The diplomatic relationship between the Spanish State and Morocco has been marked by a series of ups and downs. That is to say, by moments of tension that have led to a clash between the two countries, even for months. It is a Pandora's box that the serious migratory crisis in Ceuta has once again brought to the table and that, although the Spanish government does not want to open – at Moncloa they maintain that it is a "reliable partner" –; other voices are fully entering it. Not going any further, Sumar. The minority partner of the coalition government has asked the United Nations to "examine" Morocco's responsibility in the migratory crisis and some of its members have openly pointed to a geopolitical dimension: "This is not a migratory crisis, but political decisions," stated the deputy in Congress, Tesh Sidi.

Yesterday a photo, and today, another. Young people, between fourteen and twenty years old – I would say, teenagers – all in the water, standing, arriving at the beach, already touching the sand. They all have fashionable haircuts, the two-layer kind, like footballers'. Most of them are shirtless and show thin, toned bodies. Those who are wearing shirts have "decided" on them. They are shirts (wet, of course) with a drawing, a slogan, a photo. "If I die, let them find me well-dressed," they must have thought. There's one wearing a Lakers logo. Another, the Real Madrid kit. Some are still wearing the tire, which we mentioned yesterday. A tire that's meant to be a joke: an imitation of a truck's wheel. Two of them, and it's curious, are carrying their flip-flops in their hands, placed as if their hands were feet. Maybe they helped them swim. Maybe they wanted to keep them, whatever the case, so they wouldn't walk barefoot through the city when they arrived. "This is very important; shoes will save you from the police!" the mafia members must have told them. One of them is holding his mobile phone and seems to be taking a photo. Maybe he held it up high the whole time or protected it with aluminum foil. The phone shows us Europe made into a reel, but it's also the connection with those who have stayed behind.

This has been –or perhaps we should say it still is– a dramatic and crazy end to the school year. The fires in several provinces and the events in Ceuta are chilling. We were getting used to seeing the daily images of hundreds of people housed in sports centers while anxiously awaiting news about the fire and about their homes and belongings, when even harsher images assaulted us, such as those of tens of thousands of immigrants –especially young people, very young people– crossing from Morocco to Ceuta, in what the head of government himself, Pedro Sánchez, has described as a "violation of Spain's territorial integrity." An emergency situation, undoubtedly, which has provoked all sorts of reactions. And this is where the idea of madness fits in, due to the capacity that this situation and these images have to trigger the most barbaric and unacceptable comments and initiatives.

The images from Ceuta repeat a familiar scene: exhausted bodies emerging from the water, overwhelmed police forces, headlines speaking of an "influx" and an "emergency." For those who only look at the border when it appears on screens, it might seem like an exceptional episode. For those who know the trajectories of the people arriving there, it is the concentrated expression of a stable system: a mobility regime that turns the Mediterranean and El Tarajal into a filter of class, origin, and race.The metaphor of the "wave" is not innocent. It presents people as a threatening natural phenomenon – a mass to be contained – and erases faces, individual and collective biographies, and motives. A wave has no name or project; it only has volume and direction. This language prepares a specific political response: if what arrives is a depersonalized and depoliticized force, the imaginable response is no longer welcome or the guarantee of rights, but exception, containment, and closure. Violence thus appears as an almost natural reaction.But at the border there are no natural phenomena: there are political decisions. For decades, a combination of closing legal and safe routes, externalizing migratory control to neighboring countries, and global inequalities that facilitate the mobility of some and immobilize others has been in place. When a crack opens up — a change in Moroccan surveillance or a diplomatic crisis — a movement that already existed concentrates and becomes visible. We then call it a "crisis".The border functions as a political valve. It opens and closes according to power dynamics that rarely have to do with the concrete lives of the people who arrive there. In 2021, the presence or absence of Moroccan police in Ceuta was not just a technical matter of surveillance, but also an instrument of diplomatic pressure. Reducing everything to "mafias" or the "pull effect" avoids the essential question: who can regulate the porosity of this border, and in whose interests?

Researcher Irene Fernández Molina is a specialist in the Maghreb, the foreign policy of the European Union, and Euro-Mediterranean relations. Hours after the migratory crisis in Ceuta, we analyze with her what motives may be behind it and what consequences it may have on a European scale.

The entry of thousands of migrants into Ceuta, which has already resulted in 67 deaths, according to the latest police update, has triggered a diplomatic clash in the European Union over border protection and will lead to an extraordinary meeting of the Interior Ministers of the different member states this Tuesday by videoconference. The meeting will take place after the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, requested it on Saturday morning in a letter sent to the EU institutions. 22 other countries have also requested it, joining a letter initiated by Italy and Denmark calling for an analysis of the crisis in Ceuta and to "agree on a coordinated response and immediate actions for the control of the external border".

The images about Ceuta are repeated once again. They show thousands of young people arriving by sea, exhausted, but also families and even babies. We see how the Civil Guard is unable to do anything, paralyzed by what most media outlets do not hesitate to call an "avalanche". Beyond the beach, we know of overwhelmed reception centers and hundreds of people sleeping in the open. Images of closed shops also arrive, of a completely paralyzed city.In this context, Ceuta is requesting the declaration of a national emergency while the Spanish government continues to praise the "exemplary collaboration" of Morocco and the Moroccan government remains silent. All of this is a déjà-vu. It seems incredible how the staging of chaos can follow such a precise pattern.But where the focus should be placed is on the causes and consequences of this theatricalization. Among the causes, what makes it possible is the willingness of thousands of young people to jump to the other side at any moment. Many of them do not notify their families until they have already arrived. Some come from afar. They are willing to leave everything behind because deep down they feel they are leaving nothing. Some do not work or study. Others are young people with studies but with few future prospects.Their demands became clear with the mobilizations of the so-called "Gen Z" during the fall of 2025, which denounced the deterioration of public services (especially healthcare and education), youth unemployment, and corruption. As Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev recalls, "when you can't change the government, you change geography".

Ceuta and the border crisis unleashed on Thursday in the autonomous city has been used on social media as fuel to spread the xenophobia of the global far-right. X, Telegram, Facebook, and other platforms have, in a few hours, turned the Spanish enclave in North Africa into a symbol of the reactionary international; a way to politically sweep at home and favor the most dehumanizing proposals in the face of North-South inequalities.

The European far-right, including the Spanish one, is being very quick and forceful in taking advantage of the propagandistic and dramatic gesture of Moroccan migratory pressure on Spain in Ceuta to distance itself from Pedro Sánchez's government, the government of regularization. It doesn't matter that what Meloni, Abascal, and co. call an "invasion" will ultimately have been a one-day episode: the massive arrival has been followed by a massive return. And it doesn't matter that more than fifty young people have died at sea: the far-right leaders have not spoken of this humanitarian drama. What Italy and Finland are concerned with is reinforcing the idea of the need to fortify Europe, an idea that does not fit with the demand for labor and which follows the xenophobic discourse of America first that the United States under Trump has also embraced.

Tens of thousands of people, says the Ministry of the Interior, have swum the distance separating one side of the border from the other and have managed to reach Ceuta, the theoretical Europe. Of all of them, dozens have drowned. That swimming for kilometers is dangerous, even artificial intelligence tells you, which always agrees with you.

At sunset, police and military order various groups of young people to turn back and return home. To Morocco. They are just over eighteen years old. The oldest, thirty at most. They are some of the last migrants remaining in the streets or hiding in the mountainous areas of a Ceuta that has experienced the worst migratory crisis in recent history. In just 48 hours, more than 50,000 people (mostly Moroccan citizens) have entered Spanish territory irregularly. Some, swimming around the breakwater; others, crossing the border post on foot. Waves of people have filled the narrow streets of a city of less than 20 km². This Friday, however, the flow has reversed.

The Italian government of Giorgia Meloni has ordered the reintroduction of controls at maritime and air borders with Spain following the arrival in Ceuta of thousands of migrants from Morocco. By order of the Ministry of the Interior, Italy will also increase land controls at the border with France, as reported by the Italian news agency ANSA. Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani has justified the measure to "protect the security" of citizens and defend European borders. "We must work together to prevent uncontrolled flows of migrants from entering the EU territory," he wrote on X, linking immigration with terrorism. However, the Italian government has clarified that the controls will be random and will only affect citizens who do not belong to the EU.

With my Spanish passport I can go to Morocco whenever I want. I take a plane, land in Marrakech, Tangier, Casablanca, Essaouira or the desert, I enter, leave, and return home without thinking too much about it. Like so many other Europeans, I enjoy the charme of Morocco, its light, its gastronomy, the sensuality of its streets, the kindness of its people. I take photos, buy spices, books or carpets and, when the holidays are over, I return to Barcelona.

At least eighteen migrants have lost their lives trying to swim from Morocco to Ceuta. The Civil Guard recovered the bodies of eighteen people between Thursday and Friday, six of them in the last few hours, and Maritime Rescue recovered one more, according to EFE. The death toll is not expected to stop rising.

While Morocco rushes to build football stadiums for the upcoming World Cup, thousands of its citizens are trying to leave the country to earn a better future. Among the images of these days from the breakwater of Tarajal, families with small children clinging to floats or toy vests attract attention. Don't forget that on this very beach, in 2014, about fifteen young sub-Saharan Africans drowned while the Spanish police fired rubber bullets at them.

A week has passed since Pedro Sánchez traveled to Algeria to try to make peace and re-establish political and economic relations that would ensure, above all, gas purchases. Relations had broken down after Spain accepted Morocco's plan for the Sahara, which disregarded the claim for self-determination and settled for simple autonomy. And this Spanish capitulation, unforgivable to the Algerians, came a few years after, in 2021, Spain's reception of Brahim Ghali, head of the Polisario Front, caused a crisis with Morocco that ended with the also illegal entry of 8,000 Moroccans through the Ceuta border. It is these antecedents that make us suspect that behind what is happening these days in Ceuta there is something more than the will of some young people to force their entry into Europe. Although it is difficult to believe that this could happen without, at least, the passivity of the Moroccan side, officially relations between Spain and Morocco are currently good and cooperation is maintained.

A serious migratory crisis. This is how the media and numerous political figures describe the latest mass arrival of migrants in the city of Ceuta, which has not only left dozens dead and overwhelmed the territory's assistance services, but has also had an international impact. But, beyond a spontaneous situation, the truth is that these events are just another episode in a chronology that goes back years. To fully understand the importance of these events, ARA traces the long history of the border crossing between Spain and Morocco:

We have to go back to May 2021 to see images of such a large influx of migrants from Morocco to Ceuta in a few hours. At that time, the diplomatic shock between Rabat and the State led to the arrival of 8,000 migrants in just two days –including many families with small children– swimming to the coast of the autonomous city.

At least eighteen dead and thousands of illegal entries in a single day. Ceuta has been experiencing a day of high migratory pressure since Wednesday night. In the early hours of the morning, hundreds of Moroccan citizens - and some Algerians - had thrown themselves into the sea from the coast of Castillejos to try to reach the Ceuta coast by swimming, about two kilometers away. The attempts did not stop, both by sea and by land, throughout the day. While at noon thousands swam to the border fence and jumped over it, from 3:30 p.m. onwards, other thousands skirted the Moroccan jetty to access the city on foot. In the evening, the pace of entries through the Tarajal border crossing continued, even though Moroccan authorities used tear gas and water cannons to try to disperse the crowd. And at night, the Spanish government closed the Beni Enzar border crossing, the only one operating between Morocco and Melilla, due to the numerous groups heading towards the border at night.

The goal is to return the minors to Morocco. This is the main conclusion reached by the president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, and the president of Ceuta, Juan Jesús Vivas, in the meeting they held this Wednesday at the Moncloa to address the situation, the day after the justice system ratified the suspension of the returns. The commitment of the Spanish government is that it will activate "resources and capacities" to achieve the assisted return to Morocco of the minors who crossed to Ceuta in the diplomatic crisis in May, and that the two administrations will try the procedure again, adapting to what the judge has required. The required procedures have not been followed, the justice has ruled.