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Look at the photograph: a young man tied to the fence of Ceuta on August 30. Stop in your face. Behind the tears lies a 14-year-old boy. His name is Ansu and his hands are full of blood from the concertina cuts. Share name and origin with the new promise of FC Barcelona. Instead, life has taken them on different paths.
The Ansu (Fati) footballer, 16, arrived in Spain by plane with his father and already scores goals at the Camp Nou . He will earn almost a million euros a year and they want to nationalize him as soon as possible so he can play with the National Team. The Ansu of the Ceuta fence left his country accompanied by his older cousin, but was lost only in the desert. He escaped the slave slaves of immigrants, almost drowned in a toy boat trying to cross the Strait and cut his hands while trying to step on Spanish soil. And stepped on it. But it was returned "hot" to Morocco by Civil Guard agents.
Moroccan auxiliary forces took care of him, in his own way. First there were a few blows inside a shed in the middle of the road that goes to Tangier so that it does not occur to him to try again to approach the fence. Then, according to several immigrants settled in Tangier who had dealings with the child, they put him in a bus heading south of the country , 900 kilometers down, to the city of Tiznit, the gate of the Sahara.
That penultimate day of August Ansu was wrong on the way. The Guinean teenager waited with his fellow migratory travelers under the Mount of the Dead Woman, in makeshift plastic camps in the Beliones forest, near the border with the autonomous city. They all left at dawn, taking advantage of the fog. They were about 400 . But this time they did not take the path that leads to double fencing with concertinas as they normally do. Some of the immigrants say that they had received the notice - from a Moroccan policeman they pay to inform them - that if they wanted to enter they had to go through the other Ceuta border, that of the Benzú pass.
155 sub-Saharan got to the race. Eight others , among which Ansu was, were mistaken for travel and appeared on a beach next to Ceuta. They tried to enter climbing the mesh of the sea breakwater, surrounded by concertinas. They did not succeed. They got hooked on the fence. Then all of them were returned to Morocco.
The majority of those who did succeed went to the Asylum and Refuge Office (OAR). There were 148 applications for international protection, of which only six were admitted. The 15 lawyers of the Ceuta Bar Association that assist immigrants count that they will resort to denial of asylum. But from the Ministry of the Interior they are already processing the expulsion files. As they did in August last year with the 116 sub-Saharan who jumped the fence. Protected in a bilateral agreement between Spain and Morocco signed in 1992 - which allows the immediate expulsion of citizens from third countries who have crossed illegally - the Government of Sanchez ended up returning them to the Alawi kingdom.
A week after the last jump to the Ceuta fence, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska traveled to Rabat to meet his Moroccan counterpart, Abdeluati Laftit . It was the seventh time that both ministers saw each other in just over a year. Gone are the times when bilateral relations faltered in the midst of an unprecedented migration crisis. The times in which from Rabat, as commented by some sources of the royal gendarmerie, it was ordered to open the hand from time to time so that immigrants could leave for Spain and not be "formed a plug in the north." The Moroccans did not initially like Marlaska's idea of removing the concertinas from the Ceuta and Melilla fences. Nor that his historical friends of the PSOE arrived in La Moncloa pushed by a party (We can) which they consider "pro saharaui".
Today the concertinas are still where they were, although Marlaska has recently assured that the work for their withdrawal "will begin later this year." And the Moroccan military has built a new barbed wire fence on its side of the border perimeter, covering the entire Berrocal area, where more jumps have occurred in recent years.
The European Union also unlocked at the end of last year 140 million euros of the trust fund for Africa to deliver them to the kingdom of Mohamed VI with the aim of shielding its borders. Some of that money destined for Morocco is managed by Spain, which has already released, in several games, more than 80 million to provide the neighboring country with means to fight irregular immigration. For this reason, the number of immigrants who have arrived in the peninsula to the peninsula has been reduced by almost half (33,215 to 16.45) this year. Minister Marlaska thanked in his last meeting with his counterpart the "loyalty" of Morocco and his "enormous efforts" to stop the arrival of boats to our shores. Because, according to the Moroccan Government, this year they have aborted more than 57,000 departures to Spain and have dismantled a hundred immigrant trafficking networks.
But what Minister Marlaska did not see on his last visit to Rabat were the methods used by the auxiliary forces of the kingdom to prevent immigrants from launching across the Straits or the Alboran Sea. Or to jump the fences of the autonomous cities. Violent raids are ongoing in the forests near Ceuta and Melilla or in the neighborhoods where sub-Saharan people live in cities such as Tangier or Nador. Raids in which there are even dead.
The last case was found on the night of September 7 in the Bolingo Forest, in Nador. A boy from Guinea, Anssou Keita , died, according to the Moroccan Association of Human Rights (AMDH), for several blows to the head by refusing to hand over his mobile phone to an auxiliary forces agent during a raid. That morning they took 190 sub-Saharan to a kind of prison that they have enabled in the town of Arekmane (20 kilometers from Melilla). There they hold overcrowded immigrants until they are deported to their countries.
"It is an illegal detention center, there is no legal framework in Morocco that allows the opening of such expulsion centers," says Omar Naji , president of the AMDH in Nador. "This is a place where people are kidnapped, without the possibility that detainees have access to a lawyer. Last year we were able to document that over 2,000 immigrants passed through that jail to those who took from the forests in more than 340 raids Those who do not fit there, more than 9,000, have taken them in buses to the south of the country or to the border with Algeria and left them lying there, "Naji says, protesting because neither he nor anyone in his association they have let him into the "jail" of Arekmane to check the situation in which the immigrants are locked inside before being deported.
Those who have more "luck" and do not fit in Arekmane, end up in cities like Tiznit, where they took Ansu, the boy from Ceuta's fence. Surely, like most of those who lead to the south of Morocco, the Guinean minor will end up returning to the north and try again to step on Spanish soil.
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