After a long historical period characterized by a legal situation of colonial status of the Canary Archipelago (let us remember that in the Constitution of 1812, in its article 10, when the Spanish territories of ...
After a long historical period characterized by a legal situation of colonial status of the Canary Archipelago (let us remember that in the Constitution of 1812, in its article 10, when the Spanish territories of both hemispheres are defined, it says "??and the Canary Islands with the other possessions of Africa"), later we were a Spanish region, carefully framed in a rectangle, under the Balearic Islands and in the middle of the Mediterranean.
With the arrival of "bourgeois democracy" we became one of the 17 Autonomous Communities of the Spanish State, to finally end up being an ultra-peripheral region of the European Union. No government, neither Spanish nor Canarian, has ever asked our people what they want to be. And, on the only occasion that we were allowed to vote, whether or not to enter an International Organization (NATO), they did just the opposite of what the Canarians voted.
All the political-legal formulas to define the Canary Islands have not intended anything other than to make us forget a fundamental fact, that we are a nation. And the insular bourgeoisies and their political representatives are no strangers to these attempts. In several articles I have mentioned the appalling ridicule starred by the then president of the Government of the Canary Islands, Adán Martin, in his speech on May 30, 2006, stating that the Canary Islands is an Atlantic archipelago (obvious), composed of land and water (otherwise it would not be an archipelago) and that, consequently, we had the right to control the inter-island waters.
It is, to say the least, pathetic, when it is extremely easy to tell the truth: that we are a nation and, consequently, we have the right to sovereignty over our territory, our waters and our airspace. If we were to take stock, thirty years after the approval of the Statute of Autonomy of the Canary Islands, the income statement for the Canarian people would be appalling:
More than 31 percent of our active population is unemployed, some 130,000 no longer receive any type of benefits; in international statistics, endorsed by the International Labor Organization, above this unemployment figure are only countries in war situations or recently out of them and extremely poor African countries.
The Canary Islands ranks number 18, worldwide, in the unemployment ranking (with higher figures are the following countries: Zimbabwe, Nauru, Liberia, Burkina Faso, Turkmenistan, Djibouti, Namibia, Senegal, Nepal, Lesotho, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Haiti, Kenya, Swaziland, Yemen, Afghanistan, Macedonia). Obviously, if we talk about the youth unemployment rate, the figures increase to 51 percent; lower salaries than the Spanish average and longer working hours; and the most precarious work.
One in three people in the archipelago lives below the poverty line; levels of social exclusion increase day by day; school failure is part of the daily life of our youth; Canarian curricular contents at different educational levels are wet paper (they have never been provided with resources); our health can only be described as third world, with long waiting lists, discriminatory treatment for taxpayers in privatized health services. The application of the Dependency Law in our country, the Canary Islands, has been a joke, before it began to be applied they have already taken away the budget for it.
As for the development model (it is also laughable to call it that), it is an absolutely dependent model, focused on foreign interests, alien to the nation, destructive of our natural and environmental resources, which has ended any possibility of exercising a minimum of food sovereignty. And as if all this were not enough, the investment of the General State Budgets of Spain decreases, year after year, the investment per inhabitant in the Canary Islands compared to the state average. This year the Canarians are worth half as much as the rest of the people who inhabit the territories under the dominion of the kingdom of Spain.
They needed us to depend on everything and for everything from Europe, and they have succeeded. I cannot remember how many times I have heard about the Africans who emigrated clandestinely, even at the cost of risking their lives, dazzled by the images of abundance and wealth they saw on our television channels; and meanwhile, what do you think the population of the Canary Islands was looking at? They looked towards Europe, dazzled, not only by the television channels, but also by the subsidies for large and unnecessary infrastructures, which, however, have not ended either unemployment or the misery of our people, and instead, have served to increase the destruction of our environment.
30 years after the Statute of Autonomy, the Canary Islands is not a colony in the old style. It is true that there is no colonial apparatus (army and specialized occupation apparatus, differences between natives and colonists), but that responds only and exclusively to the fact that they no longer need it. The great apparatuses of domination today are called multinationals, media, and, of course, education, socialization. All the policies developed in these thirty years have a single objective, to make us feel like middle-class Europeans, something that we neither are nor will ever be.
Therefore, after 30 years we can affirm, without fear of being wrong, that, at least in the Canary Islands, the autonomy system has failed, as it could not be otherwise. Needless to say, much more our incorporation into the European Union, and now what is left for the Canarian institutions is to manage the crumbs that are sent to us from Madrid and for this they cut rights to our citizens, salaries to our professionals in public administrations (that is if they take away doctors and teachers and put police. In addition to all those who gave us sticks before, now, also those of the autonomous) and all this is done according to the interests of financial capital that have nothing to do with those of the social majority of the Canary Islands.
If we had a Canarian Government with dignity it would say that it does not manage misery, nor cut salaries, nor apply the labor reform, nor raise taxes that affect the shopping basket, nor..... But as we do not have it, we must show its inefficiency and its betrayal to the Canary Islands. That same Paulino Rivero who has traveled all kinds of Spanish and European corridors to maintain the privileges and tax exemptions of the Canary Islands Investment Reserve (that formula of capital flight made in the Canary Islands), we have not seen him do the same to respect the social rights of the majority of the population of the archipelago, on the contrary he calls for "public and private sacrifice". More sacrifice? Let the big capital and the banks and all the political tyrants that surround them sacrifice themselves.
The battles we must fight today are harder and more complex than ever; because, in the first place, we must overcome our own ideological resistances, what in the year 56 of the last century Albert Memmi already defined as colonized complex.
It is time to stand up, and say directly to the Government of the Canary Islands and the Government of the kingdom of Spain that we do not want their miseries, their alms. That thirty years later, our people continue to be impoverished and our resources remain in their hands. That we do not want their powers, what we want is sovereignty, we have the right to build our nation like any people in the world. We, we know where our people will be happier, in a free Canary Islands, in a socialist Canary Islands. I will dedicate to that objective until the last second of my existence.
*Lucy Rodríguez, general coordinator of Intersindical Canaria
