2020 has plunged us into a kind of dystopian future that, like everything new and unknown, generates uncertainty and fear.
Having answers at a time like this is almost impossible. Neither the public authorities nor the scientific community are in a position to foresee what will happen and when it will all end.
This situation of hopelessness is fertile ground for hatred.
There are those who take advantage of the concern generated by the shaking of our economic and productive system to wave dark flags, and thus defend certain interests. Because that is what it is ultimately about.
The latest far-right fashion is to call "invaders" the people who grab a backpack and get into a flimsy boat in search of a future of hope, often being victims of mafias that profit by risking their lives. They say we are suffering an avalanche and they don't even blush.
An 'invasion' of a few thousand exhausted souls arriving to the islands of the record of 15 million tourists a year. It is 'invasion' because it is carried out by poor and African people. If they were rich and blond it would be a pleasant visit, because in addition to being racist, the far right is deeply classist and aporophobic.
Naomi Klein said that extreme violence makes us not see the interests it serves. That is why they stir up the hornet's nest so much, because they need to hide their shame under tons of insults, shoves and harassment. Thus, while decent people are scandalized by all that tension and violence, they do not stop to think that behind the struggle of the last against the penultimate there are elites defending their inherited privileges.
Their struggle is not that of the Canary Islander against the foreigner, because then we would see barricades on the runways preventing planes from Gatwick from filling our beaches with Englishmen drinking beer. Their struggle is that of the rich against the poor, but as the parties that have the most to gain never appear on the battlefield, they use soldiers just as poor but fearful of losing what little they have managed to gather after a lifetime of bending over.
Because in the Canary Islands there are no racists, there are people with fear.
The highest level of poverty in the state has generated a social insecurity that makes us defend with tooth and nail every advance, every euro saved, every right conquered.
But we are mistaken about the threat. The boats do not come to take anything away from us because they simply cannot do so.
Just yesterday in the Parliament of the Canary Islands, an inquisitorial Vidina Espino, spokesperson for Ciudadanos in the Chamber, despised the extra aid of 250 euros that the Ministry of Social Rights managed to grant to the more than 50,000 people who receive a non-contributory pension or a PCI. She had the nerve to say that it is a "gift" and a "decree for Podemos propaganda". She even tried to criminalize these vulnerable families who have to live on only 390 euros a month by questioning what they were going to spend that small extra they have just received on. Mrs. Espino and all the right that she represents with these words do have tools to make us go backwards in rights.
If the Canarian people want to defend what little they have, their freedoms and rights, they should direct all that hostility towards the de facto powers that have found their last trench in the far right. Because whoever considers social aid a "small handout" neither believes in the social state nor will spare any effort to leave the public administrations with the profile of a spaghetti. And if we have learned anything from the pandemic, it is that only the public can save us.
Migration is something that is never done for pleasure. Unlike taking a plane, the boats do not come of their own free will. Nobody gets into a boat to make a journey in such terrible conditions if they are not more afraid of life than of death. They flee from a situation that we are not even able to imagine.
Losing our humanity and refusing to give them a dignified welcome would blur us as the welcoming, friendly, supportive and fighting people that we were, are and always will be.
A country of comings and goings that already had to go out to look for lentils and that still today sends its most prepared youth to investigate and work for other countries.
We deeply believe that in the Canary Islands nobody is left over, wherever they come from, because the best thing about our people is its people.
But the State has to do its part and help us to help by offering more resources and spaces in the Peninsula to guarantee the human rights of the people who arrive.
And by the way, so that the right does not have options to boil the broth.
Laura Fuentes
General Coordinator of Podemos Canarias
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