The report of 14 missing children over seven months triggered an investigation that has uncovered an international child trafficking network operating from the Canary Islands to France. Between November 2014 and May of this year, 13 children disappeared from a center in Arrecife (Lanzarote) and another from a children's center in San Bartolomé de Tirajana (Gran Canaria). Spanish police have arrested eleven people, and four are already in pretrial detention for crimes including organized crime, document forgery, offenses against family rights and duties, obstruction of justice, and child pornography. The police force does not rule out further developments in the case. In fact, the investigation remains open to locate and protect the missing children and to establish the necessary international police cooperation channels to clarify the facts. So far, investigators have confirmed that the criminal group used routes and contacts in Morocco, Ivory Coast, and Spain to fraudulently transport children to France. The 14 disappearances that triggered the alarm led to an operation to locate the minors and clarify how they had disappeared from the centers where they were receiving protection.

Years pass, but the tactics are repeated. Through the same winding roads where Catalan smugglers once smuggled tobacco, food, and even people, a criminal group of French smugglers smuggled vulnerable migrants recently arrived in Catalonia. They sought secondary, narrow, and untraveled roads, and the price per crossing ranged from 150 to 300 euros. A price that French authorities have admitted was low, and which they attribute to fierce competition between clans. The starting point was Catalonia. The destination, Northern Catalonia. Specifically, Perpignan, where they were offered alternative routes to reach, for example, Germany.

It is not easy to know who and how they got rich from the slave trade. In Spain and Catalonia it was a rather opaque business, because the largest slave trade took place when it was already illegal. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, different European countries kidnapped more than 12.5 million people from Africa, who were shipped to the American colonies. According to current research, ships flying the Spanish flag took nearly a million people to America. The United Kingdom made the slave trade illegal in 1807, and a year later the United States (although it did not abolish slavery until 1863). Spain did not prohibit the trade until 1820; paradoxically, it became big business for Spaniards and Catalans. "More than 550,000 African captives arrived in Cuba when the trade was already illegal under Spanish law, more than half the number in all of history," says historian Martín Rodrigo, who advises the exhibition. Infamy. Catalan participation in colonial slavery, which can be seen at the Museu Maritim in Barcelona until October 5. "We have included some names in the exhibition to illustrate it, but it is a much broader phenomenon," adds the historian.