4 Keys about what is happening in Torre Pacheco, the Spanish city in which ultra -right groups pursued North African migrants

Photo foot, Police stop several young people in Torre Pacheco, Murcia.

“At night people are afraid, children don't feel safe at home.”

Nabil Moreno is the president of the Muslim community in Torre Pacheco, a town in the Region of Murcia, in southeastern Spain, where xenophobic and racist disturbances have been producing since last Friday, the worst of the last decades in the country.

“I have been living here for 25 years and I have never had problems with my neighbors, who are very friendly and nice,” Moreno tells BBC Mundo. Those who are starring the altercations, he says, come from outside.

Ultra -right groups, organized by social networks and displaced many of them from different parts of Spain, have starred in the last nights what the Spanish Interior Minister has described as “immigrant hunts.”

Armed with sticks or iron bars, and hiding many of them their faces, these violent groups have traveled for several nights Torre Pacheco, especially the San Antonio neighborhood, a migrant majority, in search of Maghreb, that is, people of North African origin.

There they were waiting for groups of young or second generation young people who planted them.

The riots have resulted, for the moment, with at least five injured and eight detainees, although the situation remains very volatile and could be extended during the next few days, in which the ultra -right groups have convened more actions.

Torre Pacheco has about 40,000 inhabitants, a third of them immigrants. The population has increased rapidly in recent years due to the rise of intensive agriculture, in which many of the neighbors work than foreign origin.

1. The trigger

At the origin of these violent actions is the brutal aggression on July 9 to an old man from Torre Pacheco by a group of young people.

The victim, who has announced only as Sunday, walked early in the morning, like every day, to the cemetery, when he crossed with three young people: he declared, one who was with a mobile, another that shouted things “in a foreign language”, and a third that pounced on him and began to hit him.

Everything happened very fast, according to his complaint. The 68 -year -old man says he doesn't remember much.

Photo foot, The leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, at a press conference with the image of the old man attacked in the background.

According to the regional newspaper La Opinion of Murcia, they did not try to steal him, so it is believed that the objective of the aggression could simply be recorded to upload it to social networks.

The image of the man after the beating generated great shock.

The incident was then used by ultra -right groups in social networks to suggest hatred against the population of Moroccan origin, viralizing videos of other aggressions that made the one suffered by the neighbor of Torre Pacheco -Domingo himself has confirmed that it is not about him -and even sharing images and personal data of five men who identified, without any tests, such as the alleged aggressors.

Several groups were formed in networks such as Telegram, where the ultra channel “ATUPORT THEM NOW SPAIN” convened a “hunt” on July 15, 16 and 17 to find the authors of the aggression and “gather them with Allah.” And if other Moroccans did not collaborate with the identification of the aggressors, they said, “they will automatically become guilty and pay for what happened,” according to the Eldiario.es news portal.

Ultra -right formations such as the VOX party have linked crime with immigration for years.

Its leader, Santiago Abascal, shared a video on his social networks this Saturday, when the episodes of violence in Torre Pacheco had already begun but not to mention them explicitly, in which he assured that “Spain suffers from a brutal migratory invasion.”

In front of a painting that seemed to reflect a scene of a battle of the Spanish reconquest (military campaigns that sought to end the Muslim domination of eight centuries in the Iberian Peninsula), he said about migration: “He has stolen the borders, he has stolen our peace and has stolen prosperity.”

Abascal also said that the two main political formations of Spain, the Socialist Party (PSOE, currently in the Government) and the Popular Party (PP), “are responsible for all violence” and demanded “immediate deportations.”

2. Xenophobic persecutions

In rejection of the aggression suffered by Domingo, the mayor convened last Friday a concentration in the Town Hall square with the slogan “Torre Pacheco, free of violence, free of crime”, which was attended by hundreds of neighbors, including many of them also many of Maghreb origin as Nabil Moreno, who have been living in the area for many years.

The demonstration was peaceful and without incident, but at the end of the afternoon the riots began.

Dozens of radical young people, some of them from Torre Pacheco, but many coming from other bordering provinces or other parts of Spain, launched themselves to the search for the possible aggressors to the shout of “Moors children of a bitch”, “Long live Franco” or “to your country.”

Several young people cover their face during the riots of Torre Pacheco. — Photo foot, Ultras groups called new calls for the next 15, 16 and 17 of July.

During the night of Friday and Saturday, groups of radicals attacked vehicles and shops of neighbors of Maghreb origin, also to some journalists, while burning garbage containers and threw stones and bottles.

“We are fed up with crime, I the first, but we cannot stop it with violence,” said the mayor of Torre Pacheco, Pedro Ángel Roca, of the conservative Popular Party, in the X and City Hall account.

The most violent disturbances occurred in the San Antonio neighborhood, where most of the population is migrant, and where groups of hooded and also armed Moroccan young people were waiting for them.

The images of the clashes that the neighbors have hung on social networks show the violence of aggressions, many of them random, with victims who simply crossed their way.

The Security Forces – Civil Guardia and Local Police – were seen at times overwhelmed by the incidents, although they mostly managed to separate the sides and avoid a greater escalation.

On Sunday the tickets of the town were armored by the Civil Guard, which prevented access to the center of outside groups that came to cause disturbances and dissolved the groups of Moroccan young people who found the street to avoid new clashes.

Outside the center of the town, however, a violent group managed to enter a Kebab restaurant. The images of the security cameras show how several hooded men forcefully enter and in a few seconds they destroy the place before their terrified workers.

3. Political tension

So far there have been eight arrests, two of them of people related to the aggression to Domingo, the Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska reported, in an interview with the SER chain.

The minister linked those “immigrants” hunts with Vox speeches “that criminalize migrants.

“I do not know if we bring tension or not, but before the tension that the peace of the cemeteries, before the tension that the Spanish silent before the illegal immigration, before the violations, before the robberies, before the machetes. If telling the truth brings tension, then there will be tension,” said the Vox leader on Monday.

José Ángel Antelo in a rally in Torre Pacheco. — Photo foot, Some have seen at the rally that the president of Vox in the Region of Murcia gave this weekend in Torre Pacheco an attempt to suggest the xenophobic tension.

Days before the riots of Torre Pacheco, the deputy of the Ultra -Right Party De Meer began, he defended the expulsion of “millions of immigrants” if they do not “adapt” to Spanish culture, without distinguishing between legal or illegal migrants, first or second generation or if they have committed any crime.

On the weekend of disturbances, the leader of Vox in the Region of Murcia, José Ángel Antelo, moved to Torre Pacheco on Saturday to talk about the measures of his party in the face of illegal immigration in an act called “Defend yourself of insecurity.”

Antelo has been denounced before the Prosecutor's Office for an alleged crime of hate for the PSOE of Murcia, while the leftist party Podemos has said that it will do the same with Santiago Abascal.

Onced by Donald Trump's policies in the United States, “Vox is at the time and takes advantage of anything, any incident, to go with all heavy artillery,” says BBC Mundo Elisa Reche, director of Eldiario.es in the Region of Murcia.

With this type of speeches, the journalist fears that from now on you can begin to normalize “that more extreme, more explicit and racist violence” that has been triggered in Torre Pacheco.

Vox was the most voted training in the town in the last legislative elections of 2019, taking more than 38% of the votes. It was also the party that took more support in the Region of Murcia, where it obtained more than 28% of the ballots.

4. Uprooted young people

Torre Pacheco has a population that exceeds 40,000 inhabitants, but only a couple of decades was barely 15,000.

The increase in irrigation crops in this arid region, propitiated by the water transfer between the flow of the Tajo River and the Segura River 45 years ago, has generated a prosperous garden that requires an abundant labor to collect crops.

The vast majority of those jobs, which many Spaniards do not want, have occupied them immigrants, mostly from the Maghreb, the region occupied by Northwest Africa.

Two workers in the field of Murcia. — Photo foot, Murcia agriculture depends on migrant labor.

There many regularized migrants work, some who have been in Spain for decades, but also others that do not have papers and live in marginalization.

“The people need migrants and we need that people because it is where we have work, our life, our future. This country has offered us what our country did not give us, so we are not going to bite the hand that the bread gave us,” says Nabil Moreno.

He has been in Spain for more than 25 years, a country that qualifies as “very open and very friendly”, and where he has formed a family.

However, Moreno has already lived another moment of tension in 2000, when the racist disturbances in the town of El Ejido, in the Andalusian province of Almería, after the murder of three neighbors, put a large part of the communities of Maghreb origin in the country in the country.

For Nabil Moreno, however, the problem is not in the migrants who have just arrived, “but in young people born here, who feel abandoned, do not identify either as Spaniards or Moroccans.”

Some kids of that second generation have become conflicting, according to Moreno.

Many are “Ninis”, a word that in Spain is used to designate young people who neither work nor study.

“They are 24 hours on the street, so, they are normally looking for conflicts. They feel racism, they are told to go to their country but when they go on vacation to Morocco they treat them as immigrants and many do not speak Arabic. They are young people who are very angry, they are very rebellious, it is very difficult to calm them, because the hatred they have inside is not now, it comes from many years,” says the president of the Muslim community of Torre Pacheco.