Madrid Desk, Oct 26 (EFE).- Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE) announced Thursday they will report an alleged hate crime to the Prosecutor’s Office after a Popular Party (PP) councilor in the southern city of Torrox compared migrants arriving in the Canary Islands to animals.
PSOE spokesperson in Torrox Mari Nieves Ramírez announced on that the party’s legal team would take action over an alleged crime of hate and discrimination.
The Socialists have requested the immediate dismissal of the center-right PP councilor Salvador Escudero, who called for arrivals to the Canary Islands to be controlled after 240 migrants were moved to Torrox, a town near Malaga on Spain’s south coast.
“Unless they put a mark on it like animals, put a bracelet or something like that, I don’t know to what extent there will be control of these creatures that are going to wander around in a month,” Escudero said during an interview with a local radio station on Wednesday.
Escudero also blamed migration for having introduced typhus into the country.
“We put typhus here (in the Canary Islands), we don’t know what they can bring us,” he added.
Hours after the interview, Escudero apologized for his “unfortunate statements”, which “do not represent the municipality of Torrox, always friendly and welcoming”.
The controversy spread on Wednesday after the vice president of the Castille and Leon regional government Juan García-Gallardo, of the far-right party Vox, described the crisis as a “migratory invasion” and linked it to what he described as a sense of insecurity among Spanish citizens.
García-Gallardo traveled to the municipality of Medina del Campo in Valladolid and posted a video on his social media channels referring to the arrival of 395 migrants to the region from the Canary Islands.
“What we propose is legal immigration, with the capacity for social adaptation, with the capacity to adapt to our culture so that (those who come here) build a better Spain with us,” he said during the video.
PSOE spokesperson for Castille and Leon Patricia Gómez on Thursday described García-Gallardo’s statements as a “hate crime” that must be prosecuted.
“They (the migrants) are not things, they are human beings,” Gómez said.
Source: Laprensa Latina
