A large cruise ship, the MSC SplendidaOn Sunday afternoon, near Cabrera Island, in southern Mallorca, the 19 occupants of a drifting boat were rescued. They included sixteen men, a woman, and two children, who were taken to the port of Barcelona, ​​where the ship was heading. One of the children had to be immediately transferred to the Hospital del Mar because he had a fever due to contact with the cold water. Two other people who required medical attention were also taken, but the rest were taken to the Verneda detention center.

It is worrying how we come to normalize the pain of others, how we become thick-skinned, how we assume our comfortable impotence. According to the NGO led by activist Helena Maleno, Caminando Fronteras, this year that we have left behind us we also left behind the lives of 4,400 people who tried to enter Europe through the Spanish borders. Twelve lives cut short every day. Lives of human beings who were only looking for an opportunity far from the misery of their homeland and who, in the final stretch, embarked on a precarious boat, drowned in most cases without receiving help and often in anonymity. We have become accustomed to this terrifying humanitarian drama as if we could do nothing about it, as if it were alien to us, as if it were a distant fatalism. And none of the three things is true: Europe does nothing because it does not consider it a priority or, even worse, it acts politically with hypocrisy and cynicism; no human life should be alien to us, especially not those of people (including 205 small children) who are defenceless and bear great suffering, and accepting that these things simply happen and that the world is like this only causes them to happen more often.

At least 130 people died on Thursday in a shipwreck on the route between Libya and Italy, in the central Mediterranean, when the inflatable boat in which they were trying to reach Europe sank. For 48 hours, and in the middle of a storm with waves up to six meters high, an NGO had followed the boat and reported its position to the European authorities, but no official maritime rescue service went to their rescue. The humanitarian ship Ocean Viking of French organisation SOS Mediterranée, immediately rushed to the rescue along with three merchant ships, but it was too late and they were only able to recover 13 bodies. There is no news of another skiff with 42 people on board that issued its last message yesterday at noon.