For five days the Spanish government said that Morocco was a full partner, the crossings at Ceuta were the work of trafficking networks exploiting a Supreme Court ruling, and Rabat’s cooperation in taking people back had been exemplary. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said it, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said it, Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares said it.
On Aug. 3, Defence Minister Margarita Robles said something quite different. Visiting the Fourth Emergency Intervention Battalion at Zaragoza Air Base, hours after Albares had again declined on television to assign Rabat any responsibility, she said that Spanish sovereignty was not in question and would not be: “What is truly important is that everyone must be very clear that territorial integrity, Spanish sovereignty, are not to be touched. That Ceuta and Melilla are not to be touched.”
She then asked Morocco to find out who was responsible: “I ask the government of Morocco in the strongest terms that, just as the Spanish government is going to do, it look at who is behind these networks, who is behind this humanitarian tragedy.”
The sentence that matters most widens the field beyond smugglers. “Whoever has been behind this,” Robles said, “the mafias or whoever consented to it or tolerated it, will have to accept responsibility.” On the dead she was blunt: it cannot be that minors are used, as they have been used, or people sent to their deaths.