The defense minister remained seated while much of the government and the Socialist parliamentary group applauded Sánchez’s announcement. At the end of the president’s opening statement, Robles did stand alongside the other ministers, although she applauded less enthusiastically and was the first to sit back down, in a scene that comes after weeks of public disagreements between the Defense Ministry, the Interior Ministry and Moncloa over prior warnings about Ceuta.
SÁNCHEZ WILL PUBLISH ALL REPORTS
The prime minister announced Thursday in Congress that he had ordered the publication of a dossier containing “all reports” received by the government about the situation in Ceuta. Sánchez insisted that the government had “nothing to hide” and stressed that no intelligence service had anticipated an entry on the scale recorded on July 30 and 31.
According to the prime minister, detecting an increase in people crossing by sea was one thing, while anticipating that more than 70,000 people would attempt to enter Spanish territory was another. Sánchez also maintained that, to date, the executive has no “solid evidence” allowing it to conclude that Morocco planned and carried out the mass entry.
The controversy intensified after a report by the National Immigration and Borders Center (CENIF) of the National Police, sent to the National Court, came to light. It describes what happened as a “planned” rather than “spontaneous” entry. The document points to the presence and involvement of Moroccan agents and refers to an attitude of “permissiveness” by the neighboring country’s security forces, although the police leadership maintains that the available documentation does not allow intellectual responsibility for the operation to be attributed to the Moroccan government.
THE CLASH OVER CNI WARNINGS
Robles’s attitude in Congress is particularly significant because the defense minister has maintained a position different from that defended by the Interior Ministry and Moncloa regarding the role of the intelligence services. In her parliamentary appearance on August 25, Robles said that the National Intelligence Centre had carried out its assigned duties and that the information had been shared and analyzed with the State Security Forces and Corps and the Government Delegation. She also stated that warnings had been issued on July 29 about migrants entering by sea.
Fernando Grande-Marlaska, by contrast, has maintained that there was no report anticipating a mass entry of these characteristics, a position Sánchez again supported from the Congress rostrum on Thursday. The differences had already triggered a public clash between Defense and Interior, and the image of Robles not applauding the president’s announcement once again exposed those disagreements in the middle of the chamber.
