Spain-Morocco: trade war or fortifying Ceuta

Ceuta: trade war or more concessions to Segarro?

Cristian Campos's article in El Español has put the uncomfortable question back on the table: what to do about Segarro after the latest episode of pressure on Ceuta? The piece, dated August 5, 2026, suggests that all the pieces of the puzzle are in plain sight: from Pedro Sánchez's holidays in Marrakech in the summer of 2023 to the sale of defense equipment to modernize the Segarro army. Two years earlier, a senior official of the PP (Spain's conservative People's Party) was already speaking privately about Sánchez's "outrage" toward the southern neighbor.

In the analysis that has circulated, positions are divided. One camp holds that classic war is a thing of the past and that the response should be economic: strangling the neighboring country, our closest competitor, with a trade war. Another prefers the physical and administrative fortification of the border, including militarization, without a formal declaration. Radical proposals are not lacking, such as expropriatory reprisals of dubious legality, nor is there anyone who sums up the matter with irony: fumigating the border with slurry.

The unsettling fact: history explains, but nobody seems willing to read it. Between "let them declare war on us" and "Segarro has already declared war," the million-dollar question still has no official answer. Meanwhile, Ceuta remains the thermometer of a relationship nobody knows how to readjust. And the arms sale, in that equation, is the elephant in the room that the official narrative prefers not to name.