Adassat Goya González, stevedore on leave from the port of Tenerife, now has another front: as director of the Canarian Health Service, he must attend to the arrival of passengers from the MV Hondius cruise from Cape Verde. This has hindered the right-wing stevedore led by another Goya González, Antolín, a member of the board of directors of Ports of Tenerife, from defending the protective protocols for their conservative affiliates. The existence of biological risks for workers has been reported by two unions outside the 1978 Regime: Tenerife Port Workers (TPT) and CSIF, the civil servants’ union. In other words, land staff in both cases.
Adassat Goya González welcomes the ship from Cape Verde and Antolín Goya will sign the closure act due to media starvation of the conservative stevedores’ union in Tenerife. The arrival of the MV Hondius marks the end of what seemed to be an unbreakable union hegemony. The Independent and Civil Servants Union (CSIF) and the Port Workers’ Union (TPT) have achieved something previously unthinkable: taking the all-powerful Stevedores Coordinator out of the game. The ‘knockout’ has not been physical, but political and strategic, taking advantage of a deafening silence stemming from the internal contradictions of the stevedoring leadership that in 2026 defends the premium social protection provided by the dictatorship of General Franco.
Right-wing union corpse
The hantavirus crisis has exposed an uncomfortable reality for the so-called right-wing stevedores. While the bases demanded clear protocols and safety upon the arrival of a ship with three deaths behind it, the leadership of the Coordinator has maintained an invisible profile. The reason for this mutism has a name and surname, and is today seated in the highest offices of the health administration: the duality of interests embodied by its historical leader, Antolín Goya González.
Knocked out
The conflict of interests is, for many port workers, an impossible Gordian knot to untie. The fact that the spiritual and strategic leader of the stevedores is today a key piece in the machinery of the Government of the Canary Islands —directly linked to the management of health and public order— has hampered any capacity for protest from the majority union. Adassat Goya is not a newcomer to the power plays of Coalición Canaria. His trajectory is that of a party man camouflaged under the coverall of a stevedore leader who was the councilman of Economy, Finance, Police, and Civil Protection in El Sauzal from 2007 to 2023, including the lead years of Paulino Rivero.
This accumulation of positions, which included the delegated councilorship of the municipal company SEMUSA, conflicts directly with the rhetoric of union independence that the Coordinator has sold for decades. By holding trusted positions in the same party that today manages the ship’s arrival through the Canarian Health Service, the Coordinator’s capacity to pressure the administration has evaporated. They cannot be hammer and anvil at the same time. Antolín Goya’s silence regarding the MV Hondius crisis is, in reality, the silence of a union manager who prefers not to stir the waters he is trying to calm.
Contradictions that sink
In light of this leadership vacuum, the CSIF and TPT have taken the communicative and operational lead. It has been these unions that have focused on the vulnerability of the workers of the Santa Cruz de Tenerife Port Authority, demanding the guarantees that the Coordinator, due to union discipline, has preferred to omit. The diagnostic aggressiveness of TPT has made it evident that the stevedoring industry is no longer a monolithic block.
The trajectory of Goya between 2016 and 2023 as coordinator of the Container Terminal for the Aleática group, coupled with his position in Sestife CPE since 2006, paints a profile closer to the executive and political elite than to the grassroots worker who today fears the virus’s arrival. The right-wing stevedores, accustomed to dictating the pace of the port, have been forced to attend as spectators to the organization of the Granadilla protocol. Goya’s low profile in this issue is not a tactical choice but a imposition of his new reality as part of the regional power structure.
Will remain as a floating union
The result is a paradigm shift in the Ports of Tenerife. CSIF has occupied the space for technical labor defense, while TPT has consolidated as the voice of those without commitments to the Department of Health. The ‘administrative humanism’ that the Government of the Canary Islands preaches to justify the reception of the Hondius finds in the Coordinator’s silence its best ally, but resentment is growing at the base towards a leadership that seems to have traded combative spirit for institutional peace.
When on Saturday the MV Hondius secures its moorings in Granadilla, the image of External Health technicians boarding will also be the image of a moral victory for the unions that have not remained silent. CSIF and TPT have demonstrated that control of the port no longer passes exclusively through the Coordinator’s offices, especially when those offices have a direct line to the upper echelons of Coalición Canaria. The hantavirus crisis will pass, but the union fracture in the port of Tenerife, evidenced by the inaction of a political leadership that has become public management, will mark a point of no return in the history of Canarian stevedoring.
