The mobilizations held this April 20 on all eight islands and in many European cities under the slogans 'Canarias se agota' (Canary Islands are Exhausted) and 'Canarias tiene un límite' (Canary Islands have a limit) are the response of the women and men of the archipelago to the developmentalist model that the right-wing CC-PP has implemented for decades. Their governments have placed the interests of predatory businesses ahead of any possibility of a sustainable future, ahead of fundamental rights such as access to housing, and above all, ahead of what a citizenry concerned about the land and the future they leave as an inheritance to their descendants expects.
A year ago, I warned from the Presidency of the Cabildo of Lanzarote that the island had far exceeded its carrying capacity. The Island Government Council then initiated the procedures for qualifying Lanzarote as a saturated tourist zone, after publishing a rigorous report from which the urgency of reorienting the model emerged. Eleven months later, the island government pact CC-PP has not taken a single step to advance in this direction, but quite the opposite. The granting of tourist licenses has continued, and the president denies the saturation, in full harmony with the discourse of the employers' associations.
To say that the mobilizations are in line with the policies of the CC-PP Government is not only cynicism: it is cowardly, it is shameless, and it is, neither more nor less, taking the citizens for fools. They always do it. They did it in 2002 in Tenerife with the towers of the Vilaflor pine forest; they did it in Fuerteventura and Lanzarote in the marches of 2012 and 2014 against oil exploration... and they are doing it again today, after verifying the undeniable success of mobilizations on all eight islands whose meaning they have tried to distort.
Days before a 20A that was already known to become part of the history of the Canary Islands, they wanted to confuse the true message that citizens wanted to convey to the world, making a "call for prudence" - a nice euphemism - and, with it, to demobilization. Conclusion? Simple: the people are better off silent, because more important than the interests of the citizens of our land are, for them, the interests of those who come to invest, prioritizing quantity over quality or through disproportionate projects that are absolutely contrary to harmonious and balanced growth.
None of this is new. It is true that the problem worsens as time goes on, but we must go back much further, unfortunately. For decades, many voices have been warning of what would happen to us if we did not change the course of a model that was setting off more and more alarms.
Here in Lanzarote we have lived a somewhat different experience from the rest of the island territories of our archipelago. The presence of César Manrique and the respect of citizens and institutions towards his figure served to put some order, control, balance and beauty in an era in which the mass tourism-construction binomial was already a monster that was beginning to devour islands such as Tenerife, Gran Canaria or Fuerteventura. It is shared, however, that already in the 90s there was talk of disordered tourist growth in these three islands, a reality that was already beginning to generate an economic imbalance. They warned that the consequences would no longer be only landscape or environmental with the passage of time, but also social and cultural. Today we are seeing it.
Expressions such as "excess in tourist growth" or "need for structural changes" are not inventions of today. This whole set of approaches is almost half a century old and was reinforced with a broad, deep, concerned and reflective analysis, I insist, in the early 90s, which led to propose as a solution the drafting of a law of tourist saturation that would paralyze the crazy growth that was being experienced in certain places in the Canary Islands. In that text that was proposed, it was advocated to mark exceptions by islands or zones and, as a particularly important aspect, regulating a change of the use of urban land qualified as tourist to residential.
At that time, they were already trying to shield the right to housing of the Canarian citizens. The proposal also defended the articulation of aid to residential construction in old tourist areas, but if the successive governments of CC-PP had not ignored those first signs of help, perhaps today we would not be trying to find desperate answers to dramas such as access to minimally decent housing in our islands.
As long as we continue to believe that reaching record numbers in tourist arrivals at any price is a triumph of the system, there will be no real political will to turn around a model that impoverishes workers whose salaries do not reflect that supposed success.
With the image of the demonstrations in the retina for a long time, there is no other option than to look to the future taking into account the blow on the table that the citizens of the Canary Islands gave this April 20, 2024.