The Daily - ‘How Did We Let People Die This Way?’

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

Over the past year, a record 2,000 migrants from Africa have drowned trying to reach Spain.Many of these migrants make the journey in rickety vessels, not much bigger than canoes, that often don’t stand up to strong currents.What happens, then, when their bodies wash ashore?This is the story of Martín Zamora, a 61-year-old father of seven, who has committed himself to returning the bodies of drowned migrants to their families. Guest: Nicholas Casey, the Madrid bureau chief for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Martín Zamora, the owner of a funeral parlor near Gibraltar, has found an unusual line of business among the relatives of migrants who drown trying to reach Europe: He collects the bodies of those who don’t make it to Spain alive. Read this article in Spanish here.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Over the past year, a record 2,000 migrants from Africa have drowned trying to reach Spain and the promise of a better life in Europe. My colleague, Madrid Bureau Chief Nick Casey, tells the story of a man who has committed himself to returning their body's home to their families. It's Wednesday, November 10th.

Nick, tell me about this reporting that you've been doing on migrants in Spain. Well, I arrived to Spain at the beginning of this year, in February, and one of the first things that really caught my attention And in Spain, the bodies of at least 17 migrants have been taken to a port in Tenerife after they were found in the Atlantic Ocean. was these headlines that you'd see in the newspapers This improvised altar remembers 23 young Moroccans who died trying to reach Spain in November. about the drownings of migrants at sea. They're coming in boats that aren't much bigger than canoes. And these are rickety vessels going through areas with really strong currents.

So many of the people who decide to make the journey don't make it. The boats sink, their bodies float in the ocean for a couple of days, sometimes it's weeks, and then the bodies wash ashore. And Nick, where are these migrants coming from? Well, the migrants are largely from North and West Africa with a lot of people coming from Morocco. These places have long been behind Europe economically. They've gone through COVID. It's very difficult if you're living there. And the temptation of a place like Spain is obvious. It's right across the water from Morocco. You can literally see it across the Gibraltar Strait. And it's often people who are looking for work or just looking for a better life that they think that they're going to find in Europe. And in the course of reporting about this, a colleague

of mine told me about a man whose job it is to collect the bodies and try to figure out who they are and also who their families are and ultimately try to get them back to these families. Hmm. This is a person whose entire job is identifying who has washed up on shore and trying to get their bodies back to their home countries so they can be buried. Exactly. That's right. So who is this man? And how exactly did he come into this very unique line of work? So I wanted to know that too. And earlier this year, when I was in southern Spain, working on another story about migration, I looked him up. I gave him a call. I told him I was nearby. And I drove down to the city where he lives, Algeciras, which is this port city that's on the tip of Spain facing Morocco.

And we decided to meet at a cafe that was nearby. Gracias. His name is Martin Zamora. He's a 61-year-old father of seven. He is wearing a tie and suit jacket on a super hot day. He looks almost like someone you'd expect to be a lawyer. So he and I sat down, and he started to tell me about his life story. Martínez turned out was a funeral home director.

He has a mortuary in Algeciras. And he'd come to the town a couple of decades back to start this business and doing what funeral homeowners do, which is collect the bodies of the dead, prepare them, hold wakes, attend to the family. But at the time in the 90s, he'd also been asked by the government to pick up the unclaimed bodies that turned up in Algeciras. And these weren't always the bodies of migrants. It was often people who were just in town and had died, and no one had claimed them.

But then in 1999, there was a really big shipwreck. It was 16 people who had been traveling from Morocco. Their boat sank, and their bodies washed ashore shortly afterward. And it was Martín that happened to be the one who was called to go get them. So he collected the bodies. He brought them back to his funeral home, started to prepare them. But then when he was taking off the clothes of one of the bodies, he found that there was a piece of paper in one of the pockets.

He opened up the paper and he saw there was a phone number on it. No name, but just a phone number. So he called the number and a man picked up. Martin told him, you know, I have the body of someone that I think you probably know because he had your phone number in his pocket. Now, the person didn't want to answer any questions and he hung up on Martin. Now, the person didn't want to answer any questions, and he hung up on Martine. But before he did, Martine had said, please just take down my number.

If you've got any change of heart, give me a call. So two days later, the man did call back. He'd initially been scared to talk to Martine. He probably himself was an immigrant who didn't have paperwork. But this time he said he actually was the brother-in-law of the man whose body that Martine had found. And Martine told him, look, I have the body. I'm a funeral homeowner. I can get it back to Morocco. But I'd really like to figure out who the other bodies belong to as well. And kind of at the spur of the moment, he had an idea, which he proposed to the brother-in-law, which was, he said,

look, I'll give you a discount in trying to get this body back to your family if you will help me figure out who the rest of the relatives are of the other dead who were on the shipwreck. Hmm. So what is the response from this man? So the man said, yeah, I'll help you with what you need to get the rest of the bodies back. So this was where Martín got into a bit of detective work. He figured that he'd had so many clues already from the clothes that, you know, maybe the clothes themselves were the key in terms of figuring out who the dead were. So he went to a local judge in his town and asked if he could

use those clothes to figure out who the rest of the people were. Use the clothes how exactly? So what happened was that he and the brother-in-law both went back to Morocco. And they took the clothes to markets around this town called Hansala, figuring that if one person had come from this area, there must be others that had also come from the same area. So before they would arrive, they would talk to the local police and say that they were setting up a stall in the local market with all of the clothes that they had brought.

So people could come and see if they identified any of that. Wow. So he's literally laying these clothes taken from these dead migrants who have washed ashore. taken from these dead migrants who have washed ashore. He's laying them out in the center of town and inviting people to come in and use them as the identifying markers of their deceased loved ones. That's an extraordinary scene to imagine. Yeah, that's what he did. Like sometimes there were rings or bracelets or other things that could identify the person.

You know, sometimes it's just a t-shirt or a pair of shoes that was a gift. And then a relative will immediately recognize this and know Martín had the body. This is what he kind of chanced upon. And they went from town to town. And by the end of this journey, Martín had found all of the family members of the people who had perished on this boat. So all 16 bodies? Yeah, every single body

from that shipwreck was identified. It's remarkable that a single funeral home owner, acting entirely on his own, is able to accomplish that. No one thought that he was going to. I mean, he said even the judge who had given him permission to take the clothes to Morocco didn't expect anything to come of this trip and that it would be a waste of time. You know, completely the opposite. He figured out who the families were,

something that the Spanish government hadn't even been able to do. But, you know, in getting to know the families, he ran into a big problem. Which was that these families were poor. The reason why their relatives had made this journey and had died was because they were looking for a better life. And the family members back at home, they didn't have anything to pay to repatriate the bodies.

The cost is thousands of euros. And these were often people that were living in small clapboard houses on the edges of town. And Martín is now sitting in their homes telling them that he wants to help them get their relatives back, but it's going to cost something. And they're saying, you need to get my son back. You have my son's body. So what does he do? He has these 16 people's relatives back in Spain. They can't afford the cost of getting them repatriated.

So what happens? So he figures out how to get these bodies back regardless. Some of the families were able to chip in a little bit. He tried as best as he could to reduce the cost and the bodies make it there to Morocco and get buried. But you got to remember, like, even though he didn't make very much money off of this, this wasn't his main line of work either. This, if anything, was like a really fulfilling pro bono project. And for the next few years, things kind of went back to normal. He had other clients back in Algeciras.

He continued to bury them. But then there started to become more migrants who were washing up ashore in Spain. And what had been a kind of one-off pro bono project for him started to become an increasingly large part of his business. And why is that? So starting in 2010, there was a crisis involving both refugees and migrants that began to touch all parts of Europe. And it really came to a head around 2015. And the part that got the most attention had to do with refugees leaving countries like Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan and coming to countries like Germany and France. So these were people fleeing war-torn countries

and arriving into Northern Europe. But as all this was going on, there were also these waves of people trying to get into Southern Europe from North Africa and West Africa. These people were in some cases also fleeing conflict, or they were in fear of political persecution, or were extremely poor and financially desperate. And in the years after 2015, Europe starts to shut down its borders overland, or at least start making it harder to get in. That stops the flow of people coming in overland, but it doesn't do much to stop the people coming in over the water into southern Europe. And it's that water route that is a lot more dangerous. And that's what Martín has been seeing face-to-face in Spain over the years,

is more bodies wash ashore. And so what does this start to look like for Martine when this is no longer a one-off, but instead this is happening all the time? It means his phone is basically constantly ringing. Now instead of trying to contact families, families are trying to contact him. There are people from all over who

are calling him to try to find out if he has their relatives. And at the same time, the police and the other institutions in the government are the ones that are calling him to tell them that they've got more bodies, that they can't figure out who the relatives are because that's not part of what they do. He's getting overloaded, basically, with the number of requests. And he's also become the person that people go to as the first point of contact to try to find a missing relative who's died at sea. I'm curious what these calls are like. What are people saying to Martine when they reach out to him? Yeah, well, I asked Martin if he could tell me about one of these calls and if he could take me inside one of these cases.

So Martin told me about a call that he got earlier this year in April. earlier this year in April. The man calling said that his name was Yousef. He was an imam from a local mosque. He explained that two young men had gone missing. They had left Morocco in a boat, going to Spain. And their families didn't know if they were dead or alive.

And at the end of the message, the man Yuseuf asks Martin, Can you take this case on? Can you help us find these men? We'll be right back. So, Nick, what happens after Martine gets that call from this imam? What does he do? 20s. He's got their dates of birth, their names. And these are the files that Martine uses to show the police to see if they've found anybody that might be a match. And initially, the police tell him that they don't have anybody that fits these descriptions. So Martine puts those files away. But then some weeks later, it's the beginning of June, and the police give Martin a call back. And they say, actually, we have another body.

It seems to have slipped through the cracks. And this is a problem there. They get so many bodies that sometimes they're forgotten. And in this case, the body was in an overflow morgue for a number of weeks. So immediately, Martin's antennae shoot up because he thinks this might be one of the men that the imam had told him about earlier. And he asked the police for pictures of the clothing. They send those pictures to him, and they're gray overalls with paint. So now Martin has kind of something to go off of. And with the imam's help, Martine contacts the family members. And he gets to the sister of one of the men.

She has a look at the pictures. And she says, I know these clothes. They belong to my brother. And so, Nick, who is this man? His name was Ashraf Amir. He was 27 years old when he died. He was from Tangier, which is a city on Morocco's northern coasts. And he was a mechanic.

His sister said that he didn't know how to read or write. And it wasn't the first time that he had tried to come to Spain. She'd said that he had made the journey before. He'd been caught, deported, sent back, and tried life again in Morocco. She didn't know that he was going to do this another time. No one in the family apparently did. that he was going to do this another time. No one in the family apparently did.

But his sister said that he'd been acting strange during the time before he disappeared, that the family was going to move to a new house. And he'd said things like, oh, I'm not going to be with you at that next house. And people were like, well, why are you acting this way? And he wouldn't really say. But he'd said to them to take care of his mom because his mom had diabetes. So on April 13th, he went to work, but at the end of

work, he didn't go home. He went to a smuggling boat and he was still wearing those overalls with paint that his sister recognized. That's what he was wearing when he got on. And the boat took off. Sometime afterward, it sank. And his body continued to float in the water for some period of time before it washed ashore in Spain, and it ended up in a morgue for weeks. And so once Martin understands that this body is Ashraf's, how does he start to try to get Ashraf's body back to his family in Tangier?

There's a lot that's involved. I mean, he has to go see the judge to decide whether this is enough evidence that there's been an identification or not. Sometimes the judge actually wants a DNA test to happen. So that's a process that takes weeks. And in late June, he invited me to come be with him during the last part of this process, which was when he was going to go collect that body and prepare it to go back to Morocco. And what is that like? What do you see? Well, I met with him early in the morning. His first stop was the courthouse where he was going to collect the papers that were going to allow him to be able to take possession of the body from the morgue. So we meet there. He got there before me and had already talked to the judge. And I followed him to a town called Cadiz. And this is where the body was in a morgue kind of in an industrial area on the outskirts of town. From there, we drove back. It was probably about another half hour to where his funeral home is, where he puts on a hazmat suit to get ready to do the next part of the work. So you're inside the room where he is starting to prepare Ashraf's body.

You're in the room with him. It's there, and it's still in a body bag, so no one's seen it yet. And we opened up the body bag to see Ashraf, and it's just a hard sight to see. You can hardly recognize that this is the body of a man. It's been so decomposed at this point. And Martin spends about an hour or so embalming the body. It's a very kind of precise and clinical process because he has to mix these chemicals

and inject the body. But at the same time, like, Martin realizes that basically his are the last hands that are going to touch this body before Ashraf goes home. before Ashraf goes home. Mm-hmm. And that there's like a certain somberness to what's happening too, even though he obviously doesn't know this man. I wonder what's going through your mind as you're watching all of this.

It's really hard. I've seen a lot of people's remains over the course of my reporting. You know, I wrote about Mexico for many years when there was an extremely violent war with the drug cartels. You know, I saw many corpses of people in Haiti after the earthquake that happened in 2010. But to see this kind of thing happening in Spain is truly heartbreaking because this is a country that you don't expect to see these kinds of horrors in, and yet you still do. This is a side of Spain that you don't see every day when Spain is being betrayed. It's a very dark side, and it's behind closed doors, and it's what you see in this funeral home with Ashraf's body.

So when this embalming process that you're watching is over, what happens to Ashraf's body? So at the end, Martin does a kind of Muslim funeral rite that he learned from an imam that he tries to replicate himself. He sprinkles some herbs on Ashraf's body. He wraps the body in a green shroud that has lines from the Quran on it. And then he takes the body into the freezer, which is the last step before it gets repatriated back to Morocco. Ashraf was put onto a boat, went back across the Mediterranean. His family, the day before he arrived, had dug his grave. The next day was the funeral. And they said goodbye to him.

His mother still visits the grave every Friday, according to his sister. every Friday, according to his sister. Hmm. So what Martine has given this family is not just a fitting and proper ending, but a whole new way to experience Ashraf's death and to keep honoring him because there's actually a place to go. Yeah, he's basically given them closure.

I've met many families over the course of years that have lost loved ones in migration, and they disappeared. And it's a big difference when you're able to have a gravesite, a body, in some sense, that the person actually died and hasn't just vanished. And that's really key to what Martine's able to do. And at this point, just how many families has Martine done this very thing for, provided closure where none would have been possible by identifying bodies? I mean, he's really lost count of how many times he's done this. He says it might be 800 times. It's probably more than that. And there's going to be more after this. Like, this is a daily occurrence. This is what he does. Nick, I keep thinking back to the beginning of this story and how when Martin

started doing this work, he never expected it would be so central to his business. And now it's seemingly all that he does. So I have to ask, how is he still doing this when the families that he works with aren't able to cover the costs? He'll tell you that he's in a worse position now than he was when he started this by almost any metric. That first time that I met Martin at the cafe, he told me that he'd gone to another part of Spain the day before to try to collect a body. And that before he took off, he had to decide whether he was going to use his money

to buy the gasoline to get there or to get groceries. Martin is not making money in this. And if anything, in some cases, he's probably losing money. Well, Nick, given that this is literally a hardship for Martin and that he keeps doing it anyway, what have you come to understand after all this time with him? Is his deeper motivation here? Why does he keep doing it? I mean, he's doing this because nobody else will.

If he doesn't do this, these bodies are just going to go into an unmarked grave somewhere. grave somewhere. And I think the thing that terrifies Martín more than just kind of looking at sometimes these unrecognizable faces day to day is the kind of apathy that you're starting to see in Spain around the fact that so many people are dying. He's the first to tell you that no one should have to do this job. No one should have to see this kind of stuff every day. And you can see that it's affecting him. You know, this is one point where we were driving around Algeciras, and...

He was telling me about seeing this video that he'd got of a group of people who were about to take off in boats to come to Spain. And you can see people are laughing and happy and really excited for the big adventure of going to Europe. And he got this video just as he was getting ready to prepare the body of one of the people who had died making that exact same trip. And he just gets this horrible feeling. He told me that in 30, 40 years, when all of this is over, that we're going to look back at this time and ask ourselves, like, what kind of monsters were living in Europe and in this society that we could have stood by and just watched as people drowned trying to seek a new life.

You know, how did we let people die this way? That's the question that's haunting him when he goes to work every day. He doesn't want to be one of those monsters. He wants to be trying to do what little he can. If anything, he can't stop these people from dying, but at least he can get a body back and try to give closure to a family. Nick, thank you very much. We really appreciate it.

Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, the House Committee scrutinizing the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol issued 10 new subpoenas of former Trump administration officials, tightening its focus on the officials' efforts to overturn the results of the election. Those subpoenaed include Trump's former senior advisor, Stephen Miller, and Nicholas Luna, Trump's personal assistant,

who was reportedly inside the Oval Office as the president pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to refuse to certify Joe Biden's victory. So far, the committee has issued 35 subpoenas. And... Did the valuation you think affect your management style? Do you think it made you become more arrogant in how you did it? I think that's a great question.

In his first interview since being ousted as the CEO of WeWork, the co-working startup, Adam Neumann told The Times that the company's sky-high valuation of nearly $50 billion mistakenly led him to believe he was leading the company in the right way. So yes, the valuation made us feel like we were right, which made me feel that whatever style I was leading at was the correct style at the time. So I do think it affected it. Under Newman's leadership, WeWork imploded. Its value plunged by tens of billions of dollars. Its original plans for an IPO were withdrawn.

And thousands of its workers were laid off. And at some point, I do think, and I think that's what maybe is getting hinted, that maybe it went to my head. I do think at some point it did. Today's episode was produced by Rochelle Banja and Caitlin Roberts. It was edited by Anita Bonagio, contains original music by Rochelle Bonja,

Chelsea Daniel, Dan Powell, and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.