On August 15, the day of the Assumption, there will be no apocalypse in Ceuta. No matter how much it seems that intelligence services announce it, social media amplify it, and news bulletins repeat it as if counting down the hours to the end of the world. There will be no new assault on the border. There will not be. Everything is agreed upon on both sides of the fence, just as the previous events were consented to.
Because someone got carried away. Almost 80,000 people forcefully burst into Spanish territory without anyone lifting a finger. And a hundred dead, who could have been many more. Write it down slowly, it hurts: a hundred dead. Those are the figures that should keep us awake at night, not a date on the calendar. But the power has decided that this August the national conversation will revolve around the assault that is not going to happen, and not around the one that already took place.
The Minister of Defense has proclaimed that Ceuta and Melilla are "very Spanish." A commendable conviction. They were also so on July 30, and that superlative Spanishness did not prevent what happened. The rhetoric of superlatives is the resource of governments when decisions are lacking: the more sovereignty is qualified, the less it is exercised. Quevedo would have dispatched it in a verse; we have to dispatch it in committee. In any serious democracy, a breach of the border of this magnitude would have opened a state crisis, and some resignation. Here, it opened, for now, a parenthesis of August.
And within the parenthesis, a detail that portrays everything else: the Minister of Defense will not attend the Senate this month, after having announced it. Apparently, she does not have time to prepare for her attendance in committee. Three days ago she did, now she does not. The minister's calendar is as flexible as her narrative: it stretches or shrinks as it suits the script.
Because the script for September is written.
Upon returning from vacation, the entire Government will appear to explain to us how well they acted on the 15th, that day when —oh, surprise— nothing happened. The call for the assault that will never come will have fulfilled its function by then: to fabricate a management success that covers up the tragedy of July. It is the old technique of the magician, as old as power itself: look at my right hand, the one on August 15, so that no one looks at the left, the one with the hundred dead. Tacitus already said it about emperors who celebrated victories over enemies they themselves had invented.
Some of us are not fooled. The focus is not August 15: it is what happened in July, what was known before it happened, and what was not done to prevent it. Who knew what, when they knew it, and why they remained silent without doing what they swore or promised to do. That is what we will demand to explain, with documents and appearances, when the parliamentary curtain is lifted. With papers, not with adjectives. Borders are not defended with superlatives: they are defended with decisions, and decisions leave a written trace.
Save this article. And reread it in September, when the Government celebrates the miracle of the Assumption: the assault that vanished into thin air, until the next time it is convenient. Because this analysis is not given to you by either ChatGPT or Claude… Thank God.