Podemos demanded this Wednesday the cessation of the military maneuvers that the air forces of six countries are carrying out over the Canary Islands, considering them "a political, environmental and fiscal provocation" for the islands, the only community that voted in 1986 against Spain's entry into NATO.
The political group has argued that these maneuvers are employing "high-powered acoustic technologies that have already caused fatal cetacean strandings in the past," alluding to the death of fourteen beaked whales in 2002 after NATO naval exercises, which led Spain to ban the use of certain anti-submarine sonars in the Canary Islands due to their impact on these animals.
In a statement, Podemos denounces that the Canary Islands "continues to be treated as a (military) training ground without rights or compensation" and announces that it will send the Ministry of Defense "a formal request for explanations to find out the real cost, the environmental impact, and the legal framework of the maneuvers."
The maneuvers to which this party refers, which it attributes "to NATO," are the Ocean Sky exercises, training for fighter pilots that the Air Force organizes every two years and to which it usually invites air forces from other allied or friendly countries. This year it's the US, Germany, Greece, Portugal, and India.
Although this time it concerns aerial exercises, the party assures that "NATO is using active sonobuoys launched from anti-submarine aircraft, with emissions exceeding 200 decibels underwater, equivalent to the noise of a rocket but under the sea, where sound propagates with greater intensity."
Therefore, Ocean Sky believes that the moratorium banning this type of anti-submarine naval sonar in Canary Islands waters is being "bypassed" by "reintroducing the same risk from the air."
Podemos believes it is "intolerable that an ecological wound that took years to heal is being reopened and demands immediate guarantees that the moratorium is not being violated or endangering marine biodiversity."
"To all this is added the fiscal grievance. The foreign forces deployed in these maneuvers do not pay taxes such as the IGIC (the equivalent of VAT in the Canary Islands) thanks to the privileges included in state regulations," he denounces.
From this, he draws a "doubly unfair consequence: The Canary Island population bears the environmental, acoustic, and territorial impact while foreign armies operate without contributing a single euro to the Canary Island Treasury."
The Secretary-General of Podemos in the Canary Islands and Member of Parliament, Noemí Santana, argues along the same lines that the islands are not "a free shooting range or a carpet for them to come and train without being held accountable or paying what they owe."Therefore, Santana calls on the Government of the Canary Islands (Canarian Coalition-PP) to pronounce "clearly and firmly against these maneuvers," demands that they be stopped immediately (they end on Friday), and asks that "the legal framework that allows operating without paying taxes be reviewed and that the right of the islands to a sustainable and peaceful development be defended."