Friday, March 29

The Government dismisses its delegate in Ceuta investigated for the expulsion of minors

The Council of Ministers has agreed this Monday to dismiss its until now Government delegate in Ceuta, Salvadora Mateos, and replace her with the Cordovan lawyer Rafael García, who until now was part of the team of advisers of the Socialist Parliamentary Group in the Assembly as a man of confidence of the PSOE candidate for the Presidency of the City in 2023, Juan Gutiérrez.

Mateos, teacher and mother of the former Director of Communication for Pedro Sánchez, Maritcha Ruiz, had just recovered part of her public agenda after months of absence to undergo cancer treatment in Madrid that she is still receiving. She has been dismissed without prior notice and has not been aware of the decision until late in the morning, when the Ministry of Territorial Policy had not yet confirmed that the replacement had been addressed at Sánchez’s meeting with his team.

“After the summer, she transferred to the Executive the need to be relieved of her post for medical reasons”, the Delegation stated in a concise press release in which Mateos thanked Sánchez “for the trust placed in her over the years to occupy this position, which he has carried out with dedication and dedication to serving the citizens of Ceuta and Spain”.

He has also praised the “collaboration” of the Security Forces, the Autonomous City and social organizations in the “daily work” to “get our city forward in these difficult years” in which it has faced the pandemic, the closure of the border with Morocco for 26 months and the migration crisis of May 2021, when 12,000 citizens of the neighboring country irregularly entered Spanish territory in just 72 hours.

The former Government delegate, who will turn 73 on Thursday, declared at the beginning of the month in court as being investigated for an alleged crime of continued prevarication in the expulsion in August last year of 55 unaccompanied Moroccan minors to Morocco regardless of what provided for in the Immigration Law. In her testimonial, she laid a firewall with the upper echelons of the Ministry of the Interior by assuring that in Madrid they did not decide or know how these returns would be carried out.

Mateos, who in the 1990s was the first woman to hold the position of counselor of the Autonomous Executive in Ceuta, will be relieved by Rafael García, a 50-year-old lawyer from Córdoba who arrived in the North African Spanish town in 2014 to work in a law firm private.

Married and with two daughters and two grandchildren, in 2019 he was appointed advisor to the Socialist Group in the Assembly. From that position he tried to kill in the summer of 2020 a motion of censure that did not come to fruition against the president of the City, Juan Vivas (PP), when he relied on Vox for twelve months to govern after doing so in the PSOE, as currently.

In this legislature, the lawyer has established himself as one of the main ‘plumbers’ of Gutiérrez, who for years maintained an internal struggle to arm the party within the PSOE of Ceuta with the Government delegate. Both and their relatives pulled all the strings they could in the city and the peninsula to gain total control of the party, but none of them succeeded. Their ‘reconciliation’ took place in the Regional Congress of November 2021, which raised Gutiérrez to the General Secretariat of the party by acclamation and made García Secretary of Institutional Relations of his Executive.

Graduated in Law from the European University of Madrid, the new delegate has as great short-term challenges the opening of the commercial customs that Spain and Morocco have agreed to launch in January, an infrastructure that the Tarajal border has never had . Also the final decision made by the Government of Sánchez on whether it will continue to require a permanent Schengen visa for all Moroccans to enter the city or whether it will promote the integration of Ceuta into the European Customs Union.

Internally, the Delegation and the State Security Forces have been dealing for months with the war between two opposing gangs for control of illicit activities in the city, which has claimed three lives and has generated dozens of clashes with firearms and white in the streets of the neighborhoods of the periphery.

Last week, the Minister for Territorial Policy, Isabel Rodríguez, traveled to Ceuta to present, together with Vivas, Mateos and Gutiérrez, the Comprehensive Socioeconomic Development Plan approved by the Council of Ministers for the city, to which it promises more than 500 million euros in investments so that it stops being an energy island, changes its economic model and gives “stability, hope and a future” to its population, especially young people.



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