• Migration Maritime Rescue reinforces its presence in the Canary Islands due to the increase in migratory pressure

The mayor of Mogán (Gran Canaria), Onalia Bueno, has announced that her City Council will not pay for "one more burial" of the immigrants who arrive deceased at the port of Arguineguín or the rest of the coast of the municipality, because she believes that the Government of Spain must pay them.

"I do give up my niches so that there is a burial, but we will not (pay) the expenses caused by that burial, because we are not talking about one, two, or three," Bueno said in a statement made to TVE in the Canary Islands.

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Interview.

Onalia Bueno: "Marlaska failed me in the zero minute"

  • Writing: ALBERTO ROJAS Arguineguín (Gran Canaria)

Onalia Bueno: "Marlaska failed me in the zero minute"

IMMIGRATION.

The arrival of migrants to the Canary Islands increases in recent weeks

  • Writing: ANA MARÍA ORTIZ Madrid

The arrival of migrants to the Canary Islands increases in recent weeks

In Mogán is the dock of Arguineguín, the reference port of Maritime Rescue in the south of Gran Canaria, where thousands of African immigrants rescued in the Atlantic have arrived since the Canarian Route was reactivated and also several dozen bodies of those who could not stand the hardship of the crossing.

In the case of the bodies recovered by Salvamento Marítimo, the municipalities have been facing for years the costs of burying them in application of the Mokortuoria Health Policy Regulation, a 1974 norm that attributes to the municipalities the responsibility of burying, for charity, those people without resources who die in their territory.

The City Council of Mogán argues against the fact that most of the immigrants who rest in its cemeteries did not die in its municipal area, but on the high seas, although their death was certified when they were disembarked in Arguineguín, so it understands that it is up to the State to assume the cost of burial.

In this regard, its mayor argues that "they are expenses" that she has to "deduct from the taxes of the neighbors" of the municipality and regrets that "the Government Delegation (in the Canary Islands) is not even interested in anything."

Re-elected as mayor in May at the head of the list of Together for Mogán and number 3 of the candidacy of the Canarian Coalition to the regional Parliament for Gran Canaria, Onalia Bueno has criticized several times the effort that her municipality assumes in terms of migration.

Among other things, he has demanded that Salvamento move to another port, because he believes that his rescues condition the normality in the fishing and tourist activity of the Arguineguín pier.

And, in 2020, when the pier was saturated with more than 2,000 migrants who slept crowded on the ground waiting for reception resources to be enabled, he chartered buses so that two hundred people who left the port without an assigned destination were transferred to the doors of the Government Delegation in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria instead of staying on the streets of Arguineguín.

  • Canary Islands
  • immigration