Since last Sunday, when contact was lost with the submarine missing near the Titanic, with five people on board - the pilot and four passengers - there has been wall-to-wall global media attention to see whether they can be rescued alive. The US Coast Guard continues to search the area near the Canadian territory of Newfoundland, while breathable air remaining inside the submersible is becoming scarce and the estimates are that, at best, it will last until Thursday. It is good that we are concerned about saving lives, because all lives are the same. But the surprising thing is that because it is such a journalistically delicious case, with all the cinematic elements for almost second-by-second coverage, the concern is so widespread that other, much closer deaths fall into anonymity or are only mentioned at the back end of a TV newscast.
The company promoting the expedition, OceanGate Expeditions, has done its work very well, which is none other than giving as much impact as possible to the news. The disappearance of the submersible, with the five people on board, was reported on Monday, after contact had been lost with land on Sunday, according to the company. The US Coast Guard continues to search the area near Newfoundland and it announced on Tuesday that only 40 hours of air remained.
Much closer to us, one young person dead and 30 people missing is the provisional toll of a marine disaster off the Canary Islands, a case in which help from Spain had been asked for. The inflatable zodiac, which had set off from the Sahara with 60 people on board, was located on Tuesday about 150 km from the island of Gran Canaria. And it is now a week since the sinking of a fishing boat in the Ionian Sea, off the coast of Greece, in which 79 migrants died and more than 200 have disappeared. Around a hundred migrants were rescued alive, but over 400 people were travelling in the 30-metre vessel. According to local media, between 400 and 700 people were on board the fishing boat. We are entering summer, the time of the year most favourable for attempts to cross the deadly Mediterranean or the Atlantic, from Africa, bound for Spain or any other destination in the south of Europe
Europe is well aware of the problem, because the same thing is discussed every year. But the result is that little or nothing is done while the waters fill with corpses. The European Union limits itself to counting bodies and explaining its policies without achieving any change at origin in the conditions that make people risk their lives to obtain a different future. It is a vicious circle, and meanwhile the mafias make money at the expense of human lives. We have seen it in well-made documentaries and reports and we know perfectly well how it works and how little value is placed on human life. It is an authentic tragedy that a desensitized society, beyond some momentary tearjerking sentiments, spends hours and hours talking about the Titanic submarine and ignores all these deaths that will scratch at our consciences this summer. And that we are at the beginning of more than three months in which we will read these news stories daily. The truth is, there are first-class and second-class shipwrecks.