The current Spanish Government, led by the pe-pe and the Canary Islander who serves as Minister of Industry, José Manuel Soria, has decreed to give free rein to the multinational Repsol to carry out explorations in the vicinity of the archipelago. Alongside two islands, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, whose water consumption is 100 percent from desalination plants, that is, water collected from the sea that bathes the archipelago.
This town has not been given any opportunity to express itself on the matter. Neither referendum nor any popular consultation. Neither that the puppets at the head of the misnamed Government of the Canary Islands asked for it in the capital of the kingdom of Spain, nor that they showed their opposition, aware that the citizens will punish them with the vote, has served any purpose. Spain exercises the same colonialism as always, only now more crude, more cruel, more firm and willing to be evident, even at the cost of punishing the population of this archipelago, archi-punished, for being one of the poorest societies under the domain of any European administration, where the rights and services to the citizens prevail due to their scarcity or non-existence.
In parallel, in Spain they spend money on advertising the Day of their Armed Forces on television. The same ones that carried death and religious imposition, the globalization of medieval diseases and the savage brutality of that Europe that, without a doubt, was the protagonist and cause of the greatest human exploitation and slavery in the known history of this planet, throughout the world.
If today we are concerned about social services, healthcare shortages, the price of the shopping basket, unemployment or precarious employment and so many other social issues of the archipelago, when the most powerful economic sector of our economy is at stake, along with what little remains of the primary sector, such as fishing, what could happen in the event of an uncontrolled crude oil spill?
Today, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Federico Ramos, has guaranteed that the environmental risk of the oil explorations authorized in the waters of the Canary Islands is "very low." Or what is the same, they admit that there is a risk of spills. Also today, June 4, three oil platforms are docked in the Port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
Meanwhile, the population of the archipelago is organizing to demonstrate forcefully against Repsol and the explorations, in just three days. But does the road end here? If we manage to stop explorations or extractions, are we not going to continue to be exposed?
Let's be realistic, this happens because we let them. Because whether we like it or not, we are still under the yoke of a Spanish administration, which landed on our coasts more than 5 centuries ago and has been exploiting this archipelago without stopping to contemplate, at any time, other interests than those of the metropolis, and where the true interests of the Canarian People, of our environment, for example, does not go beyond - for them - getting "a postcard that can be sold at an adequate price." And that is going to continue to happen. Because their interests and ours are separated by thousands of kilometers and by very different conditions.
That is why this Saturday, June 7, we all have to form a united front, but from the awareness that we do not have to continue suffering problems, which are invented and created for us across the seas, by a colonizing power that does not govern for the good of the citizen, not even in Spain. So what are we going to expect it to do here? What future do we want?
Pedro González Cánovas, member of the Canarian Nationalist Alternative
