Risking injury and arrest, African migrants storm a gate

For thousands of desperate sub-Saharan Africans, it is a foreboding but tantalizingly close passage to a better life: A 20-foot-high fence guarding the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, one of only two land borders between Europe and Africa.

Early Friday morning, as many as 600 African migrants stormed a gate in the 5-milelong barrier that separates Morocco from the seaside city of Ceuta on the tip of Morocco — some of them cutting themselves on the fence’s barbed wire or fracturing bones.

Even though some of the migrants were exhausted, bloodied and bruised as they gathered near a shortterm immigration center in Ceuta, a city of about 85,000 people, they were jubilant.

More than 300 managed to reach the city, Spanish news reports said, instantly exposing them to a world suffused with Spanish culture and peppered with picturesque beaches, tapas bars and palm trees.

The others were pushed back by Moroccan security forces. The Associated Press reported that at about 6 a.m., surveillance cameras near the border had captured 600 people making their way to the fence, some of them gripping tools and clubs to breach the gate in a bid to reach the Spanish territory.

The AP said that two migrants and three civil guards had been injured and hospitalized after a clash along a part of the fence, while at least 10 members of the Moroccan armed forces had also been hurt. Hundreds of others who were injured were treated by Red Cross workers in Ceuta, news reports said.

Few borders in the world are more emblematic of the separation between the “haves” and the “have-nots” than the fortified borders of Ceuta and Melilla, Spain’s autonomous enclaves on the northern African coast.

The promise of European prosperity appears seductively close to those who have endured poverty or have fled violence on the African side, which explained the joyous and unrestrained reaction from those who made it.

Determined to get to Europe, thousands of migrants, many of them living illegally in Morocco, attempt the journey to Ceuta or Melilla each year, camping outside as they plot how to scale the barricades.