After the massive March for La Línea, held last Friday and which this digital already reported, comes the war of numbers: of the 12,000 people counted by the City Council, half that was counted by the Government Subdelegation in Cádiz.
The collective ‘Por una Frontera Humanitaria’, ‘For an humanitarian frontier’, founded by Juan Pecino to protest the queues at the border crossing, joined this mobilization, as did Ascteg and the Mesa por La Línea. However, and although he points out that “the positive thing is that there have been quite a few people, as was expected and as it was natural that this would be the case when it comes to the existing fear of a new closure of the Border with thousands of families depending on Gibraltar”, he is not agree with the triumphalist assessment made by the municipal government.
Through the City Council’s social networks, this platform recalls the demonstration in protest against the Brexit that had occurred and which was promoted at the time by the Sociocultural Association of Workers in Gibraltar and the La Linea Work Group, who invited the mayor and to the City Hall.
Now, the platform assures that if an aerial photograph had been taken using a drone, historical propositions could be established: «To say of this demonstration that it has been the largest in the history of La Línea is unfair against the people of La Línea who have been fighting a lot all their lives and who have never had their own means like the City Council and any institution and politicians have; “is to discredit entities that have even far exceeded these figures.”
La Línea, this platform assures in comparison with other towns, “we have always been one of those with the most, best and most attended protests in the region and province only behind Astilleros.” Thus, they go back to the Franco dictatorship and the transition, but also to when the Despierta coordinator called a demonstration against drug trafficking, “estimated by official means at 18 thousand and 15 thousand.” Or when the Civic Platform in Defense of the Hospital and Public Health, when they were going to take the ICU and Maternity of La Línea to Algeciras, too. And, later, there have been much more numerous and extensive ones.
“There are the newspaper archives,” they recommend from Por una Frontera Humanitaria. And, in that sense, they cite the media themselves, the convening groups and the altruistic corporation of the City Council itself: «What is achieved by falsifying data for one’s own interests or those of groups, whether political or of another nature, when ethics are violated? “And bad vibes are generated when we should all be rowing in the same direction?” they insist on their reproach.
