60 officers for Sánchez's Lanzarote holiday, 42 for Ceuta

Fortress holiday at La Mareta, undefended border in Ceuta

What matters more? Guarding a holiday or containing a surge at the border? The numbers that have come to light speak for themselves: 60 officers from Spain's state security forces deployed to the La Mareta palace in Lanzarote, where Pedro Sánchez is spending a few days, versus 42 officers from the riot police unit (UIP) for the autonomous city of Ceuta.

The result, according to the reports circulating, was that thousands of people swam into one of the most unequal borders in the world. The tension had been building for a long time: the Western Sahara conflict had turned Ceuta into a powder keg, and organised smuggling mafias stage periodic crossings. It took no fortune teller to see it coming.

A resource allocation that is hard to justify

The comparison is damning. Some analyses suggest that those officers were more than enough for what was actually done at the border: the 42 riot police could not prevent the mass crossing. Others, more sceptical of the official account, point out that presidential security is always reinforced, but leaving Ceuta with little more than four dozen specialists in crowd control is, at the very least, a political decision.

The most far-fetched explanations are also doing the rounds: some point to a coordinated social media campaign to mobilise thousands of people, in a context of hybrid wars and old suspicions about intelligence services and their allies. And in the background remains the big fact: while a public official is protected by some fifty officers, the southern border is left with the scraps.

With this deployment, the question is not whether the operation was insufficient, but whether anyone at the Moncloa (the Spanish prime minister's office) ever calculated the cost of getting it wrong.