“When I met her, I couldn’t stop crying.” dialla diarre She is one of the few witnesses of the Catalan-French border. He welcomed into his house a woman from the Ivory Coast who was a week living poorly in the service areas of La Jonquera (Alt Empordà), at the expense of stalkers and attempted rape. Unlike people with DNI or NIE, migrants without papers are banned from crossing into France, especially since the French government has increased security on the southern border after the rise of the extreme right.
It also occurs in port bou (Alt Empordà), where hundreds of undocumented young people travel the route of republican exile. Since this newspaper made this situation public, Cáritas has cared for more than 250 young people in the town, and more than 360 more have been returned to Spanish territory by the French authorities. Given the increase in cases, a dozen French and Catalan civil society entities join forces to network and support migrants. The reality on this border is totally invisible.
Diarre chairs an association that managed to put an end to female genital mutilation in Catalonia. She is a born leader of the African community in the Girona region, and therefore, she receives dozens of requests for help every day. One of these served a helpless woman in the town of La Jonquera. “He had crossed half of Africa by van and on foot, where he was raped along the way. He came to Morocco and paid 3,000 euros for a boat, where she was also subjected to abuse. On the third try, she got to Andalusiaand there he paid 1,000 euros more to get into a van that will take her to Francewhere her husband lived,” says Diarre.
It is known, in the towns of the Alt Empordà, the presence of pins: people who they charge up to 1,000 euros per ticket and who drive migrants to France through mountain passes. They often do it at night, with the car lights off. In the case of this woman, the plan was thwarted at the French border. “The Gendarmerie stopped her and told her that I couldn’t enter France without papers“, she explains. The police sent her to a La Jonquera service area, where he was living badly for a week. “My husband went looking for her and found her with a man who wanted to take her to her house. She was devastated,” continues Diarre.
Returns at a gas station
This is just one of the broken lives in the midst of the Albera and Pertús mountains. The Asociation Anima Materestablished in Figueras, has spent months denouncing the arrests for “ethnic profiling” by the National Police at the train station in the capital of Empordà. In Portbou, those who frequent the place are the most destitute. Those forced to cross the mountain on foot, often barefoot, and at night. “We find everything: boys injured, destroyed… there are more and more, they tend to be North African under 20 years“, explains the coordinator of Cáritas in the town, Maria José Novés.
Since EL PERIÓDICO x-rayed the situation in Portbou, the entity has already served 256 young people giving them food, clothing or shoes. “The problem is that there are many more that do not reach our premises,” he explains. Most attentions were made in summer, but this October there has been a rebound. They also collaborate with workers at the gas station located on the outskirts of town, which is where the French gendarmes return the intercepted young people. Since mid-June they have seen 361 boys, and the way to proceed is always the same. “The gendarmes come with a gray van (not with a logo), they open the door, let them go and leave. Then they stay there and They ask us for water, food… and we cannot refuse, they come to pieces“, explains Natalia Fontecava, an employee.
Of these, two cases stand out that attract attention. Fontecaba affirms that, on one occasion, he saw that French policemen released a handcuffed young man. “They took off his handcuffs and left him there. We didn’t understand anything.” In the second, a motorist who was refueling saw the scene and spoke to one of the boys. “I was underage”explains the worker, worried because every time she is seeing more girls crossing the mountain. “I’ve seen it all: people who say that the police beat them and treat them badlyinjured as if they had just come out of a hospital, barefoot kids who can barely walk… There are many occasions that you prefer not to look, not to see”, he continues. He decides to speak to this newspaper and recounts the possible abuses that he sees at the gas station because he can’t take it anymore. “It seems inhuman to me and nobody does anything”points out.
solidarity support network
Faced with this situation, a dozen social organizations that already care for migrants informally in Catalonia and the south of France have begun to strengthen contacts. A very incipient collaboration that seeks to create a solidarity support network. It is the case that some of these promoters They are children of Spanish refugees who fled during the republican exile through the same ports. Today, the stories of their parents gain voice again in the face of these migrants in an irregular situation.
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“We should detect which violations of rights occur at our border,” proposes one of the entities. Something that already happens in the area of the Alps that separates Italy and France. They have also joined these first contacts residents of towns in the south of France, such as Port-Vendres, Banyuls or Argelés. “They have installed cameras on the mountain to stop them,” said a neighbor involved who prefers to remain anonymous.
In this sense, there are already similar projects of support networks for people in transit that are being applied on the Basque-French border with the goal of saving lives. In the Basque Country, Ten migrants have drowned trying to cross the Bidasoa River. In Catalonia, for the moment, three young people have died hit by a train trying to navigate the railway tracks on foot.