The mayor of Mogán (Gran Canaria), Onalia Bueno, has announced that her City Council will not pay for "not one more burial" of immigrants who arrive dead at the port of Arguineguín or the rest of the municipality's coast, because she believes that the Government of Spain.
"I do give up my niches so that there is a burial, but we will not (pay) the expenses that this burial causes, because we are not talking about one, two, or three," Bueno said in statements made to TVE in the Canary Islands. .
In Mogán is the Arguineguín dock, the reference port for Maritime Rescue in the south of Gran Canaria, where thousands of African immigrants rescued in the Atlantic and also several dozen bodies of those have arrived since the Canary Route was reactivated. who could not withstand the harshness of the journey.
In the case of bodies recovered by Maritime Salvage, town councils have been facing the costs of burying them for years in application of the Mortuary Health Policy Regulation, a 1974 regulation that attributes to municipalities the responsibility of burying, for charity, those people without resources who die in their territory.
The Mogán City Council alleges in opposition that the majority of the immigrants who rest in its cemeteries did not die in its municipal area, but on the high seas, although their death was certified when they disembarked in Arguineguín, so it understands that it is up to the State to assume the responsibility. burial cost.
In this regard, its mayor claims that "they are expenses" that she has to "deduct from the taxes of the residents" of the municipality and laments that "the Government Delegation (in the Canary Islands) is not even interested in anything."
Re-elected as mayor in May at the head of the Juntos por Mogán list and number 3 in the Canary Coalition candidacy for the autonomous Parliament for Gran Canaria, Onalia Bueno has criticized several times the effort that her municipality undertakes in matters of migration.
Among other things, he has demanded that Salvamento be moved to another port, because he believes that his rescues condition the normality of fishing and tourist activity at the Arguineguín dock.
And, in 2020, when the dock was saturated with more than 2,000 migrants sleeping crowded on the floor waiting for reception resources to be made available, it chartered buses so that two hundred people who left the port without an assigned destination could be transferred to the doors of the Government Delegation in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria instead of staying in the streets of Arguineguín.
