Pedro Sánchez’s visit to Gambia, Senegal and Mauritania ends with well-known outdated ideas, because they have already been implemented in the future of migration from North Africa. Nothing new on the Atlantic migration route after thirty years, only the maintenance of the perennial alliance of exploitation, suffering and death.
Spain has been talking about and implementing militarization policies in border countries for decades. And within this framework, it occasionally surprises with mass expulsions used as stunts and which, by the way, are great business for companies that invest in movement control. In 2006, Bakary and Ismail, the first in a wheelchair and the second a teenager, found themselves lying in the desert after being sent from the Canary Islands to Mauritania with hundreds of others, and it has been going on ever since.
The impacts of these measures on the populations are camouflaged as collateral effects of the fight against mafias. Criminal networks that continue to grow because the States have failed in their work and that only feed them, making them stronger and stronger.
At the pace of terror, Sánchez’s journey showed us the “goodness” of compassionate policies with discourses on safe routes, presenting circular migration as the culmination of these. Circularity is not anyone’s salvation, but rather the representation of a system where the recognition of rights and security is in the hands of the exploiter. Perhaps we should ask many Moroccan day laborers whose lives have not been free of violence of all kinds during their regular migration to the strawberry fields.
It seems that when the measures are disseminated from the countries of the North, there is no questioning or evaluation, as if they were absolute truths. Dogmas whose ultimate objective is to perpetuate a system for those who enrich themselves from the suffering, exploitation and dehumanization of other populations. In El Ejido, during the raid In the 2000s against migrants, it was said that they should be among the greenhouses as agricultural tools, but not visible in the streets.
The speeches and measures are not questioned because no one is shocked by the violations of human rights caused by the control of the movements of certain populations, as if during these thirty years and quietly a virus of inhumanity had spread in a terrible way.
These so-called truths disseminated in bilateral agreements leave no room for the development of approaches that are making their way from the countries of the South, such as the necessary fight against plunder and extractivism. Because the populations of the Sahel and West Africa are asking to control their natural resources, and to resist the tools of neocolonial control that still persist. From the South, they are also asking: who is responsible for the climate change that pushes more people to leave their homes every year? A few months ago, defenders of the territory showed me a photo of a woman lying with a bullet in her head on the banks of the river, executed by paramilitary groups linked to extractive companies. And the peoples of Africa do not have the right to migrate, but they also do not have the right not to migrate.
Sánchez has not only recovered the usual measures, but has also ignored the thousands of victims that these political proposals have caused and obviously has not had time to speak with the representatives of the relatives of the dead and disappeared. Perhaps Moncloa should receive the lists of thousands of people who left and never returned, drawn up by the mayors of neighborhoods, municipalities and villages in Mauritania, Senegal and Gambia.
