A year after the Port of Santander announced that it would remove the concertinas installed in part of its perimeter, they remain. It is one year since inauguration of the new president of the Port Authority of Santander (APS)César Díaz (PP), who as soon as he took office announced in an interview with this medium that the days of the concertinas were numbered and would be replaced by other types of security systems.
Díaz linked the removal of this material for military use to the development of an investment plan that foresees the extension of four-meter-high metal closures throughout the port perimeter. However, changes in the closure of the venue have not occurred, as elDiario.es has been able to confirm.
Concertinas are considered a type of material that violates human dignity, they have been removed where they were installed, such as in the border closures of Ceuta and Melilla, and have garnered censure from political parties, social organizations such as Safe Passage and institutions. as the Ombudsman.
Already a year ago, there had been a significant reduction in the irregular penetration of people into port areas to access ships that travel the maritime lines with the United Kingdom. This fact has been attributed not so much to the concertinas as to the installation of other deterrent and control elements that have turned the Port of Santander into a fortress: cameras, new lighting, four-meter closure, sensors that monitor the fence or reinforcement public and private surveillance, among other measures. But the concertinas, with their great symbolic load, remain in place.
According to the 2022 Report of the Cantabria Prosecutor’s Office, the ‘jumps’ of the fence had already been reduced by 79.48%. “In a very serious moment of intrusion, the Port Authority decided that the best way to protect a specific area was to resort to that element. But many other things were done, physical, police reinforcement… a set of important measures because the problem was very important. This has improved the problem so significantly that we are now at the lowest level of intrusion in the last eight years,” said the president of the Port Authority almost a year ago.
The conclusion of his statements to this newspaper was that the concertinas would be removed, in step with the implementation of an investment plan: “It is planned that the four-meter-high enclosure will be implemented in other areas of the Port and where there are concertinas it will end replacing them. That is, it is planned to remove the concertinas and replace them with a four-meter enclosure. This is a process that we are carrying out, foreseen in the Investment Plan in several phases. The still photo from now is not going to be maintained and we are going to address the change of enclosure so that everything is of this style,” declared César Díaz.
The still photo from that moment is the same still photo from today, which dates back to 2021 when the previous president of the APS, Francisco Martín (PRC), gave his approval to the installation of this material. The social and political rejection of its installation did cause the purchase of more material to be stopped and the controversial crowning to be prolonged, but what was installed has not yet been removed.
A turning point in the entire controversy was marked by the Ombudsman, who in June 2022 spoke out on the matter, reproaching the Port of Santander for its strategy of using concertina wires against the penetration of Albanian migrants and other nationalities into its facilities and reminding it that the use of this material implies their “criminalization.” The land of the Port Authority is not immune to the protection of human rights, I came to tell you.
This is how the Ombudsman spoke in response to a Safe Passage complaint, a fact that led to the Santander Port Authority suspending the purchase and installation of another 10 kilometers of concertina lines, as elDiario.es reported after consult the contract provided on the Transparency Portal.
At that time, the Port of Santander excused the non-removal of the concertinas already installed in the search for alternatives. This approach was reiterated by the new occupant of the Presidency of the APS. With one manager or another, the truth is that the blades at the top continue to be displayed at the access points to the Port. In fact, his vision has already been ‘normalized’ by citizens, which has already had an artistic reflection of denunciation of this situation.
The Port Authority of Santander was questioned about the plans to remove the concertinas that ‘crown’ its perimeter closure, and it has not responded to elDiario.es’ questions.
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