Vox’s crusade against the center for foster children in the Santa Cruz district of Murcia worked. The closure of this space was an essential condition for those of Santiago Abascal to support the budgets of the autonomous community and, since last October 15th, it has been a reality. The 70 minors who resided there, Spaniards and unaccompanied foreigners, were transferred to other resources of the Autonomous Community, a movement highly criticized by the entities that work with these young people, and which is not entirely satisfied by the ultra party, which is now calling for the end of all structures of this type.
“Whoever says that juvenile centers must be closed doesn’t know what they’re saying. They know nothing about them. They’ve never set foot in a center and don’t know who lives there. The majority lead a normal life, study and are protected. Closing a center to take them elsewhere, what’s the point?” 15 years) until the end of 2021, now of age. He tells EL PAÍS that he left Algeria because he saw no opportunity to help his sick mother and with only one idea in mind: “Study, study and study.”
And that’s what he did in Santa Cruz: he learned Spanish, a language he didn’t know a word of and which he now speaks perfectly, and trained in cooking and hospitality. He spares no words of gratitude towards the workers of the institution, managed by the Antonio Moreno Foundation. “For me it wasn’t just any youth centre, it was my home, where my new life began,” he says.
During the period in which he was there, he assures, he did not experience any problems among the minors and the inhabitants of the neighborhood, which has around 2,600 inhabitants and is located about eight kilometers from the capital Murcia. He says he never felt rejected by them when he left the center, which is why he was surprised by the campaign Vox has undertaken in recent years.
The absence of conflicts is confirmed by the mayor of Santa Cruz, Patricio Ortiz, of the PP, who assures that in the two and a half years he has been at the helm of the neighborhood “not a single neighbor has ever expressed a problem with any minor in the centre”. The facilities, he underlines, were closed “for a political question”, because the neighbors “don’t exactly care if the minors stay, they see it as something that doesn’t affect their daily lives”.
Information from the Department of Social Policies on the situation of the minors was practically non-existent, to the point that their transfer was not even officially confirmed. In writing, he limited himself to informing EL PAÍS that the Murcian government continues “with the roadmap to implement the new foster care model, the most similar to a home, to improve the assistance these minors receive”.
Far from getting closer to this goal, warns Roberto Barceló, president of the Murcia Region Volunteering Platform, which brings together around thirty NGOs and social entities, the closure of the center represented a step back towards the domiciliary model, because most of the minors who resided there, around 50, were hosted together in a youth hostel in the area of the Carrascoy-El Valle mountain range. They were also segregated by nationality: all the protected minors of foreign origin are in that centre, while the Spaniards, around twenty, were distributed to other centres. Barceló is very critical of both decisions, which he considers a mere “aesthetic measure”. “What has been done is to move minors from one place to another with the consequent damage it entails for them: they are dislocated from their relationships, from their schools, from their environment of recreational, cultural or work services. From proximity to any place”, he complained, since the shelter is located about two kilometers from the nearest town.
Adriana Trafonsky, president of the PAREM association, also denounces this isolation: “The transfer of children to the mountains complicates things and makes their life more difficult on an emotional level. Now they have to start again from scratch”, she underlines, and denounces the message that is given to society, that is, that “it is right to hide these people” instead of betting on structures that had been held up as an example of good practices since their inauguration in 2019. Despite being the center of foster care minors with the most places in the autonomous community, 70, these they were divided into three “houses” of eight rooms each, in which the minors were grouped by age and housed in rooms for three people.
Even Mansour (figurative name), who lived in the center until last August, with the closure already approved, and who prefers not to give his real name so as not to damage him in his job search, defines them with that concept of “home”. He left his country, Burkina Faso, at the age of 15, although he reached the shores of the Canary Islands at the age of 16, after a months-long journey through Niger, Mali and Algeria. The Murcia center, he explains, was “just like a home, but with rules and timetables”: two and a half hours of Spanish lessons in the morning, sports in the afternoon and access to a cell phone to contact family. He reacts with amazement to learn that Vox leaders are calling for the return of unaccompanied foreign minors to their countries. In his country, the civil war that began in 2015 between the government and Islamic rebel groups intensified in 2022 after a coup. “There’s no chance there. They can come any moment and take you to war. I asked my brother, my mother ran away to Ghana, my father is a farmer and barely has anything to eat. Many people die every day. How will I get back?” you ask.
Vox, however, continues its persecution against these minors: since last September it has insisted that closing the Santa Cruz center is not enough, but that we must continue to close all resources of this type in the autonomous community, in which there are no specific centers for foreign minors, but rather all minors (national and otherwise) live there under the protection of the administrations, which currently number around 1,300.
The Vox group of the Municipality of Murcia defended on Thursday in the municipal plenary a motion against the new placement of minors expelled from Santa Cruz, in the Carrascoy-El Valle mountain range. They consider that even in that remote area they disturb around 60,000 residents, those who live in the eight districts of Murcia that border this natural park, which extends for almost 16,700 hectares. “Do you know where the shelter is?” were reprimanded by the PP, who replaced the motion with another requesting that this arrangement be temporary, precisely because of its isolation.
