The walls that face the street of the old Model prison in Barcelona (closed definitively in 2017), now offer passers-by a gallery of enormous and colorful mural paintings, some with well-intentioned messages, but which unfortunately have been mutilated by insane graffiti artists. that are not even a bit funny.
One of the paintings is a portrait of El Vaquilla, a notorious criminal from the crazy eighties, who reoffended a lot and went to jail a lot, including the Model. Needless to say, he ended up young and bad. But the legend has survived the character and the Model is now on its way to becoming a model set of civic facilities.
Nobody wants prisons next to their house anymore. They have been transferred to bucolic landscapes, where they are supposed to be less of a nuisance, such as Brians 2 or Alcalá Meco, through which the cream of the political class parade, among other leaders without complexes. They are modern, clean facilities and have cost - and cost us! - an arm and a leg. But they are far from being large enough for such an overproduction of condemned chorizo to penetrate into them.
This is a problem that affects most of the countries around us, none of which has found a solution that satisfies the demand, which is already excessive but continues to grow. Because these are no longer just common criminals or corrupt politicians, but also illegal immigrants with whom no one really knows what to do. Until now.
The British Government has decided to tackle the problem of the excess quota of unwanted asylum seekers with controversial drastic measures. Floating prisons, like the enormous barge Bibby Stockholm, anchored off the coast of Dorset, in the south of England, have been offered as the solution to this convoluted issue that is so pressing politically, diplomatically, socially, legally, as well as in morality.
For their promoters and sympathizers, who are not few, these barges are like luxury cruise ships; For his opponents, who are not few, a hell unworthy of a democratic country. Of course, whether they are one thing or another, they are nothing more than a guarded overcrowding room before these unwanted asylum seekers are sent to some distant country, perhaps in Africa, where they will be imprisoned by a tyrant, in exchange for a lot of money. pasta. Out of sight…
The idea will be anything but new. In the 19th century, there were not only prison barges anchored in the rivers of England, as Dickens describes in the first pages of Great Expectations, but these, like those of today, were but a stopover on the long journey to Australia, an island-continent converted into a filthy and enormous prison. For any reader interested in this mournful story, The Fateful Coast (Edhasa, 1989), by Robert Hughes, will be essential, a non-fiction book that thrills from the first to the last page. The horror, the horror...
It seems unbelievable that for years now Australian governments have confined unwanted asylum seekers to remote islands, such as Manus Island, in detention centers run with an iron fist and huge profits by private companies. Boris Johnson was an enthusiast for this “solution”, which his party, the British Conservatives, have now implemented. But there is more: the Labor Party has stated that, if it wins the election, it would maintain the barges and deportations to countries like Rwanda.
At this point in the film, one wonders what Juan José Moreno Cuenca, El Vaquilla, would think of all this before his portrait disappears under the strident and ignoble paintings of the gariteros who are loose in this increasingly decrepit city of Barcelona. And let it be known that, for once, this is not a hoax.
