by Augustin Goland, The Unz Review:
They came around the El Tarajal breakwater by the hundreds, then by the thousands: young Moroccan men paddling on identical cheap inflatable rings, dropping their beach toys on the sand of Spain’s North African city of Ceuta and breaking into a run. Behind them, crowds forced the land border. It was July 30, Throne Day, the anniversary of Moroccan King Mohammed VI’s accession. In roughly 24 hours, some 50,000 people entered Ceuta by Madrid’s count — 60,000 by the city’s. Ceuta has 84,000 inhabitants. The enclave’s president Juan Jesús Vivas said that proportionally it was as though 34 million people had walked into Spain in a single day.
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Chaos followed. The newcomers looted stores, residents barricaded themselves in homes, the festival of the city’s patroness was canceled. Within hours, the migrant reception center, built for 512 people, held more than 1,700, and UNICEF noted that the roughly 1,200 minors among them could not legally be sent back.
The sea gave up bodies for days: over 80 confirmed dead within a week, with the local press counting close to one hundred — the worst migrant death toll ever recorded in Spain. By the weekend, most intruders had walked back to Morocco, hungry and disillusioned; Madrid celebrated over 48,000 “voluntary returns.” Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez refused to declare a state of emergency, though every party in Ceuta’s assembly, including his own, demanded it.
Who organizes 60,000 people — and why the identical rubber rings? It seems that nobody handed them out; the young men bought them. Vendors at the local market in Fnideq, two kilometers from the Ceuta border, did a roaring trade beforehand. “When a lot of wetsuits, fins and floats are being sold there, you know waves of entries into Spain are coming,” a National Police chief inspector told a Spanish outlet. The same gear was advertised in Moroccan migrant Facebook groups with 230,000 members, next to maps of the swim, patrol schedules, and assembly points. A wetsuit cost about 55 dollars.
Two viral messages mobilized the invasion. One was a falsehood: that Spain’s mass amnesty for illegal aliens — which had closed on June 30, and was only for people already living in Spain — could still be applied for until July 30. The other was half true: that a July 8 Spanish Supreme Court ruling meant the border was “open.” The court had barred summary pushbacks of swimmers because, unlike at the land border, there is no physical barrier at sea to breach — while suggesting that barriers on the water would make pushbacks lawful.
