Ceuta Reveals Something Else: When the Dispute with Morocco Turns into a Battle Against Morocco
The latest Ceuta crisis quickly moved beyond the debate over migration, border security, and relations between Rabat and Madrid, revealing a deeper problem within part of the Spanish discourse: the difficulty of distinguishing criticism of a specific Moroccan policy from the reproduction of a historical image of Morocco as a permanent adversary. This is where defending Morocco and King Mohammed VI becomes legitimate, because the issue is no longer simply the assessment of a government decision or the management of a border crisis. It concerns a discourse that tends to reduce an entire state, society, religion, and King to a single representation shaped by hostility.
One of the clearest examples came from El Debate, where journalist Luis Ventoso published several pieces during the crisis, going so far as to describe the mass arrival of migrants in Ceuta as an “invasion” and portray the episode as a test orchestrated by King Mohammed VI, while linking it to the celebration of the Throne Day. In his August 1 article, the writer did not limit himself to criticizing Morocco’s handling of the crisis; he presented some of his deductions as established facts, although what is objectively established is the exceptional scale of the human movement and the border crisis. Whether there was a specific Moroccan political decision behind it, and what its precise motivations and timing were, remains a matter for investigation and evidence rather than journalistic certainty.
The problem becomes more serious when the discourse moves from the Moroccan state to the King personally, shifting from politics to personal characterization. Disagreements between Madrid and Rabat over Ceuta, the Moroccan Sahara, or migration can be debated politically, legally, and diplomatically. Reducing Morocco to the person of the King Mohammed VI, however, or presenting the sovereign as the source of every crisis, strips the discussion of its political substance and turns a clash of interests into a personal attack. Defending the King does not mean preventing criticism; it means refusing to allow political criticism to become a personal prosecution or a predetermined narrative that no longer requires proof.
What is equally striking is the way part of the Spanish press revives, whenever a crisis erupts, the vocabulary of old confrontations. Ventoso’s articles invoke the War of Tetouan, the Rif War, Annual and the Al Hoceima landing, before connecting them to the contemporary crisis in Ceuta. This narrative construction is not journalistically neutral: it makes the past an automatic key for interpreting the present and encourages readers to see every new crisis as another episode in an alleged continuous Moroccan project, rather than as a contemporary political situation with its own causes and complexities.
The drift becomes even more troubling when this logic moves from the Moroccan state to Moroccans living in Spain. Using a phrase such as “the Moroccan fifth column” turns citizens or residents into a population under suspicion simply because of their national origin. In a country where a large Moroccan community lives and contributes to economic and social life, such language no longer describes foreign policy; it introduces collective suspicion into Spanish society itself. The discourse ceases to analyze an external crisis and begins to manufacture an internal enemy.
Spain’s radical right has gone further in this direction. Santiago Abascal and Vox have used, since the 2021 crisis, the vocabulary of “invasion,” “soldiers,” and “war” to describe the arrival of migrants from Morocco. This language has already been examined as a discursive framework that transforms migration, a social and human phenomenon, into a military scene in which the migrant appears as a combatant or as part of a hostile operation. In 2026, the same vocabulary resurfaced with force, confirming that the word “invasion” is not a neutral description of reality but a political instrument capable of producing fear and mobilizing public opinion.
Defending Morocco does not mean denying that the Ceuta crisis was serious. Nearly 50,000 people reportedly crossed the border according to initial estimates cited by the Spanish press, while dozens of people died during attempts to cross and tens of thousands subsequently returned to Morocco. This was a genuine humanitarian and security crisis that deserves serious investigation into its causes and responsibilities. But the existence of a crisis does not give journalists the right to turn hypotheses into certainties, nor does it justify portraying every Moroccan who entered Ceuta as a “soldier” or automatically attributing responsibility for every movement of people at the border to King Mohammed VI.
Another reality is visible within the Spanish media landscape itself. El País, despite its criticism of the handling of the crisis, also approached it as a humanitarian and diplomatic problem, emphasizing the need for cooperation between Spanish, European, and Moroccan institutions. It also reported United Nations calls for the rights and dignity of those arriving in Ceuta to be respected. This diversity matters because the Spanish press is not a homogeneous bloc, and it would be equally inaccurate to reduce Spain to its most radical voices as it would be to reduce Morocco to the caricatures produced by those voices.
The issue, therefore, is not about defending Morocco blindly. It is about defending Morocco’s right to be treated as a state whose policies can be examined on the basis of facts, and whose institutions and symbols deserve respect, beginning with King Mohammed VI. It is equally legitimate to expect Moroccan journalism to apply the same standard when dealing with Spanish institutions. Moroccan-Spanish relations are too important to be reduced to the anger of a columnist or the rhetoric of a radical party. They involve major economic, security, humanitarian, and strategic interests, while also containing genuine disputes, from Ceuta and Melilla to migration and the Moroccan Sahara. All these issues require political reason, not the resurrection of a war memory.
The real danger revealed by the Ceuta crisis, therefore, is not found only at the border. It also lies in the words used to describe it. When the Moroccan becomes an “invader,” the King an “organizer of the invasion,” Islam an opponent of “the West,” and the Moroccan community a “fifth column,” the debate leaves the terrain of political disagreement and enters the territory of enemy-making. This is precisely where Morocco should respond with firmness, but without joining the escalation: defending its sovereignty, its King, and its citizens, while insisting on the right to reciprocal criticism grounded in facts and refusing to allow temporary crises to become excuses for resurrecting historical representations incompatible with building a mature relationship between two neighboring countries.
Rabat does not need to renounce itself in order to be a credible partner for Madrid, just as Madrid does not need to demonize Morocco to demonstrate its ability to protect its borders. What the relationship between the two countries needs is both simpler and more difficult: each side must stop looking at the other through its worst historical memory and return politics to its proper place, where interests, facts, and mistakes are debated through evidence rather than through old myths.
