Barely four days after the European elections, just hours before we celebrated Canary Islands Day and twelve days before the Supreme Court rules on the appeal filed by the Government of the Canary Islands, the Ministry of Environment and Agriculture gave all Canary Islanders the most poisoned gift that our economy and our territory could receive in the midst of an economic crisis: the authorization to Repsol to carry out exploratory surveys in three wells up to 5,000 meters deep at a few miles from the coast of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura.
The multinational already has in its possession the environmental impact statement favorable and only the final authorization remains to be granted by the same Ministry that has sponsored and accelerated the processing of the file: the one directed by José Manuel Soria. The response is more than predictable by those who has turned his back on his own land, has closed the doors to dialogue and has placed the interests of a single company before those that correspond to us more than two million people who reside in the Islands.
The Popular Party waited for the European elections to issue the environmental impact statement and avoid a greater loss of votes in the territories in which it has planned to carry out oil exploration, including the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands and Valencia. This fact shows that the State Government has managed the threads of the file, keeping in mind the electoral interests of the Popular Party and, what is even worse, trying to speed up the process to avoid a new stoppage in the event that the Tribunal Supreme Court agrees with the arguments put forward by the Canarian Government.
It is the chronicle of a more than predictable decision. A decision that the Government has taken in the Canary Islands, despite strong citizen opposition, and which, however, has intentionally postponed in the Balearic Islands due to pressure from the popular people of said territory. They have not cared in the slightest that it has surfaced and has been patent its double language and the use of different yardsticks depending on the Communities in which they govern and those in which they are in the opposition.
There are many unanswered questions that accumulate in a dispute that the State Government has insisted on managing without transparency and denying to the Canarian institutions and the citizens themselves their access to a project that, if carried out, will mark a before and after in the history of our people. The blank check that the Government has placed in the hands of a single company will force us to live with the constant threat that a spill destroy the wealth of our seabed in one fell swoop, ruin our economy, leave the inhabitants of Fuerteventura without access to drinking water and Lanzarote and force us to pack our bags.
We have tried and will continue working in the Courts of Justice to stop an absurdity that the Government has hatched together with the oil company with nocturnality and without scruples, and we will intensify our parliamentary activity to continue dismantling in Congress and the Senate the fallacies that the popular and the own multinational have been spreading about the supposed wealth that it will generate for our economy, the jobs it will create in the Islands or the non-existence of risks.
Andrés Ortega denounces in his work "Recomponer la democracia" that "the interests of companies are different from public interests, and the State and the Government must maintain their own criteria and autonomy against them." In this case, they have the greed of a single company has prevailed over the future of an entire land in a clear example of a manual on how former executives of multinationals sneak into the Governments and end up imposing the criteria of their previous companies. No We cannot forget that the former Secretary of State for Energy, the same one who rescued the file, had been a director of Repsol before being signed by the Government.
José Ortega y Gasset said that "like each individual, each generation, if he wants to be useful to humanity, one must begin by being true to oneself." And those who have not have been faithful to their land or to the citizens they represent should know that this battle is not over, that we are not willing to give up in a fight in which our present and the future of our children are at stake. Para to move forward, we need a project and a collective effort that helps us build a new sustainable energy model that leads to a new model economic. And that should be our challenge to provide solutions to more than two million people and not give free rein to a single company to have in its hand the future of a people who, in addition, are denied the possibility of speaking out on a project that no one promised them in any electoral program.
Ana Oramas, deputy of Coalición Canaria