In a corner of Europe that turns out to be, ironically, in Africa, scenes typical of the exoduses of the wars of the 20th century are taking place these days. A shanty town of no less than 100 shacks fills the beach - a new irony - of Trampolín, in Ceuta, with sub-Saharans and North Africans who bathe in the sea, cook on rudimentary stoves, play soccer barefoot, relieve themselves wherever they paint and every afternoon they carry out a hard ritual to receive a meager bag of food. In a polygon, Tarajal, women and children are crowded together surrounded by excrement, waiting either for an uncertain future or for an outbreak of cholera.
They are all over the city: in parks, sidewalks, hills. They occupy the terraces of the bars in groups, leaning on one who orders a testimonial coffee. They wander aimlessly. The sub-Saharans smile at the passers-by. They approach the supermarkets, guarded by the Army as if a Netflix dystopia were being filmed.
The Ceuta people, a people forged in hospitality for centuries, watch them. The city's population doubled on July 31. There were 80,000 inhabitants and another 80,000 people entered. The city closed like an oyster and left visitors empty, which caused the return of some 70,000 to Morocco, but another 8,000-10,000 decided to play hard for a dream: to obtain asylum and reach the Peninsula.
It was an endurance competition. Migrants, to fight against hunger. The Ceutíes, let's see how long they could last closed.
"And what happened was that we went back to living a semi-normal life, they stayed there, and now look what we have," says Mari Ángeles Romero, 60, on the terrace of her house, in the La Colina urbanization. The living room of her detached house, decorated with the heads of the moose that her husband hunts, literally hangs over the Trampolín beach. A small Calcutta has come to be built before his eyes, "in just three days," he complains.
And here comes the fear that has swept through the city in the last few hours, with the political blockade pointing to a long stay for migrants in Ceuta's limbo, both stranded in the debate that is sweeping Europe and the planet: welcome or close. Assume that we were all migrants at some point, or close the door to a West that is not there to get excited about either.
"They want to leave these people here, it's very clear," says Mari Ángeles. «They want to hide the problem under the rug like they did before in the Canary Islands with the Menas, and for us to swallow them. We cannot be the Albania of Spain, and stay here with them. It's absolute madness. "This is going to explode."
Ceuta fears becoming - even more so - the backyard of Spanish immigration, as Albania is of Italian immigration according to Giorgia Meloni's plans, at a time when rich countries store their surplus human material in other poor and subcontracted countries: the United Kingdom planned to send migrants to Rwanda and Sweden places its prisoners, upon payment, in Estonia, for example.
200 meters from La Colina, the luxurious urbanization where Mari Ángeles lives, another wild contrast of this Ceuta that explains this era so well: next to the CETI, the Temporary Stay Center for Immigrants, where migrants who have requested asylum usually spend the night before traveling to the Peninsula, a public equestrian center that this Tuesday hosted a rally against the reception.
"It's unreal," says Álvaro de la Riva, a 44-year-old from Ceuta, at the rally. «We want to integrate, we know that we live in a place that has always received a lot of immigration... But this is of an incredible size, there is no room. And we don't know who they are. A friend from Castillejo [Fnideq in Morocco, just across the border] tells me that many of them may not be clean wheat. The first days we didn't believe what was happening. Now, it's going on for three weeks... Does the Government not realize that it is unsustainable?
The concentration, which occurs while several thousand people receive their bag of food at the Trampolín after a long police ritual that actually seeks to tame them, tries to prevent the equestrian center from hosting one of the four structures that the central government promotes so that Ceuta does not become something that, in the eyes of the visitor, is bordering on: a humanitarian and health problem of the first order.
"But if you give them that, you're making a book call effect," says the woman at the beginning. What if you don't give it to him? "Well, they have to go." However, every small corner of Ceuta already houses a shanty made of cane, three ropes and two pieces of cloth, even with its small and officious television set in which some 100 Moroccans yesterday shouted "Long live Spain!", "Sorry, Ceuta!" and "We want a future!" In recent days, just over 400 requests have already been denied, which has resulted in barely thirty returns to Morocco.
