The migration crisis that has been suffocating Ceuta for more than a month has not only altered the normality of the autonomous city. The pressure spreads throughout the small territory and hits its most vulnerable areas with special intensity. El Príncipe, one of the most historically conflictive neighborhoods in Spain, is also one of the areas where this new reality is perceived in a cruder way.
This newspaper meets with six men from the neighborhood who want to maintain maximum anonymity due to their close ties to drug trafficking. In fact, we cannot put their names nor are we allowed to photograph them. It is their strictest requirement to speak openly. The interior of the neighborhood maintains a tense calm, a climate of violence that does not end up exploding. The cameras are not welcomed and anyone who sets foot in the place is recognized as a stranger by the neighbors. On the corners you can see young people with cell phones in their hands controlling the movements between the different blocks. Leaving the main streets and getting lost in the narrow alleys is an unaffordable risk. When you try to take out the camera to illustrate the interior of this neighborhood, shouts from the neighbors come from the buildings: "Not a photo here!"
The interview takes place at the foot of the neighborhood, in the lowest area. Some of them sitting on the floor, others in old beach chairs. Trying to understand the explanations that these men, dedicated to crime, are going to give forces the reader to place themselves in an uncomfortable position. You have to be located in a neighborhood in which legality and its total functioning break with the common rules of any other place. Their arguments are based on an apparent contradiction: they live and participate in a world, sometimes outside the law, but they now denounce that the lack of immigration control has also reached the streets where they themselves have imposed their own rules for years.
"We are having a bad time. In this neighborhood we are paying the highest price," they say in reference to the insecurity that has taken over the narrow colorful streets. "The women in my house can't go out in peace, my mother doesn't even go out for a walk," explains one of them.
This neighborhood has always lived with violence. Although some of their neighbors repeat that "it's not what it used to be," the settling of scores continues to be part of their reality. The last shooting occurred, in fact, the same week in which this interview took place, as confirmed by these neighbors. They establish, however, their own border: "No one dies here because they are innocent," they say without blinking.
There the particular logic of the place begins to be drawn. There is the law that prevails in the rest of the city and there is another, unwritten law, that some of its inhabitants consider essential to maintain a certain balance. A violent, illegal order that is difficult to understand from the outside, but assumed by those who have lived under these codes for a lifetime.
According to the six men, the massive arrival of immigrants has strained that fragile balance. "Since July 30, they came to the neighborhood without having anything. They came to buy to consume. Before eating, they prefer drugs," they explain, referring to the new arrivals.
The scene becomes visible on the ground. A few kilometers from the place where this conversation takes place, days later, this editor witnesses how the man she is speaking with sells a chicken of cocaine to an immigrant. The operation barely interrupts the conversation. He delivers the drugs, collects the money, goes up to the apartment block and, a few minutes later, the conversation continues. As if nothing had happened, with an overwhelming everyday life. In The Prince, substances are part of the usual landscape to the point that they themselves ironically: "Here it is easier to get drugs than love."
The arrival of new consumers, they say, has reactivated part of that market. According to those interviewed, immigrants especially frequent peripheral areas that are further away from the center. They relate it to a smaller police presence than in other parts of the city: "They want the image of the center to remain what it was until now. But we do not count for them. We are tired and abandoned, we were before," they lament.
The result is a complex paradox. Those who admit to engaging in illegal activities demand more security in their neighborhoods. However, they only want that control from the authorities to keep immigration chaos at bay. And, in the face of what they consider to be an absence of the State, they champion an anarchic response: exercising control themselves.
During this time, neighborhood movements have appeared that organize to protect certain areas and avoid altercations. Some of the six men interviewed also participate as volunteers in caring for the protection of women.
Accustomed to living with violence at their doorstep, these young people recognize their relationship with drug trafficking and assume as their own a form of justice that is most often foreign to the courts. At the same time, they provide help to those who have just arrived: "I don't want immigrants to be here. This can't be tolerated. But they are people and I want to do good, it fulfills me," explains one of them.
This newspaper has seen them performing in the vicinity of a camp where women and girls are concentrated. As they explain, they intervene when they consider that some men are approaching them violently under the influence of drugs or alcohol and try to dissuade them. "I can't sit still watching them suffer and be raped. They are people," he explains angrily. "I have a sister and I can't imagine that happening to her," he laments.
They assure that these interventions have also caused them numerous threats: "The immigrants have come to tell us that if we go to Morocco they are going to kill us. That also makes us uncomfortable, let's see if they are going to catch you one day among several...", they point out. It is contradictory to see how those who for decades have spread fear in their neighborhood now fear for the safety of their area.
One of them also claims to have witnessed a group rape of a young woman in a place near the Prince, an episode that this newspaper has already reported on. "I was with a group of friends from the neighborhood, the first thing we did was: get her out of there and take her to the hospital," she says. What happened next sums up the situation that The Prince is experiencing better than any explanation: "We teach the men the law of the neighborhood, you know what I mean," he explains.
When asked what exactly that expression means, the six describe a form of punishment carried out by the neighbors themselves. Many times they do not resort to the police, they consider that certain behaviors receive an immediate response within the neighborhood itself. "If the police don't patrol or maintain order, we have to do it."
This editor then presents them with a contradiction: they themselves admit to living off drug trafficking and, therefore, contributing to altering the order they seek. His response is immediate: "But that is our order, our rules and the way our neighborhood works."
That is, probably, what best allows us to understand the delicate stability that exists in some of the most marginal areas of Ceuta. It is not about the absence of rules. It is about the existence of parallel rules. Internal codes that coexist and are foreign to ordinary legality.
Newcomers are required precisely to accept these codes and comply with them. "Let them respect the great ones," as they themselves express. Their indignation lies in the fact that coexistence is increasingly difficult in their neighborhood. "What cannot be is that you feed them or give them a blanket and they respond by shitting at your door."
The six also want to make it clear that they are Spanish, born in Ceuta and Muslims. They reject that criticism of certain behaviors can automatically be identified with racism or xenophobia. "In El Príncipe we have all always lived together, because here we all need to earn a living." They assure that they would accept those who arrived with the "intention of working and living together."
To explain it, they resort to a scene that, according to what they say, they experienced recently. An immigrant asked them where he could find a mosque: "We were happy because we thought 'look, at least someone wants to pray,'" remember the young people from Ceuta, who share their religion. But, according to his story, immediately afterwards the man changed his attitude: "He then started shouting that he was going to end up exploiting us all."
The sensation they describe is that of increasing tension. "We feel fear in our neighborhood, each time the immigrants get used to it and gain more confidence," they explain.
As that hostility increases, so does contact with the drug. It is common to see immigrants consuming hashish or marijuana, although these young people assure that cocaine is the substance that really moves the neighborhood: "where coca enters, the rest does not rule."
That does not mean, according to them, that the newcomers are generally entering drug trafficking structures. When this newspaper asks if some receive offers to work for the networks, the six deny it: "We don't trust them. They see more opportunities outside of Ceuta. As soon as they sell something and have money they are going to rob us," they explain.
Drug trafficking, however, is deeply embedded in the lives of those interviewed themselves. One of them was released from prison last October after being intercepted with 220 kilos of drugs, a crime for which he claims he was sentenced to six years in prison. He also says that on some occasions he has been offered money to kill: "I refused, I am not the one to take the life of someone who has not done anything to me, but a gun here costs you 300 euros," he explains.
Another works as a "petaquero", the name given to those who supply offshore fuel to drug boats to prevent them from having to approach the port and have enough supply to flee from the persecutions carried out by the authorities.
They also do not try to present their life as a normal reality. "I'm a criminal, but I would like to be a worker," one admits. They say they feel marked from the moment they pronounce the name of their neighborhood. They claim that being born in El Príncipe conditions their access to the labor market and their relationship with the rest of the city: "No matter how much you study, you are already pigeonholed." One of them raises that frustration: "I don't kill anyone with a joint, those who wear a suit and tie, with their lies, kill many more people."
The argument is repeated throughout the conversation. They do not believe that they have completely chosen drug trafficking, but rather they consider that they have grown up within an ecosystem where it is difficult to stay out of it. "The business is in the neighborhood and you can't escape from that," they say.
Precisely for this reason it is tremendously striking to hear them now talk about order, security and abandonment. Drugs are part of the functioning of the neighborhood. Violence too. But the massive arrival of immigrants, they maintain, has introduced new problems in a structure that functions with its own codes.
On the other hand, their discontent with the administrations' response is more current than ever: "The Government has us very far away. It has always been like this." They assure that this distance did not begin on July 30. The migration crisis has simply made more visible a fracture that already existed. "The Prince already has a mentality established, the Government has put it into him," they explain.
They have a complex relationship with their neighborhood: They defend it, protect it, live off its underground economy and at the same time want to leave: "We love the neighborhood very much, but our dreams are outside," they lament.
This is the reality on behalf of The Prince. The massive arrival of immigration has caused, according to the testimonies of these young people, an increase in consumption and greater activity in the drug market. But it has also put even more tension in a place where legislation sometimes clashes with what they call "the law of the neighborhood."
The six men demand security while admitting to living from drug trafficking. They protect migrant women while asking those who have arrived to leave Ceuta. They criticize the absence of police while defending that they themselves administer the punishments. They condemn one violence, but justify another.
