María Agustí is eight months pregnant. She spent part of the summer in Casablanca, with her Moroccan partner, Rachid Dahdahi, with whom she has been in a relationship for two years. She has now returned to her home in Llíria (Valencia) because they both decided that the child would be born in Spain. However, the father will not be able to be present at the birth, because he has not even managed to get a tourist visa for a month to travel from Morocco to Valencia and accompany the mother on the dates indicated. “It has been impossible to get an appointment at the Spanish consulate in Casablanca to process at least a tourist visa,” explains this 34-year-old teacher of History at a high school. “There was never any availability: when the deadline opened a few hours a day, all the places were already taken or the system was blocked. And that is even though he meets all the required requirements. [al menos 100 euros al día y un saldo bancario de 3.000 con mínimo, carta de invitación o lugar declarado de residencia]but he has not even had the opportunity,” he complains. The “impotence and anger” he feels have led him to tell this newspaper about “the unjust situation” he is experiencing.
Maria has the full support of her family and friends, but she will not be able to have her 40-year-old partner at her side, whom she met through the costumes designed by the fashion designer for a television series and discovered on the Internet. Interested in the culture and history of the Maghreb country, Maria began to visit Casablanca frequently and the relationship became stronger. “I can buy a plane ticket to go see him whenever I want; he can’t,” she laments in a telephone conversation. Her mother has also travelled to Morocco several times to meet Rachid, who has a sewing workshop, and his family. In addition, she is helping to try to speed up the paperwork to get married, which they started months ago. She has a secure job in Valencia and he could open his workshop in Spain. The plan is none other than to live the life of “a normal couple, with freedom of movement, not counting how long it is until we see each other and part ways.”
But the bureaucratic process is complicated and very slow, and even more so if one of the spouses comes from Morocco. She had a personal interview in Spain months ago, in which she answered questions of all kinds – “some with a racist bias, to be honest,” she adds – to confirm the type of relationship they have. Rachid is still waiting for his. The procedures to request any paper or certificate from the administration of the African country are much slower and are more laborious and expensive to obtain. “The marriage papers can take a year or even two, according to what they tell us. I can’t wait, I can’t stop my life waiting. The Civil Registry of Llíria decides whether it is a marriage of convenience. And the Central Registry of Madrid is the one that validates marriages. But there is a lot of ignorance, even within the administrations,” says María.
For all these reasons, they decided to at least request a visa so that he could travel this September. “There are many mafias and opportunists, we know this and we have seen it, but we have not even had the opportunity to process it,” he reiterates. This newspaper has asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the specific problem of Maria and Rachid and the general situation of possible collapse of the consulate in Casablanca, the economic capital of Morocco, with an estimated population of almost four million inhabitants. Official sources from the department respond in this regard: “The company with which the Consulate has outsourced the visa service implemented a new electronic appointment system that incorporates additional security measures to prevent the trafficking of appointments by intermediaries in bad faith, so that the availability of appointments for legitimate visa applicants is not fraudulently reduced. Likewise, new developments are being promoted to incorporate reinforced control measures to avoid abuses in obtaining appointments.” The ministry adds that “in 2023, the Consular Offices in Morocco processed a total of 233,843 visas, nearly 15% of the visas processed by the entire consular network.”
Maria will not be able to register her son, who they want to call Jorge Rachid, with the father’s surname for the time being. Although there are contradictory opinions on this issue, she believes that the most effective and safest thing to do is to register the baby with her surname and as a single mother, while waiting for the problems to be resolved. “Your partner can sign a power of attorney for you to buy a house, for example, but not to register his son,” she says. Maria shares her experiences with a Facebook group of Spanish men and women in Morocco who are in a similar situation to hers. “There are thousands of stories told there. We pass on information and advice,” she says, having just arrived from Casablanca. She expresses her indignation at the recent wave of racism in Spain, which spreads the rumour on social networks, for example, that the murderer of the 11-year-old boy stabbed in Mocejón (Toledo) was a “Moor.”
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She says she has noticed an increase in racism in recent years in society in general, and in the classrooms at her school in particular. The discourse, spread mainly on social networks such as X (formerly Twitter), that immigrants “come to take jobs from Spaniards, when they do the work that nobody wants to do” has taken hold. “It is regrettable,” says the teacher. “We want our son to have both cultures, that of Morocco and that of Spain, to speak the languages of both countries,” she insists. “We just want to live in peace and stop saying goodbye once and for all, because we are always saying goodbye.”
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