They have just bought the Canary Islands-based company Unión Martín, turned fishing into a financial business and are now complaining. At assemblies of the Bloque Nacionalista Galego (BNG), the script is sacred: anti-imperialist rhetoric, fierce criticism of the European free market, banners denouncing neocolonial extractivism and declared support for Agenda 2030. Yet when the boats of the Galician fleet see their campaign in the Mauritanian fishing grounds threatened, Marxist dialectics undergoes a miraculous transformation: the class struggle is put on hold, the Communist Manifesto is tucked away in a drawer, and the absolute priority becomes getting the European Union to ease its regulations and speed up the transfer of euros to Africa.
Néstor Rego, the BNG’s spokesperson in Congress, has led the parliamentary crusade demanding that the central government pressure Brussels to renew the fishing agreement with Mauritania at breakneck speed before it expires on November 14. It is fascinating to observe how sovereignist fervor and anti-capitalist rhetoric dissolve as soon as they come into contact with salt water. Those who denounce EU bureaucracy and its globalist sustainability policies at rallies suddenly become the most fervent defenders of Community agreements and administrative speed in Brussels.
They want Mauritania to be a colony of Galicia
The paradox borders on theatrical art. In the morning, the official discourse abhors the free trade that exploits the resources of countries in the Global South. In the afternoon, the urgency is to demand that the fleet not lose a single day of work in Mauritanian waters, lest stalled negotiations prevent it from continuing to extract resources off the African coast. Agenda 2030, marine protection and environmental restrictions—concepts viewed with suspicion by the movement’s most radical wing because they are considered inventions of big capital—become bureaucratic nuisances that ‘negatively affect vessels’.
Néstor Rego has warned dramatically that deadlines are running out and that processing a new agreement could take months. Faced with the prospect of ships being left in port, the BNG has not hesitated to call for the Spanish government’s ‘immediate intervention’ with the Community authorities. The raised fist holds up very well in Obradoiro Square, but in the fishing grounds of the South Atlantic, there is nothing more effective than European diplomacy and the free movement of goods.
The article Fishing: Galicia’s Marxist BNG Does Not Want Agenda 2030 in Mauritania was first published on canarymaritime.com.
