.

María’s son, Jaime Estiven Valencia Sanabria, was a 16-year old secondary school student in Soacha when he was kidnapped, taken to Norte de Santander and murdered. When his mother started searching for him, one prosecutor told her that she was making a fool out of herself by crying over his disappearance while her son was probably out partying with some girlfriend. When she arrived at Ocaña to retrieve his body from the mass grave, she was told her son was a guerrilla. Now, six years after the murder, no judicial investigation has even been opened, María does not know whether the case is being decided in the courts of Cúcuta or Bogotá, because no one in the Public Prosecutor’s Office will talk to her.

“We know that our sons were killed in exchange for a medal”, Sanabria says, “in exchange for a promotion, in exchange for money paid by the State”.

1,400 Euro per corpse

The State paid the murderers bounties. A few days after Uribe had asserted the military’s “negligence” and “failure to follow procedures correctly”, the journalist Félix de Bedout uncovered a secret directive by the Ministry of Defence. Directive 029, dated November 17 2005, authorised rewards for “the capture or death in combat” of members of illegal armed organisations. The rewards were divided into five categories: from 1,400 Euros per foot soldier to 1.8 million Euros for senior officers. Moreover, a six-page table listed the rewards for material confiscated from guerrillas, ranging from aircraft to camouflage pants, from machine guns, missiles, mines and bullets to hard drives, telephones or mess tins.

In January 2008, around the time when soldiers from Brigade 15 were kidnapping and murdering the young men from Soacha, a former member of this unit, Sergeant Alexánder Rodríguez, told the press about the false positive practices. Earlier, in December, he reported the killings and cover-ups to his superiors; before being removed from his post three days later. Rodríguez told Semana magazine that his colleagues in Brigade 15 had killed a farmer, put up money to buy a gun that they would later place on the victim and that they were given five days leave in exchange for their collaboration in the crime. But the reports by Sergeant Rodríguez were silenced by senior officials. And thus, at no risk of exposure by their former colleague, the soldiers from Brigade 15 kidnapped and murdered the young men from Soacha during the following weeks.

The rewards listed in Directive 029 encouraged a macabre business within the military: the fabrication of guerrilla corpses. As a result of the installment of the directive, reports of extrajudicial killings multiplied: by 2007 the number had tripled since 2005 (73 to 245, according to the Colombian Prosecutor’s Office), even before the wave of reports spurred by the Soacha scandal in 2008. Fingers began to point at President Uribe’s policies.

Álvaro Uribe established the so-called Democratic Security Policy, as a mainstay of his terms between 2002 and 2010. This State-governed, primarily military offensive was intended to defeat the guerrilla groups (which, though having suffered major defeats, still had some nine thousand members), the paramilitaries (which had agreed to demobilise but had actually evolved into gangs) and battle drug trafficking (a phenomenon that remains entangled with the Colombian conflict).

For the Democratic Security Policy, Uribe increased the military’s budget and ­activities. Under the banner of the “fight against terrorism,” arbitrary and mass arrests of civilians were carried out. According to reports from human rights groups and the United Nations, seven thousand people were illegally arrested within the first two years. These reports contain stories of soldiers detaining large groups of people under generic accusations of collaboration with guerilla fighters, lacking evidence or grounds. To uncover any possible connection to the guerilla fighters, whole villages would be arrested and investigated. In the early hours of 18 August 2003, the police arrested 128 people in Montes de María, accusing them of rebellion. Prosecutor Orlando Pacheco ordered the release of the detainees after observing the lack of evidence and the many errors in the police reports. The Prosecutor General of Colombia then immediately removed Pacheco from office and placed him under house arrest for two and a half years. Three years later, after the Colombian Supreme Court was condemned by by international legal associations, Pacheco was exonerated. But no one was punished for the mass illegal arrests.

In Arauca, an area with a heavy guerrilla presence, President Uribe made this statement on December 10, 2003: “I told General Castro that in this area, we should arrest two hundred people every Sunday rather than forty or fifty, so as to speed up the jailing of terrorists. Thousands of people were arrested without evidence or a fair trial, spent long periods of time in jail and were later released, where they suffered under social stigma. “Uribe’s Democratic Security Policy has been a systematic, widespread, and permanent breach of the right to freedom”, the team of international observers from CCEEUU ­(Coordination between Colombia-Europe-United States) declared.

At the same time, a systematic persecution of political opponents set in motion. In 2009, Semana magazine revealed numerous cases of illegal spying, recordings, phone taps, harassment and criminalisation of journalists, judges, politicians, lawyers and human rights defenders. DAS, the secret body service under Uribe that was carrying out these persecutions, had already been associated with another scandal in 2006. Back then, Jorge Noguera, the head of the unit and one of Uribe’s confidants, was accused of collaborating with paramilitary groups, providing them with information about labour leaders and human rights workers, who would later turn up dead. In the midst of this uproar, Noguera stepped down from his office at the DAS. But Uribe, determined to stand by Noguera, appointed him as consul to Milan. When in 2011 Noguera was sentenced to 25 years in prison for homicide, conspiracy to commit a crime, disclosure of secret information and destruction of public documents, Uribe twittered: “If Noguera has committed any crimes, it pains me, and I offer my apologies to the people”. Some of the crimes Noguera was accused of, such as spying on journalists and judges, were statute-barred due to the drawn out legal procedures.

At the end of his eight-year term, Uribe’s Office of the President published these ­figures to prove the effectiveness of his policies: 19,405 fighters had been “brought down” (a euphemistic way of saying “killed”), 63,747 were detained and 44,954 demobilised.

The total sum comes to 128,106 people, an astonishing figure. The FEDES Foundation has calculated that in 2002 there were some 32,000 members of illegal armed organisations in Colombia, including guerrilla and paramilitary groups. Therefore, if the numbers published by the Office of the President are correct, these illegal armed organisations were either all “brought down” and replaced four times over, or “the so-called Democratic Security Policy was not aimed exclusively at members of these groups but rather at a broad spectrum of the civilian population, which consequently became the victim of crimes such as false positives”.

In response to the need to present figures on the military’s progress, and spurred by the secret bounties established in 2005, during the Uribe years, the number of extrajudicial executions skyrocketed. The team of international observers from CCEEUU documented 3,796 extrajudicial executions between 1994 and 2009, 3,084 of which occurred during the second half of this period, when the Democratic Security Policy was in force.

A blow to impunity

The Porras Bernal family did not have enough money for a grave in Soacha. So a friend gave them a place in La Inmaculada cemetery, a vast prairie with a scattering of small gravestones to the north of Bogotá. From Soacha, at the southern-most edge, it takes Luz Marina two hours by bus each time she goes to visit Leonardo’s grave.

At the entrance to the cemetery, she buys three bouquets of carnations and daisies. She walks across the soft grass, lays the flowers on the place where Leonardo’s remains lie, sits on the grass and strokes the ground. She cries in silence and speaks in whispered tones, looking at the ground.

“I bring him news about the family. I tell him how we are doing, what we are up to, how much we miss him. And I tell him that the Mothers of Soacha are fighting. I tell him that the nineteen murdered boys have to ask the Lord to give us strength, that we are fighting for them, so that justice is served. I tell Leonardo everything, and then I go home feeling calmer and stronger.”

Luz Marina has another date to keep with Leonardo and the murdered boys: the meetings with their mothers at a park in Soacha on the last Friday of every month. María Sanabria helps her carry a large poster condemning the cases of torture, forced disappearances, cover-ups and mass graves, accusing Presidents Álvaro Uribe and Juan Manuel Santos of being responsible for more than 4,700 crimes against humanity. The Mothers of Soacha wear white tunics. They carry photos of their murdered sons around their necks while they hold up signs.

When they started having meetings, started to demand the truth, they were threatened, harassed and attacked. But they never stopped. And their cries and their songs broke the silence: the press told their stories, Amnesty International sent them 5,500 roses and 25,000 messages from around the world and arranged a European tour for them in 2010 to denounce their cases. In March 2013, at the proposal of Oxfam-Intermon, they received the Constructoras de Paz prize from the parliament of Catalonia.

“We are still being harassed -says Luz Marina Bernal- but the international community is keeping watch and that is our protection. If anything happens to us, fingers will be pointing at the State.”

Colombia has been on the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) list of countries under observation since 2005 due to the suspicion that it does not properly investigate or bring to trial crimes against humanity committed by FARC, the paramilitaries and the members of the armed forces. The case of false positives is one of the things that are being investigated. In a report published in November 2012, the ICC asserted that there were ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe that these crimes were part of a state policy which had been known for years by senior members of the military and that they were at least ‘covered up’ or ‘tolerated’ by the senior members of the State.

The efforts of Luz Marina Bernal and the Mothers of Soacha were compensated with a major triumph on 31 July 2013. The Supreme Court of Cundinamarca (the department where Soacha is located) increased the sentence passed on the six soldiers accused of killing Leonardo: from 35 and 51 years in prison under their original sentence to 53 or 54 years. More importantly, in addition to considering them guilty of forced disappearance, falsification of public documents and homicide, as established in the first trial, the Supreme Court added that this was part of a systematic criminal scheme by the military imposed on the civilian population and that, therefore, it must be considered a crime against humanity. This, it was concluded, should then apply to all the false positive cases.

Crimes against humanity

This decision hit like an earthquake because crimes against humanity cannot become statute-barred and can be tried in any country. This was the first blow to impunity. Through the cracks that were now showing, light can be shed on the 4,716 cases of extrajudicial executions reported to the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Colombia, many of which would otherwise have been destined for oblivion in a sealed tomb.

But it won’t be easy. Uribe’s lawyers filed an appeal against the sentence, which will take some time to be reviewed. International observers insist that the investigations are few and slow-moving. And while the murder of Leonardo Porras was the most flagrant, there are still many deaths that have received no attention at all. Like Jaime Estiven Valencia, son of María Sanabria, a 16-year-old student who wanted to be a singer and veterinarian, but was killed instead.

“They killed my son on 8 February 2008, going on six years now, and no investigation has been ordered” –she says-. “They killed my boy and no one cares. This impunity makes me sick. The sadness is killing me. But I carry on so that our sons have not died in vain. Because by telling our stories we can save many other lives.”

“We need the truth in order to go on living” -states Luz Marina Bernal-. “And knowing who pulled the trigger is not enough. Right now they are only sentencing low ranking soldiers, but we want to know who was organising everything, who gave the orders and who paid the killers with State money.” •

The Migrants’ Files: Surveying ­migrants’ deaths at Europe’s door

They know their lives are at risk, yet each year thousands of people from Africa, the Middle East and beyond — war refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants — leave their homes and try to reach the promised land of Europe. On the third of October 2013, more than 360 would-be emigrants drowned off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa. A catastrophe of this dimension grabbed the media’s attention for a while and won the sympathy of the general public.

Spanish coastguards intercept a migrant’s boat off Tenerife © UNHCR A. Rodriquez

In response, later that month, the European Council decided to implement measures aimed at preventing a repeat of such a tragedy at the European Union’s borders. The Council called for strengthening the EU’s border security co-ordination system, ­Frontex, more formally known as the European Agency for the Management of Operational ­Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union. And the Europe-wide surveillance system Eurosur began operations on December 2, 2013. Thus, once again, a large tragedy spurred real, if belated, action.

Well-intended though they doubtless were, these measures only address the tip of the migration iceberg. Little is known about how many men, women and children actually have lost their lives on their journey to Europe. Believing that policy unsupported by facts cannot be optimal, a consortium of European journalists committed themselves to systematically assembling and analyzing the data on the deaths of Europe’s would-be migrants.

Data sources

By compiling rigorous datasets from various sources, The Migrants’ Files team aims at creating a comprehensive and reliable database on migrants’ deaths. Principal data sources for this effort include United for Intercultural Action, a non-profit whose ­network comprises over 550 organizations across Europe, and Fortress Europe, founded by the journalist and author Gabriele Del Grande, which also monitors the deaths and disappearances of migrants to Europe. The Migrants’ Files’ database also uses data from Puls, a project run by the University of Helsinki, Finland and commissioned by the Joint Research Center of the European Commission.

A consistent methodology is applied to all data, starting with so-called “open-source intelligence” (OSINT). Originated by the intelligence services, this approach collects data from publicly available sources such as media reports, government publications and grey literature. In the case of The Migrants’ Files, the number migrants who die while seeking refuge in Europe is obtained by monitoring real-time global news on asylum seekers, migration and human trafficking activities in and around Europe.

United for Intercultural Action monitored emigrant fatalities from 1993 until 2012, documenting about 17,000 deaths. Gabriele Del Grande reports more than 19,000 deaths since 1988. The database of The Migrants’ Files covers the period from January 1, 2000, until today.

The journalists of The Migrants’ Files noted that the various data sources often lacked compatibility since each organization structures its intelligence differently. This required extensive data cleaning and fact-checking, using OpenRefine, an open source analysis tool. In a second stage, The Migrants’ Files journalists established a database on ­Detective.io, a web-based tool specifically designed to support information gathering efforts for large-scale investigative reporting projects.

Early in the process of establishing The Migrants’ Files’ data methodology, sixteen students from the Laboratory of Data Journalism at the University of Bologna, Italy, contributed valuable fact-checking of more than 250 incidents, supervised by Prof. Carlo Gubitosa.

The Migrants’ Files database of emigrant deaths now structures the data according to name, age, gender and nationality. Every fatal incident is recorded with its date, latitude, longitude, number of dead and/or missing as well as the cause.

Margins for error

Overcoming the issue of data compatibility, The Migrants’ Files journalists have managed to create the most comprehensive survey of European migration fatalities available today. That said, the project team is aware that biases inherent in every dataset cannot be fully eliminated.

What’s more, aggregating several sources of data can easily produce duplicates. When duplicates are detected are manually removed, one at a time. Accuracy is laborious.

Beyond duplicates, some individuals had been registered as missing, say, identified by survivors of a shipwreck. If a body washes ashore in another location days or weeks later, it is virtually impossible to assign it to an earlier incident. And some fatal incidents have not been reported in any form. Hence, other sources of intelligence, such as testimonies, are carefully reviewed and double-checked before registering an incident in the database. Nonetheless, there is no getting around the fact that some individuals and events cannot be documented since no evidence offers confirmation. This sad reality cannot be redressed, rendering all fatality estimates conservative. The true numbers of dead are doubtless higher than recorded.

Moreover, assessing the geolocation and mapping the registered incidents imposes other kinds of difficulties. The map of The Migrants’ Files also presents incidents far from European borders due to the methodology used. For example, a boat capsized on its route from Algeria to Spain can be geolocated in Algeria and at the country’s center.

The Migrants’ Files is ongoing. The team continues to collect intelligence on the deaths of Europe’s would-be emigrants. The project aims to further improve the quality of its data, to shed more light on the situation of emigrants seeking refuge in Europe and to consistently track European asylum and migration policy, particularly because the broader media often ignores the issue until another large-scale emigrant tragedy thrusts it back to the top of the news cycle.

Surveying migrants’ deaths at Europe’s door

A tide of humanity — people on the run from Africa, the Middle East and Asia — is washing over Europe’s boundaries, and many don’t survive the journey.

The plight of migrants only grabs the media spotlight intermittently. It usually takes a disaster involving death in large numbers to drag this story into the public eye, although in fact it is a story that never ends.

And the inevitable deaths are ongoing regardless of the attention or inattention they receive. For example, in early February 2014, at least 15 migrants drowned as hundreds tried to reach the Spanish enclave of Ceuta from Morocco. And one of the most ­wretched ­recent incidents, in October 2013, involved the death of over 360 people off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Tragedy on this scale demands, and generally gets, the attention of the broad public and political leaders. During his visit to Lampedusa after the October 2013 disaster, José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, proclaimed, “The European Union cannot accept that thousands of people die at its borders.” Malta’s Prime Minister Joseph Muscat also issued a statement after the tragedy, warning that the Mediterranean risked turning into a “cemetery” for desperate migrants.

These well-publicized incidents, and the bursts of engagement from politicians and officials that follow, highlight the conflict at the heart of Europe’s asylum and migration policies: on the one hand, the authorities acknowledge the humanitarian imperative of saving lives at Europe’s borders while at the same time they vigorously apply politically driven policies that restrict migration. In the end, the dynamics that put so many lives at risk remain unaltered.

Deaths and disappearances: the known and the unknown

Catastrophes grab the headlines; smaller incidents often go unreported. Any reliable overview of migrants’ deaths has been difficult if not impossible to achieve, until now. Thanks to The Migrants’ Files, compiled by a consortium of more than 10 European journalists, the most comprehensive and rigorous database on migrant fatalities ever assembled is now up and running. Their assessment is shocking: since the beginning of the century more than 23,000 people have died or vanished attempting to enter Europe.

Their approach was to use “open-source intelligence” (OSINT), a method originated by the intelligence services, acquiring data from publicly available resources such as news media, public data or grey literature. This material has now been collected, screened, cross-checked, analysed and registered in one database.

The main data sources for The Migrants’ Files are United for Intercultural Action, a non-profit which coordinates a network of over 550 organisations across Europe, as well as Fortress Europe, founded by the journalist and author Gabriele Del Grande, which monitors the deaths and disappearances of migrants to Europe. The Migrants’ Files’ database also uses data from Puls, a project run by the University of Helsinki, Finland and commissioned by the Joint Research Center of the European Commission.

The findings of The Migrants’ Files data mining have been eye-opening. The number of fatalities suffered by migrants on their journey to Europe turns out to be much higher than previously believed. Earlier estimates had ranged from 17,000 to 19,000 victims since the early 1990s. However, the estimated number including carefully assessed ­undocumented cases is indisputably higher.

Shifting routes make data more difficult to collect

The Migrants’ Files data indicates that migration flows vary between sea and land routes according to season, flaring or ebbing depending on local conflicts and war zones, as well as the preferences of human traffickers. In recent years, the European Union has concluded a series of bilateral agreements with various north and west African countries and has undertaken several measures to tighten border security along Europe’s borders. As these measures came on stream, the routes taken by migrants shifted from Spain, to Italy and then Greece, underscoring the dynamic, adaptable nature of migrant flows.

Frontex is the European Union’s border security coordination system. Its Operation Poseidon aims at tightening border controls between Greece and Turkey. In addition, on its own, Greece added some 1800 police officers to patrol its border with Turkey in response to the rising flood of migrants attempting to cross that border in the period from 2008 to 2012.

The number of migrants observed travelling overland from Turkey into Greece ­subsequently fell from more than 55,500 in 2011 to just over 12,000 in 2013. Meanwhile, the sea route between these two eastern Mediterranean neighbours saw an increase in detected emigrants from less than 1,500 to over 11,000 in the same period, an eightfold increase.

At the moment, a growing number of migrants are making their way to Europe via the Greek islands and, once again, Italy. Since the land route from the Horn of Africa through Sinai into Israel has been cut, the sea journey between Libya and Lampedusa has lately returned to favour among the traffickers, who claim to arrange passage for paying migrants.

As a jumping-off point, Libya is currently one of the main hubs for migrants wishing to enter Europe. Libya’s lack of effective law enforcement, reflecting the country’s growing power vacuum, only makes the situation of migrants more precarious.

Data from Frontex backs those findings but Frontex does not track dead or missing migrants, nor doesEurosur, the European Border Surveillance System or the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Data on dead and missing migrants risks being lost. Using open-source intelligence and carefully sifting other relevant information sources, The Migrants’ Files is committed to supplying this vital information. •