ABSTRACT
On January 30, 2007, the Spanish maritime rescue service responded to a distress call from the Marine 1, a cargo ship stranded off the coast of West Africa. This was the start of an incident of what has come to be known as “mixed” migration (Wouters and Den Heijer 2010). It involved at least a dozen countries, two international organizations, several non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and 369 migrants 1 from Africa and Asia who had paid smugglers to take them to the Canary Islands. 2 They had embarked at Conakry (Guinea) and ended up detained, under Spanish police guard, in an abandoned fish processing plant in the Mauritanian city of Nouadhibou.
