The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has reiterated that, as of today, he still does not have any data confirming that Morocco organized the massive entry of more than 80,000 migrants into Ceuta on July 30 and 31, and he has insisted that he did not absent himself on vacation, but continued his work at another “official residence”.
During an interview on the podcast 'The Wild Project', collected by Europa Press, Sánchez again emphasized that the Executive did not have prior warnings that an arrival of people of that magnitude would occur, and he again backed the work carried out both by the CNI and by the forces and security services of the State.
“I don’t have information to accuse an entire government of this,” he said when asked whether he maintains his position of not directly holding Morocco responsible, underscoring that the border of Ceuta is “difficult to manage” and that a “dilemma” then arose. “We got into a shootout,” he said, recalling that among those trying to cross there were numerous minors, many of them “kids unarmed,” “or whether we ended up trying to absorb all those kids so that later they could leave.”
In this vein, he pointed out that “it is clear that the Moroccan regime, also being seen as overwhelmed and surpassed by this reality, what it did was to facilitate at the border that it could be managed in that way this migration crisis”.
Asked about the presence of agents of the Moroccan security forces on the other side of the border crossing, mixed among the migrants and allegedly encouraging them to head toward Ceuta, Sánchez indicated that “there is information published that effectively says that it could have been that, but it could also have been that they were there precisely so that no catastrophe and tragedy would be created and caused”.
When addressing the way the Government handled the crisis and his personal role, he recalled that, the day after the start of the stampede, he himself put in “an appearance” and went to the autonomous city, before traveling later to Lanzarote with his family. He stressed that in the days that followed there was always some minister present in Ceuta.
“I wasn’t on vacation, I was working,” he emphasized, acknowledging that he was with his family “in another official Government residence”, in this case in La Mareta and not in the Palacio de la Moncloa. “I was working ‘full time’ to resolve the Ceuta crisis,” he reiterated.
Sánchez has defended that "a Government president is 24-7, 365 days a year and does not have a ZIP code; it doesn’t matter where you are—you’re working all day" and he has wanted to underline that, for the Executive, the citizens of Ceuta have the same rights and the same level of protection as those who "live within the M-30" in Madrid.