The last journey of the 145 nobodies to Ceuta

There is something even more painful than counting the dead: asking what was done — and what was not done — to prevent them from dying.

Because behind the 145 deaths that the NGO Caminando Fronteras, a Spanish organization that documents migrant deaths along the country’s borders, counted during the Ceuta crisis, there is not only a human tragedy; there is also a question that remains unanswered: what was done to prevent those people from ending up dead?

The organization counted 78 bodies recovered in Ceuta and another 67 in Moroccan territory. It is too terrible for anyone to allow themselves to look the other way.

The Ceuta crisis was a mass attempt by migrants to cross from Morocco into Ceuta, Spain’s North African enclave, in the summer of 2026.

The battle over the narrative

And this is where the real heartbreak begins. Because a tragedy of this magnitude cannot end with a body count, political statements or a succession of headlines that soon disappear from the screens.

The question remains much simpler and much more uncomfortable: how can it happen that 145 people die trying to reach a shore and, after the tragedy, we continue talking more about policies, borders, controls and responsibilities than about the lives that were lost?

There is also something particularly unbearable after a tragedy: the battle over the narrative.

When the tears have not yet dried, the effort begins to explain what happened in a way that allows each person to place themselves safely beyond responsibility.

Some point to others — for example, regarding the treatment of minors — some talk about borders, others about criminal networks, others about decisions made by others, and still others about unavoidable circumstances. And while words look for culprits elsewhere, the dead remain exactly where they were left.

It is not that a democratic society should not seek explanations. On the contrary: we must know the facts, confront different versions and determine responsibility based on evidence and due process.

But that is different from using a narrative to dilute the impact of the tragedy, shift responsibility or make it always appear to belong to someone else, especially someone with less ability to impose their version publicly.

Those who have institutions, spokespeople and media outlets can make their interpretation reach people sooner and farther. But those who have died at sea have no spokesperson.

Those who have lost a child at a border do not have a press conference. And those who live in vulnerable circumstances can hardly compete over the meaning of their own tragedy.

That is why we should be wary of narratives that are too quick. Before deciding who is to blame, we should know what happened. Before assigning responsibility, we should know what information existed, what decisions were made and what alternatives were available.

And before turning a tragedy into a political argument, we should remember something elementary: there were no arguments there, but people.

When the narrative manages to prevail over the facts, the dead can be buried beneath an avalanche of words that speaks about them without listening to them.

Remembering the human faces

One hundred forty-five. Put that way, it seems like just a number. A figure that fits on a newspaper line and can disappear the next day beneath another story.

But a figure is also one of the most effective ways of hiding the human face of a tragedy. Because 145 are not 145. They are 145 lives, 145 interrupted stories, 145 families, 145 faces and voices that someone loved and was waiting for.

When we say “145 dead,” we run the risk of forgetting that before they were dead, they were people. And no one should die twice: once beneath the waters or in front of a border, and again beneath the weight of oblivion.

Perhaps that is why I am reminded of Uruguayan writerEduardo Galeano (1940–2015) and his haunting text “The Nobodies,”from his 1989 book “The Book of Embraces.”

Galeano wrote about those human beings condemned to exist on the margins of our gaze, those who have so little space in history that even their pain seems to lack importance. He called them “the children of nobody, the owners of nothing” and wrote that “they have no name, only a number.”

There is something terribly relevant about those words when we think of those who die trying to cross a border. First they were people with first and last names; then they become migrants; later, bodies; finally, a figure.

But they were not nobodies. They were somebody to somebody. And that should be one of the deepest questions in the face of any tragedy: who will pronounce their names now? Who will remember that behind every body there was a story, a family, a hope?

The sea does not distinguish between names, nationalities or documents. Neither does death. We are the ones who establish those differences and who, all too often, end up becoming accustomed to them.

The most troubling thing is that the question should not begin after death, but before. Before someone throws themselves into the water and who or what pushes them to do so. Before someone grabs onto a float. Before a desperate crowd runs toward a border.

Where were the policies capable of preventing desperation from reaching that point? Where were the foresight, protection and mechanisms capable of responding to a situation of such magnitude?

Because when politics arrives after the dead, it arrives too late for them. It can debate procedures, strengthen borders, assign responsibility, announce measures or open investigations.

All of that may be necessary. But no subsequent decision brings a life back. No statement resurrects a child. No debate gives a mother back the voice she was waiting to hear.

A Christian call to dignity

From a Christian perspective, that inequality is even more unbearable. The Gospel does not speak of important human beings and secondary human beings.

The wounded man on the road does not need to present his papers to awaken the Samaritan’s compassion. The Samaritan approaches because there is a wounded man. Nothing more. And nothing less.

Perhaps that is the first thing we are called to recover: the ability to recognize that a person’s dignity does not depend on their passport, religion, place of birth or the border they were trying to cross.

Memory as a final responsibility

That is why we need memory. Not a memory turned into resentment, but a memory that makes us more human.

Remembering the dead means recognizing that they were here, that they existed and that their death cannot simply become a number.

Memory is, in a certain sense, the last home we can offer to someone who no longer has a home. And praying for them is also a way of pronouncing a name before God when the world has stopped pronouncing it.

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, the 19th-century Spanish Romantic poet, wrote verses that seem to cross time and reach us with undiminished force — the refrain of his Rima LXXIII: “My God, how lonely the dead are!”

The living can close a screen, change the channel, forget a news story and continue with our lives.

The dead, by contrast, remain. They cannot return. They cannot explain what happened. They cannot ask for justice. That is why we are the ones who must keep their memory alive.

Perhaps this is where our final responsibility lies: not allowing them to be forgotten in addition to dying. That is why, humbly, I write these words.

May the search for justice not be vengeance, but a commitment to ensure that no person has to risk their life to find a place to live and that a tragedy like this never happens again.

Because Galeano’s “nobodies” were never nobody. They were our fellow human beings, other “selves” like us, even though we did not know their names. No statistic can answer: what do we, the living, do with the memory of those who can no longer speak?

We can turn the page. Or we can stop and recognize that they, too, belong to the human family.

May no one die twice. May no one be merely a number. May no one once again become one of those “nobodies” Galeano spoke about.

And when there is nothing more left to say, may Bécquer’s prayer at least remain, crossing the centuries like a bell amid the silence:”My God, how lonely the dead are!”

This is a translated and edited version of the column that first appeared on Religion Digital and has been republished with permission by Global Catholic.