In english
Spain’s most dangerous neighborhood
Even the police rarely venture into El Príncipe in Ceuta, where poverty and drug violence rule
Jesús Rodríguez 3 NOV 2014 - 16:36 CET
Few visitors to Ceuta, Spain’s exclave on Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, ever venture into the Príncipe Alfonso district. Home to the city’s poorest inhabitants (all of them Muslim), lacking the most basic amenities and crippled by 90-percent unemployment, it’s a third-world slum dominated by rival drug gangs fighting each other to control a trade that has moved away to Tangier. “It’s a pressure cooker that could blow at any time,” says a member of the Spanish security forces. “This is Spain, but it isn’t Spain. Quite simply, there is no law here, the state is absent.”
Outsiders are not welcome in el Príncipe, and neither are the police, who rarely enter, and whose duties are limited to mediating in domestic disputes. In any case, the area’s narrow streets and alleyways prevent cars from patrolling; there is no station house. Even ambulances and fire services only come in when protected by the Civil Guard. The neighborhood, which sprawls up a windswept, barren hillside known as Monte Chico, is Spain’s African outpost. Each day, tens of thousands of men and women head through the district to the Tarajal crossing, carrying goods to sell in Morocco. El Principe has also become a hiding place for undocumented migrants hoping to make it into Europe.
The hashish trade is a part of everyday life in el Príncipe, and one of the few ways to earn a living there: “It is the only industry in the north of Morocco; it provides the most jobs, and pumps the most money into the economy, and it also finances radical Islam,” says a Civil Guard officer. This year alone, four young men have been killed there in disputes that the police say are related to the drug trade.
Kids here don’t care about Batman, their heroes are the gunmen who drive big fast cars and live in huge houses”
El Príncipe resident
Fátima, who prefers not to give her surname, is the mother of 35-year-old Mohamed Ennekra, who was shot and killed in August. “Mohamed had never been in trouble with the police; he earned a few euros each day making deliveries. How could he have been a drug trafficker? He was as poor as a rat,” says his mother.
“If the government had sorted this place out long ago, then we wouldn’t be here crying over Mohamed,” she continues. “All the decent people have left. The police haven’t even bothered to ask me about my son – how can we trust them?”
Mohamed’s sister, Saba, says her brother may just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time: “Here, you can die just because you know somebody who owes somebody else money. Before, disputes would be resolved with a fistfight, but the kids today sort things out with guns. And that is what happened to my brother.”
In el Príncipe, silence means survival, and nobody is willing to talk to strangers, least of all the police or security forces, who must rely on informants and what they can glean from intercepting emails or cellphone messages as they try to keep track of the drug traffickers. Although their attention these days is more focused on the threat from radical Islam, keen to recruit among the young men who see no future within a system that has turned its back on them.
“It’s easier to investigate the jihadists than the drug traffickers, because there is more international collaboration, and also because Morocco is very supportive: but we get no help in fighting drug traffickers, the Moroccan authorities look the other way,” says a senior Civil Guard officer. “But when it comes to fighting radical Islam, the information services can’t do enough for us. In Morocco, there are two things the police won’t overlook: attacks against the monarchy or jihadism.”
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