Antonio José Montoro: Ceuta Events are ‘Most Complete Expression’ of EU Pact on Migration & Asylum

The following is an interview with the general coordinator of the Basque NGO Mundubat, Antonio José Montoro. He situates what occurred at the Tarajal breakwater within a chain that runs from the 1975 Madrid Tripartite Agreement to the Abraham Accords, passing through Algerian gas and the venue for the 2030 World Cup final.

Between July 30 and 31, tens of thousands of people swam across from Morocco to Ceuta [Ceuta is a possession of Spain on the North African coast; it is bordered by Morocco and lies between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean]. The Spanish public conversation took less than 48 hours to shift from humanitarian emergency to invasion. While the death toll grew at the pace of provisional and contradictory updates, the European debate turned on the possible suspension of Schengen for Spain [the “Schengen Area” is a system of open borders that encompasses 29 European countries]. Almost nobody asked why it had happened. Antonio José Montoro has spent 20 years asking that question from the lands where the answers originate.

Montoro holds a University Expert qualification in development cooperation, master’s degrees in sociology and economics and in international relations, and is a doctoral candidate in international studies. He worked as a development worker in Nicaragua, Argentina, and Sri Lanka before joining Mundubat, where he began as representative to the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic [frequently referred to as “Western Sahara”] from 2006 to 2008, worked subsequently in Bolivia and Brazil from 2008 to 2010, and now serves as its general coordinator.

Mundubat is an unusual NGO. It was founded in 1988 in Bilbao as Paz y Tercer Mundo (Peace and the Third World), with a conception of cooperation far removed from the charitable and assistance-based model that has dominated the sector—taking a critical and structural approach to the causes of inequality, pointing to colonial relations, the architecture of international trade, and the geopolitics of natural resources. Human rights, feminism, and food sovereignty underpin its work in Central America, Colombia, Chiapas, Cuba, Bolivia, and Brazil, as well as in two countries central to our conversation: Palestine and Western Sahara.

The interview took place at a key moment. The European Pact on Migration and Asylum entered into full force on June 12. On June 29, the Spanish Supreme Court established that border pushbacks cannot be applied to those who enter by swimming, as they do not cross any containment element; on August 1, the government installed a 500-meter floating barrier at the Tarajal that constitutes precisely that element. In between, the Ceuta events occurred.

Mundubat works with Sahrawi organizations in the Occupied Territories of the Sahrawi Arab Republic. The Interior Ministry claims that Morocco “cooperates loyally and permanently,” and Ambassador Benyaich [the ambassador of Morocco in Spain] denies instrumentalization, while the public debate connects the crisis to Western Sahara, Algeria, and the 2030 World Cup. However, on October 31, 2025, the Security Council approved Resolution 2797, which, for the first time, places the Moroccan autonomy plan as the basis for an agreement and extends MINURSO until October 31, 2026—expiring in three months. In February, Washington presented a roadmap for the territory in Madrid without consulting Spain. What is left for the Sahrawi people? What does an organization in solidarity with the Sahrawi people ask of a government that depends on Rabat for migration control?

The Sahrawi people, and the Polisario Front as a liberation movement and its only legitimate representative, have no alternative but to continue fighting for the exercise of their right to self-determination—and it is important to make clear that the Sahrawi people are not seeking independence from Morocco, as the mainstream media narrative suggests, since Western Sahara has never been part of that country. They must use all available means to pursue this. No relevant actor on the international stage—and the Sahrawi people are fully aware of this—can expect Spain to play a significant role in resolving a conflict arising from an unfinished decolonization process for which Spain is responsible. Today, the diplomatic channels and the evolution of actions on the ground follow political dynamics in which the Spanish state has ceased to be a determining factor.

This loss of relevance is not solely the product of the current conjuncture but of a progressive estrangement process that has sharpened in recent years. In this regard, it must be noted that the position of successive Spanish governments in support of Moroccan claims did not begin with Pedro Sánchez’s letter to the satrap Mohamed VI in March 2022 but constitutes one of the state pacts that runs through the entirety of Spanish political history since November 14, 1975—the date on which the Madrid Tripartite Agreements were signed—and that underpins the prevailing status quo.

At Mundubat, as part of the solidarity movement with the Sahrawi people, we make three basic demands of the Spanish government.

First, unrestricted respect for international law in its foreign policy. Western Sahara is a Non-Self-Governing Territory pending decolonization, as defined by the Fourth Committee of the United Nations General Assembly. States—and especially those holding the status of “administering power”—are obliged to act to make the exercise of the right to self-determination possible, in this case for the Sahrawi people. What holds for Palestine, even if only at the rhetorical level, must hold for Western Sahara.

Second, responsible action in humanitarian affairs. Hunger and the deterioration of living conditions cannot be used as a political pressure tool to force the Sahrawi people into making desperate decisions about their future status. For this reason, increasing humanitarian aid to the exile population in the Tindouf camps is an obligation the Spanish government cannot ignore.

Third, the opening of consular channels to facilitate the arrival in Spain of Sahrawi activists who face the threat of imprisonment and repression for defending human rights and Sahrawi self-determination in the Occupied Territories of Western Sahara. Unfortunately, it is currently impossible to obtain Temporary Residence authorizations on humanitarian grounds for Sahrawi people—and there are no justifiable grounds for this blockage beyond subordination to Moroccan interests, which only reinforces the repression at the hands of the Alawite kingdom in a territory it illegally occupies.

Zugasti: Ceuta declares its resources for minors overwhelmed and the government calls for “positive solidarity” from the regions. Is the problem the scale of arrivals or the protection system? What could be done differently—and what is not being done?

Montoro: From our perspective, the problem is not the number of migrants but the protection system and, fundamentally, the political logic from which it is constructed. What has happened in recent days in Ceuta—and to a lesser extent, in Melilla—has been serious, above all because of the suffering of the people who attempted to reach European territory in search of better life opportunities. But it does not constitute the core of the matter, both because of its exceptional character and because of its causal explanation.

A rational analysis of the situation yields a clear picture: public administrations at the state, regional and municipal levels have more than sufficient capacity to receive and provide dignified living conditions for the people who arrive in our country seeking a better life and who, in many cases, regard Spain only as a transit point toward other EU countries. Good planning of this care, an increase in budgetary resources and their adequate management could enable the 8,132 municipalities in Spain to attend to these people in dignified, local conditions—avoiding unnecessary imbalances.

More specifically, one of the most urgent needs for adequately attending to migrants is the essential reinforcement of technical, administrative, and legal resources to speed up the processing of asylum applications from people fleeing repression who, as in the case of Morocco, also face very harsh material living conditions. In this regard, public administrations should rely more decisively on social organizations working directly in this field, which have extensive experience and knowledge of concrete reality.

Zugasti: The images show predominantly young Moroccan men. Much racist profiling is being made about them—stereotypes and prejudices that construct a very dangerous narrative. Within 48 hours, public conversation moved from humanitarian emergency to “invasion.” What responsibility do institutions themselves bear—not just Vox—when they disseminate unverifiable data and talk about “networks instrumentalizing court rulings”? What does a society lose when it normalizes the language of containment?

Montoro: What we have witnessed is a process of dehumanization of migrants. When this cognitive operation is implemented at scale, with the decisive support of the media, it enables a space favorable to fascist-type solutions. Allowing ideas such as “men of military age” to impose themselves on dominant discourse helps construct a narrative that is profoundly dangerous for social coexistence and encourages violence in our communities, feeding a situation in which the far right finds fertile ground to occupy and dominate the public agenda.

Public administrations bear primary responsibility for this situation—beyond the fact that the far right is being consistent in its strategy of criminalizing migrants, especially when they are Arab and/or Muslim. The government’s response has focused on the rapid expulsion to Morocco of these people rather than placing the focus on the causes that drove them to a desperate action and its consequences. We still do not know exactly how many people died trying to reach Ceuta, how many were injured, how many needed medical assistance, or whether it could be adequately provided. Out of fear of the far right’s growth, the framework imposed by those same forces is accepted—forgetting that we are facing a humanitarian crisis, not a violation of any territorial integrity, in which dozens of people have died in search of a place to improve their living conditions.

Zugasti: The Pact entered into full force on June 12, 2026: accelerated procedures, the Returns Regulation, expanded notions of “safe country” and “safe third country,” externalization. Mundubat signed the June 20 mobilization in Donostia under the slogan “We are a land of welcome,” with the call “No to the European Pact on Migration and Asylum.” Seven weeks after its entry into force, the Spanish response has been to return more than 25,000 people to Morocco—according to the Interior Ministry, “at a rate of 150 per minute”—and to announce the deployment of buoys at the breakwater to artificially reconstruct the “containment element” that the Supreme Court found lacking on June 29. Do you consider Ceuta to disprove the Pact, or to be precisely its first coherent application? And what does it reveal about the European project that the debate of recent days has centered on the free movement of Europeans rather than on the people who died at sea?

Montoro: The events in Ceuta are, perhaps, the most complete expression of the European Pact on Migration and Asylum—because they respond perfectly to a logic of border externalization based on agreements with authoritarian states that repress migratory flows and modulate them to incorporate them into political negotiation. The return to a dictatorship like Morocco’s of tens of thousands of people without any administrative procedure or guarantee of respect for their human rights shows, in all its rawness, what this European Pact on Migration and Asylum actually consists of.

As serious as this is, what is even more worrying is the underlying tide that has made possible both the approval of the Pact and its methodical, calculated application in the case of Ceuta. The fact that issues relating to the mobility of Europeans have been placed at the center of the agenda, while the number of deaths has barely been mentioned, shows how European common sense has internalized the dehumanization of the other—of those who differ, who are conceived only as a threat or as an impoverished working class to be exploited with impunity. The acts of hatred we have seen against people who are only seeking a better future, and their normalization by broad sectors of society, represent the banality of evil that Hannah Arendt already identified and that should deeply concern all of us—people and organizations—who fight for a different society.

Zugasti: The Supreme Court established on June 29 that border pushbacks are not applicable to those who enter by swimming because they cross no containment element. How do you assess this ruling in the broader context of European migration policy? The Interior Ministry maintains that more than 25,000 people returned to Morocco “voluntarily” at a rate of 150 per minute. From your direct experience in reception work, what guarantees of identification, information on asylum or legal assistance are possible in a procedure at that pace? Can a return executed under those conditions be called voluntary—and what should be documented now so that the record of what occurred is not lost?”

Montoro: The Supreme Court ruling of June 29 fits within the general logic of a migration policy based on the externalization of borders through the establishment of physical barriers, controls and containment elements. The image of a Fortress Europe — of the garden that must be protected from the jungle outside — underpins the ruling and points to “containment elements” as one of the axes around which European migration policy must pivot. In fact, Spain’s deployment of a system of pneumatic buoys — a 500-meter physical barrier in the Ceuta sea — will serve, in line with that ruling, to enable “hot returns” without any legal obstacles whatsoever.

The volume of people who have arrived in Ceuta and the accelerated, precipitous pace of expulsion to Morocco make it entirely impossible to carry out the necessary procedures for identification, information, legal assistance and any other essential services in these cases: medical care, psychological support and coverage of urgent basic needs. In other words, the Spanish government is openly assuming non-compliance with its reception obligations — preventing, for example, people who might be potential asylum seekers on grounds of political persecution or otherwise from effectively exercising their rights. The events in Ceuta, the conduct of the Spanish government and the reactions of the European Union and European states exemplify the deterioration of the democratic system and the loss of relevance of human rights as an organizing element of our societies.

A rate of 150 people per minute — more than two people per second — constitutes a mass expulsion without the slightest legal guarantee or the possibility of dignified treatment in purely humanitarian terms. Still less does it allow for the expression of a freely formed will — which is what we should aspire to as a society.

Sadly, their life stories have been lost. Nobody recorded the reasons for their attempt to reach European territory, and all efforts have been focused on concealing, as quickly as possible, a massive movement of people in search of better living conditions. The work of the social organizations present in the area — despite the criminalization they face on both sides of the border — will prove fundamental in attempting to recover these life stories and to reconstruct the humanitarian causes and consequences of this crisis.

Zugasti: Something your NGO has always worked on is approaching intervention through a structural lens of power, geopolitical and economic relations in the territories. What reading do you draw from this episode in a global context—Trumpism, the reactionary international, the Donroe Doctrine, war in Western Asia?”

Montoro: The Ceuta episode brings together various factors that, to a greater or lesser degree, are shaping international reality and that take different forms depending on the conjuncture. None of them alone probably explains the arrival of tens of thousands of people in barely 24 hours—but together, they contribute to a complex explanation of the global dynamics that converged in its materialization.

First, we must situate the colonial question as the most determining structural factor. The unsustainable levels of inequality on either side of the border generated by the existence of Spanish cities on the African continent—a product of Spain’s colonial history and imperial ambitions—cannot be resolved with physical barriers, hot returns or inflamed patriotic rhetoric. On the contrary, a serious approach to the political consequences of the colonial project and to the historical anomaly it represents—or should represent—is the only path toward finding solutions that alleviate the suffering of migrants, who are the primary victims of this situation.

Second, also with a structural logic, we find the direct connection between the Spanish government’s rapprochement with Algeria—with Pedro Sánchez’s visit on July 20 as the most recent precedent—and Morocco’s reaction, using the desperation of its own population to push the relationship between the two countries and the internal situation in Spain to the extreme. This action–reaction dynamic is well known and barely concealed. Algeria is Morocco’s great rival in the region—not only over the Western Sahara conflict, in which Algeria maintains an exemplarily consistent position, but because of the Alawite dictatorship’s own expansionist logic and its historical project of “Greater Morocco,” which encompasses large swaths of western Algerian territory.

Third, with decisive performative power, we find the close alliance between the United States, Israel, and Morocco, and the way these countries construct their foreign policy in disregard of basic principles of international law. This alliance is configured as an intricate web of agreements and mutual loyalties with a historical depth that must be kept in mind. It should be recalled that the relationship between Morocco and the United States dates to 1777 and that the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the two countries has been in force since 1787. This historical continuity is reflected in the Free Trade Agreement in force since 2006 and, among other things, in the decisive support of both the Trump and Biden administrations for Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.

Regarding the alliance between Israel and Morocco—beyond the signing of the Abraham Accords in December 2020—historical affinities exist on the basis of colonial and imperial expansion logics. The projects of “Greater Israel” and “Greater Morocco” converge in the genocide against the Palestinian population and the extreme repression of the Sahrawi people, in the construction of walls, in military collaboration, and in the plundering of the natural resources of peoples living under occupation.

In the face of these three structural factors, the undignified position of the Spanish state on the Western Sahara question will never function as a deterrent to tensions at the Ceuta border. The historical tendencies that have converged in the events at Ceuta have deep roots and cannot be transformed by piecemeal measures disconnected from Spain’s own responsibilities. Neither the increase in military spending to benefit the US industry and placate the Trump administration, nor the maintenance of diplomatic and economic relations with the genocidal state of Israel in violation of legislation passed by the Spanish parliament, nor support for the false Moroccan autonomy plan for Western Sahara as a strategy to curry favor with a medieval-tinged autocracy will prevent crises like the one in Ceuta from occurring again.

For this reason—and perhaps this is the greatest lesson to be drawn from this crisis—it is essential that Spanish foreign policy renew its foundations and make a commitment to international law and human rights as the central axes of its international projection. And there, inevitably, revisiting the colonial past and assuming responsibility for the unfinished decolonization of Western Sahara and for the situation of Ceuta and Melilla constitute a Rubicon that is both necessary and urgent to cross.

Morocco Kills 3 Polisario Front Members, Including Son of Former President Abdelaziz

 

 

 

(Diario Red) by Irene Zugasti

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

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