A 20-year-old Spanish man was on Monday arrested on suspicion of murdering an 11 year old child in a small town in Toledo.
The suspect, who has not yet been named, broke into a sports pitch in the town of Mocejón and attacked a group of boys with a knife. The group managed to run away but the murdered boy, named only as Mateo in the Spanish media, tripped and fell.
He was then stabbed several times and died almost immediately.
READ ALSO: Spain in shock after boy playing football stabbed to death
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After 36 hours the alleged killer (who has since confessed) was eventually caught, and the brutal killing shocked Spain and caused widespread outrage across the country.
It also caused a frenzy of online speculation, in particular among far-right networks.
Fake news and false information spread quickly through different parts of Spain’s loosely connected online far-right, including the Desokupa movement, Alvise Pérez, the far-right influencer who was recently elected to the European Parliament, and various other Spanish social media influencers who claim to be journalists.
Much of the misinformation centred on the supposed nationality of the suspect.
On Twitter/X, one post widely shared on Spanish networks claimed that it had been ‘confirmed’ that the ’10 year old boy’ (he was 11) was killed by a ‘moro‘, meaning Moor or someone of North African descent, and that, in response, “the streets must burn now”.
This was one of many such posts on Twitter/X and Telegram either wrongly stating or insinuating that the attacker was a North African migrant and calling for protests. So immediate and widely shared were these sorts of frenzied posts that, for many, it appeared some people actually wanted the attacker to be an immigrant and that their legal and racial background was more important than the victim himself.
Incredibly, a family member of the victim who spoke to the press had to come forward and say publicly that the family had no suspicions about the perpetrator based on race or religion. In response, he was attacked online for defending migrants as part of his work as a journalist and NGO worker.
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“They’re attacking me, they’re branding me, investigating my past and saying that I have blood on my hands,” he told the Spanish press in tears.
When it emerged that the attacker was a Spaniard, their ethnic origin was questioned. If it had turned out the alleged killer was of North African descent but perhaps had Spanish nationality, whether through naturalisation or being born here, as sometimes happens, often the assertion by far-right accounts is that they are therefore not ‘really’ Spanish or are simply Spanish by law but not blood — a common far-right trope in Spain.
Tellingly, the Spanish far-right will often claim that having a Spanish ID does not make a naturalised North African Spanish, but simultaneously say that Catalan separatists are Spanish exactly because they have one.
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And as is the case in many countries, sometimes the framing of these crimes also changes depending on who the perpetrator is: white Spaniards often seem to be viewed as ‘lone wolves’ suffering from mental health problems (something already being reported in the Spanish media) while North Africans committing crimes are inevitably linked to broader narratives about migrant invasions and terrorism and crime waves.
The leader of Spain’s far-right party Vox, Santiago Abascal, was more subtle in his response to the Mocejón murder: “They are turning Spain into an unrecognisable and dangerous country for all generations,” he said on Twitter/X.
Who exactly ‘they’ are in this context is unclear, but the insinuation seems obvious. Now, it could plausibly be the government he’s talking about (Abascal has been one of the biggest critics of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez in recent years) but it could also be a more ambiguous, other ‘they’ – something Abascal knows his followers will interpret and fill in the gaps as part of this wider far-right narrative.
Vox’ leader Santiago Abascal adresses his supporters under the slogan ‘They’re going to hear us’. (Photo by Thomas COEX / AFP)
Southport parallels
Here there are some parallels with the recent race rioting in the UK following the Southport stabbing. Far-right figures and influencers in the UK also used this sort of ambiguous, coded language in the aftermath of the horrendous murder of three young girls to incite protests and violent rioting.
Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform party, widely shared conspiracy theories pushed by far-right accounts that the British state was protecting the identity of the attacker, and that he had arrived in the UK illegally on a boat.
As with Abascal, Farage is always careful to couch his language with deniability. Farage wasn’t directly saying himself that he thought the attacker was a foreigner, but that he’d heard it could be the case.
READ ALSO: What a Vox government could mean for foreigners in Spain
Similar to the disturbances in the UK, the unrelated fact that a hotel in Mocejón has been hosting unaccompanied migrant minors (known as menas in Spanish) of Senegalese origin was widely circulated on social media.
Like with the Southport incident, many far-right accounts also suggested the authorities are more reluctant to reveal the nationality of alleged criminals when they are a foreigner. However, as noted earlier, even if they were a Spaniard the far-right logic of legal versus ethnic nationality would quickly unpick this anyway.
This sort of language taps into a growing anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner and anti-tourist sentiment bubbling among a minority in Spanish society in recent years.
The anti-tourism movement in Spain certainly has justified grievances with the tourism model, which The Local has covered in detail here, but the more far-right, race-based anti-immigrant rhetoric in Spain has been propelled by fake news for a long time. This latest case is nothing new.
Spanish fact-checking website Maldita has identified at least 450 separate pieces of fake news about immigration circulating online in Spain, from claims that undocumented migrants are claiming state benefits to attributing crimes to migrants that they haven’t committed.
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The immigration effect
Do immigrants in Spain commit crimes? Of course. Are they sometimes behind rapes, violent crimes and murders? Yes, they are – to suggest otherwise would be to deny reality.
But so do Spaniards, and whenever there is such a case (of which there are many we don’t hear about or pass through the news cycle unnoticed) the Spanish far-right networks fall strangely silent and seem far less concerned about whipping up an online frenzy.
Immigration is an increasingly polarising topic in Spanish society. This latest online frenzy is evidence of that. But those that decry the fact that migrant numbers have gone up by 43 percent since 2018 and that Spain is becoming ‘too’ multicultural should also consider the benefits.
READ MORE: Canary Islands migrant arrivals soar as Spain’s PM eyes west Africa trip
Of 6.63 million foreigners living in Spain, 78 percent are working and contributing taxes to the social security system, the highest rate in Europe. This in turn guarantees the pensions and public healthcare of an ageing Spanish population that will have the world longest life expectancy in the world in the next two decades.
Foreigners also have more children than Spaniards (1.35 compared to 1.12), which secures another generation of homegrown workers for the following decades.
Immigration can certainly bring negative side effects to Spain, some of which are fair criticisms and some of which are overblown by far-right commentators. But currently the broad strokes benefits clearly outweigh aspects such as a lack of integration, radicalism and crime by a small percentage of migrants.
Although details about his motives are yet to be revealed, the man who on Sunday August 18th murdered an 11-year-old boy in Mocejón most likely didn’t commit this heinous crime because of his or the victim’s race, creed, culture or nationality.
What is clearer is that in the current context of fake news about immigration, aided by Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter/X, Spain is just as exposed to xenophobic misinformation as the UK, France, the US or any other nation.
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