The Minister of Social Welfare of the Government of the Canary Islands, Candelaria Delgado, believes that the objections that other communities have raised to share the effort of welcoming the children who arrive alone to the islands in a small boat demonstrate that, throughout this time, "the condition of migrants of the children has weighed more than their reality as minors."
Although the Canary Route seems to have given a break in recent weeks after months of almost daily rescues, Delgado (United Kingdom, 1970) is well aware of the details of the last center they have had to open to give a roof to the children who continue to arrive: a resource for 80 minors in Tenerife. Number 86 in the network.
"Within our possibilities, we try to ensure that they are well cared for, that those who are of compulsory schooling age have a school as soon as possible, we try to offer training for those who are over 16 years old... But these figures overwhelm any capacity," she confesses in an interview with Efe.
The number of people welcomed in the Canary Islands centers changes almost every day, not only because small boats and dinghies continue to arrive, but because in them there are many teenagers close to the age of majority who, as soon as they turn 18, have to leave the network. It has approached 6,000 in recent months. At this moment there are 5,720.
A social worker by training, Fernando Clavijo's right-hand woman for child care has seen in the last year and a half how the situation exceeded the capacity of her team and brought her closest collaborators to their personal and professional limits, who even endured the threat of facing legal consequences when the community decided that it could not continue like this.
Communities that "only see their reality"
Now she is waiting for the distribution mechanism provided for in the reform of the Immigration Law to be implemented and for the Government of Spain to specify how it plans to take care of asylum seekers, as ordered by the Supreme Court. But she cannot avoid looking back.
What does the Canary Islands Minister think when she hears her colleagues from other communities say that their network is saturated, when they welcome fewer minors than El Hierro, where only 11,600 inhabitants live? "Well, they only see the situation under the magnifying glass of their reality, of what they have closest. They see their center saturated, but they have not given the possibility of creating more centers. They do not see the reality of the Canary Islands."
For this reason, she emphasizes, the Government of the Canary Islands insisted so much last year on hosting the Sectoral Conference where the last voluntary distribution was agreed, to try to show the rest of the autonomous communities the reality of its centers for minors. The president
Clavijo and she even organized a visit to a center in Tenerife, which was not attended by any of the ministers from the communities led by the PP, the partner of the Canary Coalition in the islands.
"I saw that they were not aware of the reality we had in the Canary Islands and that they did not put themselves in the place of this autonomous community.
That they did not see that what we had been telling them for months with words was a reality, not a story," she says.
Delgado distributes responsibilities, not only mentions the reticence of other communities, but believes that the State could have done more in terms of financing the reception and facilitating the procedures for opening new centers.
The difference with Ukraine
However, she does not fail to remember that, with the same instruments, the minors who arrived from Ukraine at the beginning of the Russian invasion were welcomed in a matter of days, weeks. "We ourselves asked from the first moment that the measure used with Ukraine be used, which was to put 1,500 million on the table with the immediate opening of centers. These are tools that the autonomous communities have not had right now," she explains.
But, when she reflects on everything that has happened in these months, while the Canary Islands felt "alone" in the reception effort, she comes to this conclusion: with the attention to the children of the small boats "their condition as migrants has weighed more than their reality as minors."
And this, despite the fact that many of these children and adolescents have gone through traumatic situations. The Minister recognizes that there are some that have marked her, such as that of a child who saw his mother die on the journey after losing his father in another small boat that never appeared, or that of two teenagers who drowned while swimming on a beach in Tenerife after having survived the dinghy.
Delgado remarks that almost all the centers in the Canary Islands are already "overcrowded" and that many reach double the capacity for which they were designed. And she recognizes that they have made mistakes, that they have had to fire workers for incorrect behavior and have closed centers that did not meet a minimum requirement.
The protocol was suspended, but it changed things
In her opinion, the situation began to change on September 3, when the autonomous community stood up, decided that it would not welcome more minors in its centers if the Police continued to deliver them with incomplete "delivery notes" that compromised their rights in the future and approved its controversial reception protocol.
It lasted only hours, because it was suspended as a precautionary measure by the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands and then revoked by the Constitutional Court, but the Minister believes that it was key for the Prosecutor's Office to get involved and demand that what was planned in a national protocol, not discussed by anyone, be complied with.
"The children were arriving with a handwritten delivery note. And it happened that, when we filtered data, it turned out that the same minor was in five centers. It was not the same minor. They were different minors, but they had taken their data wrong," says the Minister.
