Ceuta, Spain, and 70,000 arrivals: anatomy of a massacre without orders

The economic key is scarcity: 70,000 arrivals in one week in a city without enough housing, food or jobs. The account argues that sorting the newcomers and withdrawing the State turned that scarcity into competition and, later, into violence.

## Seventy thousand arrivals in one week
Ceuta is a Spanish city in northern Africa, with a border that, in the story now circulating, becomes a funnel. Around **70,000 migrants** crossed the **Tarajal** crossing in one week. The operation was dubbed "the Second Green March". The Government said the situation was under control. It was not.

The problem was not only migration. It was supplies. Ceuta lacked housing, food, jobs and services to absorb such a population. Most of the newcomers had no means of subsistence of their own either. During the first **72 hours** there was some solidarity. Then the Administration began sorting them by nationality, ethnicity, place of origin, family, date of arrival, documentation status and possible destinations.

That sorting was not neutral. In a situation of scarcity, every list becomes a price. Whoever appears on a list can get a bed, food or a transfer. Whoever does not is left out. Official information was scarce and unofficial information was contradictory. Word soon spread that some would have priority for housing, that others would be moved to the Spanish mainland sooner, that some would receive documentation and that others would be sent back.

## Sorting, rumor, competition
The result was devastating. People who had arrived together began competing with one another. First they fought over food and shelter. Then middlemen appeared. They claimed to have contacts with officials, humanitarian organizations or police. They promised food, documentation, housing places or inclusion on transfer lists. When the State rations badly, someone sells access.

Soon those middlemen stopped being middlemen. They became leaders. Ceuta no longer held seventy thousand newcomers. It held territories in the **Tarajal**. Each territory had its leaders, its distribution networks, its rumors and its enemies. The authorities made an apparently technical decision: move them to the port and concentrate the police on protecting the civilian population and essential infrastructure. Internal conflicts would be handled through mediators from each group. The Administration called it **"emergency self-management"**.

In practice, the State stepped aside. It left the management of food in the hands of the minority group, not the majority one. That was when suspicions of corruption began. First there were thefts. Then fights. Then a man disappeared. Two days later his body was found. No one asked what his name was. The question that swept through the camps was another: "Which gang was he from?".

## Self-management, middlemen and corruption
That question changed everything. An individual death became a collective attack. The first reprisal produced another. Then another. Each corpse justified the next. When the massacres began, the official language changed again. There was no longer a crisis caused by seventy thousand people abandoned in a city unable to support them. There were "internal clashes". There was no longer institutional abandonment. There were "historical tensions between groups". There was no longer a political catastrophe. There was a "humanitarian emergency".

The investigation underpinning this account leads to a single senior official. His identity is not published. The extraordinary thing, according to that investigation, is that no order of his appears that could be described as incivil. Thousands of administrative documents contain supply orders, police protocols, housing plans, mediation programs and security reports. There is not a single order saying **"Set them against each other"**. None was needed.

According to the hypothesis held by some investigators, someone grasped an elementary equation. **70,000 people** united posed a gigantic political problem. Ten communities in conflict posed ten much smaller police problems. The strategy, if it existed, would have consisted of not directly creating the violence. It was enough for those people to stop seeing themselves as victims of the same situation and to believe that the cause of their misfortune lay in the neighboring group. After that, all that remained was to wait.

## The economic cost of doing nothing
Months later, a parliamentary committee questioned the official. The session barely made the news. One lawmaker asked him: "Did you know they would end up killing each other?". The official stayed silent for a few seconds. "I knew that seventy thousand human beings without means of subsistence, without prospects and convinced that others were receiving what they believed was rightfully theirs constituted an extraordinarily dangerous situation". "And what did you do?". His answer takes up barely four words in the official record: **"I managed the situation"**.

Economically, the story is recognizable. No order to kill is needed for scarcity to organize violence. It is enough to withdraw the public distribution mechanisms, allow middlemen to capture access and let rumor replace data. The cost does not appear in a budget line. It appears in corpses, in distrust and in a city that takes years to return to normal. If the account is correct, no one organized the massacres: someone built the conditions and then found the right bureaucratic name for them, **intercommunal violence**.

None of this constitutes a judicial conclusion. The claims about responsibilities and documents require official verification. In matters of violence, migration and law, caution is mandatory.