The parliamentary partners of the Government increase the pressure on the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, after the new images published in the newspaper The country which would reveal that at least one of the -at least- 23 immigrants who died in the jump over the Melilla fence last June died in Spanish territory. Despite the fact that Marlaska denied that anyone died on national soil, both the ERC and the PNV and EH Bildu were very harsh when it came to assessing both the actions of the police forces and the response of the minister during these months, and the Catalan republicans called for his resignation.
One of the crudest interventions was that of the ERC deputy María Carvalho Dantas, who as soon as she began her speech blurted out to Marlaska that “he continues to be minister because the people killed at the border are black and poorIf they had been white, you would not be a minister today.” Carvalho outlined a detailed chronology of the events that occurred on the Melilla border with Morocco on June 24, and charged on several occasions against “cynicism” and “lies” with which, in the opinion of ERC, the Government is handling when addressing this issue.
“We must put an end to the lying and racist story that has been created from the institutional framework and that goes in the same direction as the extreme right,” asked the ERC deputy, who demanded that Marlaska admit that the means used by the forces of security were not “ideal” when “people died between balls and gases” or that they stop defending that “there were no beatings by the Civil Guard of migrants” when – he said – it is documented that they did take place. “Yes, there were deaths in Spanish territory, at least one dead” and “there was no medical assistance in Spain or in Morocco,” Carvalho Dantas also settled.
To settle her intervention, the ERC deputy asked Marlaska “what difference [al Gobierno] of the PP and the extreme right”. “How is it different? I tell you: in which you promised to be a government of the left. In you there were many people who placed a hope for change, but you are as left-wing as Vox is center,” snapped Carvalho Dantas, who assured that it is not “progressiveness to treat people at the border like this” and again demanded “a commission of investigation” and the resignation of the head of the Interior.
“A minister like this cannot continue another day,” closed the deputy. And the ERC spokesman in Congress, Gabriel Rufián, did not want to directly verbalize the request for Marlaska’s resignation, but he called his appearance “disappointing” and assured that “the truth is closing in on him.” “The last time a government lied about death, and I don’t want to compare, it went wrong, so I recommend that this government not rely on lies about deaths that have to be clarified,” Rufián said. in a veiled reference to the actions of the Executive of José María Aznar in the hours and days after the attacks of 11-M.
the commission of inquiry
For their part, PNV and EH Bildu, the other two regular partners of the Government, accused Marlaska of “castling himself” in his refusal to accept that there were deaths in Spanish territory despite the evidence that attests to it. “Stop castling: It is clear, according to the videos, that the avalanche produced a lot of people in line with the border post” and that the actions took place in Spanish territory, requested in this regard the deputy Mikel Legarda, of the PNV, who slipped that the recordings that The Interior has provided to Congress have “interruptions at key moments”. “We are told that these cuts are for operational reasons of the helicopter and the drone” and “we have no reason to doubt, but we would like to know the communications” with the control of those vehicles, Legarda said.
Along the same lines, Jon Iñarritu, parliamentarian for EH Bildu, asked that “if the facts are so clear and if the rest of the institutions and the rest of the parties see them so differently, regardless of their ideology, Why isn’t a commission of inquiry activated?“. Iñarritu, like Legarda, assured that the Government has not provided all the images of that day that it has, and pointed out that “as long as this is not clarified, the minister will tell his version of the facts but the rest we will have seen quite a different one.”
The least combative was Enrique Santiago, who on behalf of United We Can focused on condemning the events that occurred on the Melilla border and demanding that the Interior “take responsibility for what happened and take measures so that it never happens again,” although he rejected the version offered by Marlaska and assured that, “as we have been able to see, at least one death occurred in Spanish border dependencies.”
“Neither Spanish legislation nor that of the EU have effective mechanisms to guarantee that a persecuted person can safely reach the border to request asylum or international protection,” Santiago also lamented, who assured that “no one would risk their lives jumping over a fence if you can submit a request for protection at a diplomatic office in Morocco or the asylum offices at the border”. “But that is not possible today,” he criticized.