Marín (Pontevedra), Feb 14 (EFE).- On February 15, 2022, the hearts of twenty-one seafaring families stopped. At dawn, the Galician fishing boat in which his family had embarked months before, sank in the icy waters of Newfoundland (Canada). Even today, a year later, they are still looking for answers, unable to assimilate this blow that life has dealt them.
“The world fell on us. Life is no longer the same ”, he laments, like the others, in a chat with EFE, Pablo More. He lost three of his own in that fateful shipwreck. At Villa de Pitanxo were his brother, Daniel More; his nephew, Diego More; and his nephew-in-law, Edwin Córdoba. All of them of Peruvian origin.
Having three victims within the same family has left a deep mark on them. “Since all this happened to us, life has changed completely,” adds his brother José, Diego’s father, who reveals that this has been “the most disastrous day of my life.”
“We have not yet accepted what has happened. Neither me nor my wife, ”she underlines the loss of her son, a 26-year-old for whom it was her first tide. He enrolled in Villa de Pitanxo because he failed a course that he was going to do “and he didn’t want to stay without doing anything.”
He, like twenty of his companions, “got on that ship and never came back,” lamented his relatives, all of whom have labor ties to the sea and who, since the day of the shipwreck, “have had a hard time going to work, we are not able”.
José More explains that “before, I worked quietly for four months in a row”, embarked on the high seas and far from my family, but points out that now “I would have to think hard about going back to deep-sea fishing because life is no longer the same.”
“That day they destroyed our lives”, reiterates the father of Diego More, who assures that the only thing he can think about is that, throughout this last year, “his birthday has passed and we have had a very sad Christmas, always thinking about him and what happened.”
He asked his brother “not to go anymore” on that boat, where José himself had worked “and knew what was happening there”, but Daniel More told him that “it was going to be his last time and that’s how it was”. . Fate made, he says sadly, that he did not want to go alone “and he left with my son.”
Edemon Okutu, boatswain of Villa de Pitanxo, left his wife and three daughters ashore, the youngest just seven months old. Jeanette, the eldest of them, does not separate from her mother. “She’s having a really hard time,” she explains. She with him she arrived in Spain more than twenty years ago.
“There are nights when he doesn’t sleep and neither do I,” says this young woman, saddened by the moments lost with her father. “He would be with me now seeing how well I am growing,” she says. It also hurts her that her sister “will not remember the moments she lived with him.”
Okutu is one of the nine sailors who has not been able to receive a burial. His body is still sunk in Newfoundland waters. Not having a place to mourn him makes everything even more difficult for them because “we don’t know where he is and that’s very hard”.
The same goes for Fernando González, the ship’s oiler. His sons, Cristofer and Kevin, have been two of the spokespersons for the relatives from the beginning. “The only thing that gives us hope to continue is to do justice. Nothing more”, affirms the first of them.
“This year has been horrible. What you never expect that you can suffer, we had to go through, ”stresses Cristofer González, who acknowledges that his family“ has had a terrible time ”. Her grandmother, sick with Alzheimer’s, does not know what has happened to her son. “We can’t tell her because otherwise, for her, it would be as if her son died every day,” he adds excitedly.
PILLS FOR ANXIETY
Cristofer confesses that, for a long time, he could not sleep at night. “I had to take anxiety pills,” he recalls. “I never thought that I would remember my father every day. Whether I like it or not, I think of him every day, ”says the son of the Villa de Pitanxo greaser.
Justice. The word that the relatives repeat the most, who denounce a “total abandonment” by the ship’s owner, Pesquerías Nores. “The only thing they tried is to hide the truth,” denounces the son of Fernando González. Just like the skipper of the ship, he adds.
José More thinks the same. He and his family have “where to go to leave a bouquet of flowers”, but many others “have nowhere to go to cry or put a candle”, something that he attributes to the “greed of a man” who wanted to continue fishing in full storm
“They played with our pain. I lost three of my family and it is not fair that they are lying, “says his brother Pablo, who considers that” if the boss or the assembler had a clear conscience they would have bothered to have comforted us “.
Noemí Rivas, wife of Pedro Herrera, Villa de Pitanxo’s first officer, insists that “they were very cruel because they did not call or send anyone home.” She -with an eight-month-old child- found out through social networks. “They are bad people, miserable and inhumane”, she censures her.
Call after call, all they received in those early hours was silence. “They didn’t answer anything because they said they didn’t know anything, but they knew everything. They are cowards and they were already using their mechanisms to cover everything up”, says Cristofer González.
The twenty-one deceased from the Villa de Pitanxo “are not going to return”, admits resignedly María José de Pazo, daughter of Francisco de Pazo, the chief engineer of the shipwrecked ship in Canada, “but each one of them had a family behind them that has devastated.”
LET A TRAGEDY LIKE THIS NEVER BE REPEATED
Despite this pain, they have wanted to continue fighting so that “what we are experiencing is not lived by anyone else and that it is a before and after”, according to Pablo More. “Let this not be in vain. Not for me anymore, because mine are not going to return, but for the people of the sea ”, he affirms.
“It was not an accident due to a sea surge. There are many gaps to investigate and clarify”, concludes De Pazo, who does not understand why the operation to get off the ship has been so delayed, although he suspects that “it is clear who did not want to get off there”.
If it were not for the persistence of the families, “they would not have done anything”, underlines María José de Pazo, who recalls that in claims in other areas, such as aviation, “every last screw is reviewed” to find out the causes of a catastrophe of this caliber.
The sinking of the Villa de Pitanxo, a year ago, is the biggest catastrophe in Galician fishing since, in 1978, 27 people lost their lives off the Cíes Islands. “Those who were never afraid of the truth support the investigation to the end,” the families say.
Alejandro Espino
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