While the Canary Islands are under Spanish administrative and military rule, any project to expand the scope of Spanish sovereignty is repeated in the desires of outdated colonialist imperialism and buries the archipelago again in the colonialist status that condemns its inhabitants to be "voiceless" and to put Madrid's interests before those of the Canary Islanders.
That is why the announcement on December 5 that Spain will claim the waters west of the Archipelago before the United Nations is not good news for us. Those waters would belong to the Canary Islands if we were an independent country: with its wealth of living resources, such as fishing grounds; possible hydrocarbons; and even control of the merchant or passenger corridor. But the reality is that if Spain claims those waters before the United Nations and it is signed, the Canary Islands will still have to swallow what is dictated from the capital of the kingdom. We will continue to have the consideration of a colony that we have suffered for more than 500 years and our right to decide will be diluted within a population that doubles ours 20 times and resides 1,000 or 2,000 kilometers away. Of course, with very different interests from the Canary Islanders.
Therefore, it is clear that the inhabitants of the Canary Islands do not care whether these waters are international or Spanish. In neither of these ways will we be able to decide how that territory is managed, because for that we would have to be a free state, not as we are now.
However, in Spain they have heard and admitted the independence claims of the archipelago. They have not stopped to assess how their action will be appreciated in the Canary Islands, but they do not let a moment pass to launch this new attempt to hoard and grow on the maps, with the approval of the United Nations. The fact does not fail to admit that the independence claim of territorial waters has all the legal basis and logic of a People that aspires to emancipate itself, like the others.
The funny thing is that it is difficult for those people in Spain to admit legality, even when they are the ones who dictate it. As an example, look at the response to the threat of denunciation on the issue of prospecting. They consider it "pathetic" to go to court, and "unfair" that the officials who have testified against prospecting in Levante and the Balearic Islands, and in favor in the Canary Islands, have to be held accountable. That's called "double standards."
The Minister of Industry himself has already said that Spain will not take care of the population of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura if they could not make use of desalination water, which is currently 100 percent of the water consumed on these islands.
In other words, as long as the current status of the Canary Islands is maintained, as long as we administratively continue to belong to Spain, it will not matter if we have 35% unemployment or if we bathe with Fanta: that does not mean that, on the other hand, "Spain is doing well."
Pedro M. González Cánovas, member of the Canarian Nationalist Alternative (ANC)
