Photo by Alejandro Martin on Unsplash
Martín Zamora is the owner of a funeral home near Gibraltar and a businessman who collects the bodies of migrants who drowned on the way to Europe and helps the dead find relatives and take them home.
In an article published Oct. 12 by The New York Times Nicholas Casey and Leire Ariz Sarasketa, the Spanish body collector tells the story.
When the man was washed ashore, no one knew his name. His body had been floating in the sea for weeks, and then for most of the summer he was left in the refrigerator of a Spanish morgue, his identity unknown.
He was one of thousands of missing people at sea in Spain's record drowning of migrants. If Martin Zamora had not found the body with its own name and life before his death, he may have been sent to the unnamed cemetery like other unclaimed dead.
The deceased was a 27-year-old mechanic named Achraf Ameer from Tangier. When Zamora reached out to his family via WhatsApp, he had been missing for weeks. Zamora found the body of their son, who could bring it to them for a fee in Morocco.
"Sometimes I think, in a few years — I don't know how many years, maybe 30, 40, 50 years, they're going to look at us like monsters." Zamora said: "They will see us all as monsters because we let people die in this way. ”
Zamora, 61, is a father of seven and the owner of Southern Funeral Assistance in Algeciras. But in this port city where you can see the lights of Morocco on the other side of the Mediterranean, his identity doesn't stop there. Zamora was the body collector for those who could not reach Spain alive.
Zamora said he has returned more than 800 bodies in 20 years, forming a business model that few people can do. He wrestled with the municipal officials to get them to hand over the body to him so he could embalm it. He worked with smugglers to find relatives of the dead and has traveled to Africa dozens of times. His last trip to Morocco was a month before the COVID-19 outbreak.
For families who have abandoned their missing loved ones, Zamora's work can provide them with an end that has lost hope.
But his service costs a lot, costing at least $3,500 or more to bring the body home. Zamora said no Spanish agency paid for him, and the profit margins for the work were low. So his work is in a gray area, and in such a frontier town, it is not uncommon to be caught between the will to do good and the need to make a living.
Zamora said: "My next problem is funding, [the victims] have nothing at home.
Spain witnessed the devastating drowning of migrants at sea.
According to Caminando Fronteras, a nongoversal organization that tracks the death toll, 2,087 people, including 341 women and 91 children, died or went missing while trying to reach the country's coast in the first six months of this year. The International Organization for Migration's statistics are conservative, with more than 1,300 deaths recorded so far this year.
Helena Maleno Garsson, head of The Walking Frontier, said the situation in Spain was particularly dangerous because it was the only European country with smuggling routes across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. "This includes some of the most dangerous routes that are being used," she said. ”
Dozens of ships sank this year off the Spanish Canary Islands near West Africa.
Migrant ships were also lured by the narrow Strait of Gibraltar, a stretch of which was only 9 miles wide, though turbulent currents had sunk many ships. Some migrants drowned just hours after leaving Africa, and their bodies were later washed up on beaches in the Andalusian region of southern Spain.
The Spanish media sometimes publishes reports of the latest bodies. Then, when the headlines faded, Zamora's work began.
The world we live in
Corpses are a mystery. Clothes are often the only clue.
"It can be difficult to identify a person's face, but family members will suddenly recognize shoes, sweatshirts, T-shirts because it used to be a gift," Zamora said. ”
His first clue came in 1999, when he found a note in the clothes of a deceased Moroccan. At the time, the government outsourced the burial of unclaimed bodies to funeral homes, which were buried in fields next to local cemeteries.
Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash
When the body was found on the beach and 15 other bodies, Zamora was on standby. He took the body back to the morgue and found the soaked note with the Spanish phone number written on it.
He dialed, but the man on the other end of the phone claimed he didn't know anything. Zamora recalled, but a few days later the man called back and admitted he was the brother-in-law of the drowning young man.
"I told him, 'I'll make a deal with you and charge you half the cost to bring the body home, but you have to help me find the rest of the deceased's families,'" Zamora said. ’”
The man agreed to take him to the southeastern region of Morocco, where his brother-in-law lived, and Zamora first disposed of the young man's body, embalmed it and sent it back to Morocco. He then obtained permission from a local judge to bring the clothes of other dead migrants to Morocco.
Zamora and the relative walked from village to village, holding a large shelf with the deceased's clothes, rings and other personal belongings, which they brought to markets he knew people would go to.
Two weeks later, they identified the remaining 15 relatives of the deceased and returned each body.
Zamora realized that he had a way to solve what was seen as a failure in Spain. However, it cost thousands of euros to repatriate the bodies, and the families he saw were able to pay much less than he had paid for it
"You find the family of the deceased, you find the parents, they take you to where they live, you see a tin hut on the side of the hill with goats and roosters, and they tell you they want to get back to their son," he said. What would you do? Is it to be a businessman or a person with feelings? ”
Mohammed El Mkaddem, an imam of the Algeciras mosque who collected donations for the families of the deceased, said he was aware of Mr. Zamora's difficulties. The imam said: "At the end of the day, they run a funeral home, which is a business. But they are doing what they can, and we are grateful for that. ”
José Manuel Castillo, head of a funeral home in algeciras, said Zamora filled the void left by authorities. "Someone has to be responsible for the paperwork (record)work and the repatriation of the bodies, and if it's Martin Zamora, that would be great," he said. ”
Even in the heat of southern Spain, Zamora wears a tie and loafers. He looked more like a lawyer than a funeral home worker. On a recent afternoon, he and his son, 17-year-old Martin Jr., were disposing of a body.
Speaking of the body, Martin Jr. said: "When they found him, he was wearing overalls and maybe he went straight from work to the boat. ”
The boy walked for a moment, and Mr. Zamora began to talk to himself. Their son was 15 when they first worked together when a 40-man ship capsized on the coast of Balvat, north of Algeciras, killing 22 people.
He said he was worried his son would have nightmares, but Martin Jr. wanted to work.
"No father wants his son to see these things, but that's the world we live in," Zamora said. ”
Mechanics of Tangier
Before summer arrived, Zamora said he had received a WhatsApp message claiming to be Yousef who said he was working at a mosque in Larinha, across the rocks from Gibraltar.
The voice message said: "There were two boys, and we don't know if they were alive or dead — they must be dead. Families were looking around and I said we would ask people we knew who were involved in this sort of thing. ”
The next message included a photograph of three people sitting in a rubber boat, wearing homemade life jackets, taken shortly before they left Morocco. One of them was Amir, an illiterate mechanic from Tangier.
So Zamora contacted the local government, and there was a corpse in their morgue. After they gave Zamora a picture of the man's clothes, Zamora, with the help of Yousef, found Amir's sister in Tangier and showed her a picture of the clothes. Today, Zamora rarely needs to go to Morocco as before, mainly through remote identification.
In a telephone interview with Tangier, Amir's 28-year-old sister, Soukaina Ameer, said: "The paint on his clothes is stained when he works. ”
She said her brother had tried to cross the border into Spain but was deported. This time, he didn't tell anyone, but left a veiled hint when the family began planning to move.
Sarkina recalls: "He always told us 'I'm not going to live in a new house with you'. ”
She said he left on April 13 and that his ship may have sunk that night. His body floated at sea for most of April and did not appear on shore until the end of the month. For the rest of the spring and parts of the summer, the bodies were housed in a morgue, which had deteriorated because they had not been frozen.
Photo by britt gaiser on Unsplash
So, on a sweltering day, Zamora loaded Amir's body into a hearse and took her son, Martin Jr., through pine trees and sunflower fields. The body was wrapped in a blanket when the Red Cross found it, with a hospital label on one leg. At the morgue, Zamora and his son arrived in protective clothing and began embalming.
A long needle stuck 10 times on Amir's shoulder and another 10 stitches in his chest. An hour later, Zamora wrapped the body in a shroud, covered it with a green cloak, and sprinkled dried flowers to recreate the Muslim ritual that an imam had shown him. Then he closed the coffin lid, and he and his son took off their protective suits, both sweating profusely.
However, the work does not appear to be complete. In the next room was a stack of documents that Zamora was still trying to find after his relatives contacted him. There is an Algerian born in 1986; there are two Moroccans who have disappeared at sea; and there is a Syrian who has a wife and lives in Aleppo.
A bell rang from another room, and what may have been followed was another clue.
Zamora took off his gloves and said to his son, "Martin, go get my phone." ”
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