CEUTA, Spain — Daouda Faye, a 25-year-old migrant from Senegal, was elated when he heard that Moroccan border guards had suddenly started waving in undocumented migrants across the border to Ceuta, a fenced-off Spanish enclave on the North African coast.“‘Come on in, boys,’” the guards told him and others as they reached the border on May 17, Mr. Faye said.
And in they went — by the thousands.Normally, Morocco tightly controls the fenced borders around Ceuta, a six-mile-long peninsula on Morocco’s northern coast that Spain has governed since the 1600s. But now its military was allowing migrants into this toehold of Europe. Over the next two days, as many as 12,000 people flowed over the border to Ceuta in hopes of reaching mainland Spain, engulfing the city of 80,000.
The crisis has laid bare the unique pressure point Morocco has over Spain on migration. Spanish government officials and other experts say Morocco increasingly sees the migrants as a kind of currency and is leveraging its control over them to extract financial and political prizes from Spain.(...)
A principios de mayo, el Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Marruecos advirtió a España que habría consecuencias por ayudar al líder del Polisario.
José Ignacio Torreblanca, profesor de política en la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia en Madrid, dijo que Marruecos ahora está usando su control sobre los migrantes en la frontera para presionar a España para que se ponga de su lado en el conflicto del Sáhara Occidental, siguiendo el ejemplo de la administración Trump, que el año pasado reconoció el reclamo de soberanía de Marruecos sobre el Sáhara Occidental.
