There is a point in Juan's speech, after 20 years working as a civil guard in El Tarajal and with a voice, on the other end of the phone, that expresses very well the hardness of his work, that puts in black and white the strange, paradoxical limit in which one lives on this border between the Third World and the First: "You have to try to prevent them from entering, you are there so that legality is maintained and legality is respecting the border, the limit... But, as soon as they have entered and you intercept, your priority is to save their lives. You give them water, dry clothes, blankets, you call the Red Cross to cure them. The first thing is to protect them from the cold: they all arrive with hypothermia.
On one side of the line, migrants must be contained. But, as soon as they manage to break that shield, they go, so to speak, from adversaries - or from an element to be contained in any case - to allies, and everything consists of protecting them: "It's like that, we have to prevent them from entering, but as soon as they enter what takes priority is their protection." In fact, at another point in the conversation, Juan emphasizes this: "You have saved someone's life, and that is... Well, what it is to save someone's life. A very serious thing."
Perhaps that is the best feeling that this civil border guard expresses in a conversation with EL MUNDO. Perhaps the worst: "Frustration for what has happened? Well, it's more... It's seeing that we are of no use when we are here, that our work is of no use. That some enter and stay, others are sent back and try again... And nothing changes. We do not bring any solution, what we do is of no use. The solution can only be political so that these people do not do what they do."
Juan (the name is not real), who is just over 60 years old and who began working in El Tarajal, a destination that he requested - "and where I want to retire" - about 20 years ago, felt the avalanche of the 30th and 31st "like a party." Not theirs, obviously, but that of the 80,000 North Africans and sub-Saharans who crossed: "It is not the same when they cross violently, sometimes they throw urine or feces at you, and other times they have attacked colleagues with the hooks with which they jump the fence... Than what happened those days: for them it was like a party, they came happy... It is not the same."
By sea, however, the funeral arrived: "I think there were no deaths due to crushing, I understand that they all died by drowning [83 people on the Spanish side, the Armed Institute has certified]. In these cases, it is the crowding that in some way contributes to their death... Many do not know how to swim, and when you are drowning you hold on to what is closest to you, which was another person...".
Juan coldly analyzes, but like someone who sees something happening in his own home, the scenes that shook the planet just over a month ago: "Many people entered clinging to the stones of the breakwater, without having to swim, but many others entered very far from the breakwater. Our boats were full, it was crazy. If they come swimming from afar, they do need a special physical condition, but if they reach the breakwater, it is almost not necessary: they cross holding on."
The guard has lived through the years, "until Covid", in which "about 20,000 people and about 8,000 cars" crossed the border every day from Morocco and back to that country, in a kind of clandestine trade but allowed by the neighboring country: "They called it subsistence customs. Morocco did not control anything that entered because it assumed that it was so that the population of Castillejos and those areas could live." The pandemic closed the border "and from then on everything was more controlled," when it reopened, two years later.
When it started "there were many attempts to jump over the fence, but less by swimming than there is now, when there are a lot of swimmers. The two days before July 30, 300 people came, it was clear that something could happen, but those of us who are there on the job are sometimes the ones who have the least information."
Do you feel like you are abandoned, alone in the face of danger? "It is true that many things are missing: better material means, more people working on a serious containment protocol... There is a lot of work to be done for this to be done well, and it is all political will."
When asked if Morocco is the one who actually controls the border, he responds with another question, dryly: "Isn't it clear, after what has happened?"
But, returning to that two-faced condition - of guardian of the border but savior if the migrant crosses it -, Juan tells how they have been asking for years that the DNA of those drowned in El Tarajal can be compared with that of the relatives who are looking for them: "Those who die and whose identity is not known are buried with a number, without further ado, but photos, fingerprints and DNA remains are taken, and there are NGOs that often come looking for them, with their relatives on the arm. We have been trying for years to have this DNA matched, but the Foreign Ministries of Spain and Morocco have not agreed to it."
Do you put yourself in the place of the migrants whom you have to repel and, moments later, take care of? "Let's see, emigrating to get a better life is very legal. My mother emigrated, in the 1950s, to Germany. My son has emigrated to France. But it can be done legally. Every year thousands of Moroccans go to Huelva, with a work permit, to pick strawberries, and then return. It can be organized, and it should be done."
Juan admits that it "frustrates" him that his work is of "nothing" use, "but I push it away," he adds. On the day in question, "the deployment was normal every day, no more, no less. Then, when they began to set up, they brought reinforcements, but nothing before."
