Blas Acosta rescues AMF’s roadmap
Blas Acosta has taken up AMF’s thesis of integrating the southern enclave into the Puertos del Estado network while he launches an attack on the management of Beatriz Calzada as head of the Las Palmas Port Authority.
In the backroom of Canary port politics, turns in the script often reflect old blueprints kept in a drawer. The PSOE in Fuerteventura, led by former Pájara mayor Blas Acosta, has decided to revive the 2023 roadmap drawn up by Asambleas Municipales de Fuerteventura (AMF) to remove the port of Morro Jable from the regional orbit and fully integrate it into the Puertos del Estado network.
In January 2023, then Pájara mayor Pedro Armas (AMF) held a discreet meeting in Madrid with Álvaro Rodríguez Dapena, who at the time was president of Puertos del Estado—today a board member at the council of the Las Palmas Port Authority—to establish the first official contact and begin the transfer of the infrastructure. That meeting in Spain’s capital was supported by the then president of the state entity in Las Palmas, Luis Ibarra (PSOE). “It was going to be our star plan for 2023 and 2027 thanks to Ibarra’s logical coherence. We knew that putting that proposal on the table openly would have the support of the PSOE in the Canaries and the rejection of the PSOE in Fuerteventura of Blas, who now copies us. Welcome to logic; others would have used it to generate tension. We chose discretion; but we were going to get, in a single stroke, giant investments that this crew has wiped out,” a leader of AMF said this Tuesday.
The deal outlined an ambitious investment plan from the state system to clear up land access routes and divert heavy traffic away from the tourist hub—at the very moment when the south of the island was awaiting the country’s biggest hotel investment, the refurbishment of the Stella Canaris complex, “which also didn’t happen because no work was done,” an AMF leader recalled. Political prudence at the time advised against publicising the photo of the Madrid pact. AMF was governing Pájara then in a coalition with Coalición Canaria, an alliance that would fall apart weeks later over town-planning disagreements. After the electoral shift of May 2023, the roadmap was consigned to oblivion.
The municipal ownership dilemma and Pájara’s amnesia
Three years later, the proposal returns to public debate in a retooled form as a throwaway weapon against the current regional government. However, the plan runs into a legal detail that local politics often overlooks. The port of Morro Jable—a key node for the maritime connections that AMF cemented by bringing Fred. Olsen operations in front of Gran Canaria’s capital— is, under strict legal criteria, municipal property.
The current transfer to the Autonomous Community is the result of a simple transfer of powers due to the town hall’s lack of means to manage an infrastructure of that scale. Curiously, the Pájara council, led by a pact between the PSOE and CC, has eight non-local Socialist councillors, a factor that explains the collective amnesia regarding the ownership of the facility when putting forward offers for institutional transfer.
The push against Beatriz Calzada and the transport bill
The PSOE’s move responds to a strategy of direct attrition against Beatriz Calzada, president of the Las Palmas Port Authority (CC). Acosta formally proposed ceding both Morro Jable and Corralejo to the Puertos del Estado network to ensure that the operating benefits generated by both facilities remain on the island and are not used to subsidise smaller installations in the western province.
The Socialist leader accused the Canary Islands Government directly of using the province’s biggest industrial tool as a party stepping stone. In Acosta’s words, Calzada’s appointment aligns with the interests of an aspiring mayoral candidate in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria who “didn’t even manage to lead the electoral slate.” Under PSOE theses, inefficiency at the top of the port is being paid for by Fuerteventura companies and families, which are already affected by an overcost in freight transport of up to 78%.
By aligning its message with the thesis of a separate Port Authority for the eastern islands—an historical demand backed since 2016 by Lanzarote—the PSOE rules out that administrative segregation will solve the problem in the short term. Acosta recalled that the Recast Text of the Ports Law gives the regional government the power to propose to the Ministry of Transport the removal of the president. The battle for control of the majorero docks thus shifts from the berths to the offices, reopening a war of competencies between the state and the Autonomous Community in the busy maritime corridor of the Canary south. Meanwhile, Morocco is growing in Tarfaya and Fuerteventura is growing without PIF.
The entry El PSOE de Fuerteventura rescata el plan de AMF para traspasar Morro Jable a Puertos del Estado was first published on canarymaritime.com.
