At the Arguineguín pier, where seagulls fly over the waters that became a symbol of the migration collapse, much more than an improvised humanitarian response was rehearsed. There, between 2020 and 2021, a policy of exception, an opaque management machinery, and a network of patronage were incubated, which today, with the audio recordings of Minister José Luis Ábalos's advisor, Koldo García, as a catalyst, is beginning to be exposed. What seemed like sudden chaos turned out to be, to a large extent, a deliberate experiment, a kind of social engineering applied to the immigration system, where the collapse was useful: it allowed legal guarantees to be suspended, media criticism to be silenced with emergency rhetoric, and contracts to be handed out by hand, without transparency or democratic oversight.
2020 was the year the Arguineguín dock was transformed into an open-air internment camp. Up to 2.600 people were crammed into unsanitary conditions. For weeks, the government kept the public silent while in Madrid, amidst offices and tapped phones, mass deportation plans and territorial redistribution were being designed without legal protection.
The UCO documents are clear: Koldo García, then an advisor to Ábalos, offered Air Europa flights to deport migrants from the Canary Islands and communicated directly with Ángel Víctor Torres, then the regional president, and with the director general of the police. Koldo assumed duties that were not his, coordinating with Maritime Rescue, the Red Cross, and even designing institutional communication strategies. Meanwhile, the mayor was branded by the so-called synchronized opinion group as a local extremist leader. Onalia Bueno was forced to send the victims to Las Palmas due to the overcrowding.
The phrase, uttered by Koldo in a telephone conversation with the chief of the National Police, is the key to the Arguineguín experiment: turning a humanitarian emergency into a political and business opportunity. The airline Air Europa, bailed out by the state for 475 million euros, operated as a fleet for migrant transfers, in an informal fusion of public and private interests unprecedented in the archipelago. Meanwhile, the chaos served a political purpose: justifying the militarization of the Canary Islands border and reorienting the narrative toward "security." There was less talk of human rights and more of the "pull effect," of "well-dressed people with cell phones," or of "trafficking disguised as small boats." This was the narrative in Koldo's audio recordings, but also in the Moncloa government.
The concept of social engineering takes on a double meaning here. On the one hand, the manipulation of reception conditions (deliberately collapsing them, as occurred in Arguineguín) enabled the activation of a radical political response. On the other hand, the fabrication of social consensus through repeated media discourse and official statements turned exceptionalism into the norm. Migrants were invisible on the Peninsula, but hypervisible in the Canary Islands. A perception of a controlled invasion was fostered, useful both for intimidating and demobilizing. The collapse was used to impose measures without debate: handpicked contracts, closed centers, covert displacements, and the militarization of rescue operations.
Citizens, overwhelmed by the pandemic and anesthetized by a rhetoric of "control," accepted policies contrary to human rights without resistance. In that context, Arguineguín was not an accident, but a tool of social control. Five years later, the Arguineguín model has been perfected. The massive arrival of migrants to El Hierro in 2023 or the use of hotels in Tenerife, Gran Canaria, and Fuerteventura repeat the same pattern: collapse, outsourcing, silence. The networks of interests that began to form then have matured. Today they are under judicial investigation, but their effects on the Spanish immigration system remain active.
Arguineguín was the first step. That open-air laboratory, with children sleeping on thermal blankets between containers, not only tested logistical responses: it tested a model of opaque governance where the State delegated border control to informal operators, while shaping public opinion to accept it as inevitable. The sea in front of the dock no longer receives dozens of cayucos daily. But Arguineguín's legacy remains anchored in the system. In decisions made behind closed doors. In contracts without bidding. In agreed-upon silences. And in that social engineering that turned human suffering into fertile ground for business and power.
