Issa Munkaila: Black Lives Matter in Villaverde too | Opinion

No one in their right mind would hesitate in Spain to show solidarity with George Floyd and with all the victims of the police brutality that in the United States has spurred Black Lives Matter, another of those movements that we seem to like more in English than in Spanish. We have appropriated him, #MeToo or Occupy Wall Street as the Black Friday, but rather lip service, because it is more difficult to think about Villaverde’s Africans than those from Minnesota.

Issa Munkaila, a Ghanaian in his 40s, died on November 5 in that humble neighborhood in the south of Madrid, crossed by four shots from four policemen that left the traces of a few more shots in various cars and containers around him. That he was homeless with mental problems, that he was upset and that he was holding a knife with which he allegedly pounced on one of the agents may be truths of the case that we should all be willing to attend to, especially if they are explained to us well. Because what is a proven truth is that the police did not report the fatal event when, for example, they disclosed that same day the rescue of several camels that had escaped from a circus. No photos of that knife have been shown, nor has any precision been given on the facts, nor on the deceased, nor on the number of shots or the parts of the body in which he was wounded. The police only respond succinctly, as EL PAÍS reported yesterday, to the journalist who wants to be interested. More questions, therefore, than information.

The police silence on the death of Munkaila coincides these days with the troubled waters around some security forces that have taken out a tank in the face of the protests in Cádiz and who are leading demonstrations against the reform of the gag law. It is respectable that they want to protest, it would be missing more, but perhaps they have not realized that the race unleashed between the PP and Vox to capitalize on the discontent can only further cloud the police image.

On the chest of Pablo Casado and Santiago Abascal the medals that they try to place to ideologize causes that they embrace as trophies of their property weigh more and more. To the cause of the monarchy as if it were its patrimony is added that of Spanishness, that of Madrid’s freedom (which the Ghanaian will no longer be able to enjoy, although surely he never did), that of educational 155 and now that of the security of our brave agents. They should know that partnering on the right can be a bad idea. @bernagharbour