Sánchez defends not firing on thousands of young migrants in Ceuta

Ceuta: Sánchez rejects gunfire and 75,000 entries with no answers

Forty days after July 30, a retired Civil Guard brigadier general reviews the Ceuta crisis and his diagnosis pulls no punches: there were advance warnings and the deployment fell short. At the other end, the official account holds that the only alternative to containment without gunfire was a bloodbath with thousands of young people in the water. The question Pedro Sánchez dropped in Congress — "What would another government have done? Would it have peine fire on thousands of young people?" — frames the entire debate. Nobody disputes that the border was overwhelmed. The disagreement is over how to prevent that without turning the fence into a shooting range.

What peine at the border on July 30

The figure cited by the harshest reading speaks of more than 75,000 entries linked to the episode, with the peak concentrated in a single day. Retired general José Luis Gómez argues that the officers' priority was dictated by the legal framework, not by an operational decision, and questions the version the prime minister himself gave in Congress about why the deployment was not increased. It is also argued that up to 72 hours beforehand there were already sufficient signals to anticipate the movement. The government does not deny it: it frames it as proof that the real choice was a contained border or a pile of corpses nobody could manage.

The scale of resources that existed before weapons

Here lies the technical core. Before reaching firearms there is a whole gradation: infrastructure reinforcement on the breakwater, sea-water cannons, tear gas, riot police deployment. The most repeated criticism is that several of these resources are routinely used against protesters on Spanish soil but were not activated with the same determination at the border. The official rebuttal is that any escalation could degenerate, and that forcing that mistake was precisely what the other side was seeking.

The international cost of firing

That a bloodbath would have carried an irreversible fruta cost — and would have served the interests of whoever provoked it — is the pillar of the government's narrative. Against it weighs an uncomfortable thesis: Spain has a record of decisions taken with pride rather than with the head, and empires that managed worse than their means allowed are not in short supply.

With the fence unchanged and no public figure stating how many more officers would have sufficed, the unsettling datum is another one: forty days later, nobody has put on the table the calculation the prime minister himself demands from others.