TARIFA, Spain, 13 September 2003 — With immigration officials on the country’s south coast overwhelmed by the tide of human misery heading in its direction almost daily, Spain recently erected a wall of electronic surveillance in a bid to stem the mass arrivals from North and sub-Saharan Africa.
Radar posts have sprung up around the southern town of Tarifa looking out over the Strait of Gibraltar, a 15-km stretch of water which is one of two chief maritime routes immigrants ply chasing dreams of a new life in Europe, the other being from the West African coast to the Canary Islands.
In recent months, the number of people seeking life and limb to cross the Strait has steadily risen, leaving local authorities unable to cope with the inflow while sparking Red Cross complaints that conditions for the new arrivals are intolerable.
Between January and August the number of immigrants to the area increased 109 percent on the first half of 2002.
July and August alone produced, with 6,273 arrests, about half of the immigrants to arrive this year to date, according to central government estimates and those of the Andalusian regional government.
Spanish Interior Minister Angel Acebes has recognized the “extraordinary leap” in the number of immigrants in recent months which have overwhelmed staff at Tarifa’s detention and processing center.
To combat the problem Spain has installed an early-warning system using radar and thermal or infra-red cameras.
The hardware, dubbed an integrated system of external surveillance, came on stream last month and the government has high hopes it can help attempts to alleviate the problem — one which can prove fatal.
Hundreds of would-be immigrants, including young children, have drowned trying to cross the Strait since 1980 in “pateras”, the name given to the makeshift and often barely seaworthy boats in which they undertake their perilous voyage.
Although the new surveillance system has scarcely acted as a deterrent it has shown itself effective in detecting the immigrants, with thousands of people caught since its introduction, according to Salvador Gomez, police spokesman at the port of Algeciras, just up the coast from Tarifa.
“This summer the meteorological conditions have been good and have facilitated crossings, and the pateras have been intercepted in time thanks to swift detection and better (police) coordination,” says Gomez.
As he speaks he points out five towers crammed with radar, thermal and infra-red equipment which can pick out a patera at a distance of five to ten kilometers.
A further detection tower is due to go up in the coming months.
“The system is not a wall which prevents people coming in. Its goal is to detect the boats and avoid human tragedies by intercepting the immigrants before they approach the shore because they think they have got here and throw themselves into the water,” Gomez explains.
But members of the Spanish civil guard who patrol the area believe more personnel are required to fulfill a task which they see as primarily as being of a humanitarian nature.
To bypass the stepped-up surveillance at Tarifa, people traffickers are concentrating their efforts on smuggling people further along the coast south of cities such as Grenada and Almeria.
The very much greater distance from the Moroccan coast— some 100 km — multiplies the risk of drowning. Since the start of the year at least 75 immigrants have died trying either to cross the Strait of Gibraltar or to reach the Canary Islands.
One member of an international non-government organization working in the area says the people traffickers lure would-be immigrants with offers of a single payment being good for several trips in the event of their repatriation.
But the price of chancing their luck sometimes goes beyond mere money, given the spate of drownings.
Spain’s high-tech surveillance may or may not achieve its aim.
More significant, according to local Red Cross coordinator Juan Antonio Araujo, is why so many people are risking their lives to cross to Spain in the first place.
“As long as the difference in the standard of living between there and here remains as wide as it is people will try their luck and risk their lives.”
