Ceuta border fence: unidentified deaths and a poisoned debate in Spain

The Ceuta border fence leaves a trail of unclaimed deaths

The mass attempt to storm the Ceuta border fence has claimed an unknown number of lives. The figures circulating in public debate put the death toll at around a hundred. But the most revealing fact is another one: only two bodies have been identified. No relatives have come forward to claim the remaining corpses.

That silence feeds a misleading reading. Some argue that if there are no claims, it is because the migrants were incivil nobody cares about. The reality is more uncomfortable: identifying the deceased is an obligation of the receiving state, and its absence says more about administrative management than about the lives of those migrants.

The dilemma between incivil and qualification

The discussion has become polarised between those who see the migrants as a threat and those who recall that, according to a TVE report, many of them were graduates and engineers. The same verbal aggression that dismisses the dead without knowing their story is what prevents tackling the problem as what it is: a demographic, humanitarian and foreign policy challenge.

While the Spanish government moves pieces — a ferry, night buses, dispersal across the mainland — the unidentified bodies remain in morgues. With the end of the year approaching, the projected figure that Spain will reach 50 million inhabitants before Christmas adds pressure to the debate.

The naked reality is that nobody wants to take responsibility for the dead. Not the governments of their countries of origin, not the Spanish government, not the debates that prefer to feed hatred rather than demand accountability. Meanwhile, the migration crisis claims nameless victims.