The Ceuta crisis progresses marked by the absence of a convincing explanation for what happened on July 30. When there is no clear diagnosis of the causes, it is hardly possible to be effective in the solution and much less to prevent it from happening again. More than a month later, the Government has not provided a convincing account of the origin of the migrant avalanche. It could argue that it may be impossible to know who is behind the border assault, but the problem is that the Executive has issued different and contradictory versions. When that happens in crisis management, disaster is evident.
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The first symptom of discrepancies between versions was the clash between the Ministers of Defense and Interior. Margarita Robles defending that the CNI warned and Fernando Grande-Marlaska and the rest of the Cabinet maintaining the opposite. The reputation of the secret services has thus been called into question. The intelligence center maintains that not only was the increase in arrivals of migrants swimming in the previous weeks warned about, linked to a distorted interpretation of a Supreme Court ruling, but it was also warned that a massive entry was being prepared for July 30, the throne festival in Morocco. Even that the potential of the avalanche could reach 180,000 people (there were more than 70,000). It should be noted that the CNI reports are sent to the Minister of Defense and the Presidency of the Government. A string of ministers except Robles and even Sánchez himself admitted that they knew of an increase in irregular entries, but perfectly attributable to the migratory increases in the area in summer. La Moncloa denied having any information that would allow glimpsing such an avalanche. In fact, some sources privately question the effectiveness of the CNI in this matter. For the Government, any of the explanations is harmful: if the president or a minister were informed, why did they not respond quickly?; if they were not, does Spain not have intelligence services that detect the movement of thousands of people on the other side of such a sensitive border as Ceuta’s?
To that confusion was added this week another of equal caliber. El Español published that the judge of the National Court María Tardón, who is investigating what happened, received last Monday a report from the National Immigration and Borders Center (CENIF), a kind of intelligence service of the General Immigration Police Commissariat of the National Police, which pointed to Rabat. In that document, the digital said, Moroccan gendarmes under the orders of plainclothes agents who would have guided the migrants to collapse the Spanish border were pointed out. The Minister of the Interior was again in the spotlight: did he know nothing or did he hide it? The truth is that the magistrate “gave orders” to the police officials not to inform their superiors of the content of the report, but it finally came to light yesterday.
The report practices shooting fish in a barrel… it could only have been Morocco
It is a dossier prepared afterwards, based on images captured of the assault. From reading the document it is deduced that the police who wrote it suspect Morocco, even accusing gendarmes and military of that country of facilitating entry into Ceuta and they come to say that everything was so planned and organized, that such a level of coordination and availability of digital tools was needed that it is not credible that only the mafias that profit from human trafficking had set it up. Moreover, it describes other precedents, such as those of 2021 and 2024 as rehearsals of the current one. It even concludes that the Moroccan deployment on August 15 to stop an alleged second avalanche attempt was a setup organized to “whitewash the response of the Security Forces and Corps.” In short, shooting fish in a barrel. In other words, to a good listener… Morocco was behind everything. But the report does not draw that direct and explicit conclusion. It recognizes that all that story are factors that arouse suspicion, but admits that “the intellectual and directive authorship” is “diffuse” and “difficult to determine.”
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The Government clings to that to insist that there is no evidence that Morocco instigated and organized the “invasion” of Spanish territory for political purposes, which can only be the claim of sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla, as well as to remind La Moncloa (and Europe) of that country’s capacity for pressure. Sánchez himself said on Monday on SER that without evidence he could not make a direct accusation. But the pressure from the PP is increasing, even more than that of Vox (Morocco has become a preferred ally of Trump). The PP thus shows a weak president, hostage to the Moroccan regime and hints at a link with the espionage of the president’s mobile phone through the Pegasus program.
Knowing Morocco’s role in this crisis is essential. Without the cooperation of that country it is hardly possible to regulate the border flow, especially if the Spanish security forces do not want to assume the bad image of repelling entries violently. But it cannot be forgotten that, for Rabat, the territorial aspiration over Ceuta and Melilla is fully alive. It is a difficult balance, but the Government has gotten into a dance of versions that erodes its credibility, a problem even worse than the lack of reflexes when managing solutions.
