This week in Morro Jable, Fuerteventura, a man was arrested. Brutal attack on a foreign resident, 17 stitches in the face. On Telegram channels, the news immediately ran as a supposed far-right hate attack.
The police say something else. They say: robbery with violence. Operation "PUSILK". The victim had been out drinking with friends, came back alone, was followed by two hooded men, knocked down from behind, kicked — and his belongings were taken. Classic robbery pattern.
Is it a hate crime? Probably not. Theft is not racism.
But.
While that one act is not a hate crime, there is something on the Canary Islands that the police have known about for years and that national and EU authorities have warned about repeatedly. A real, documented wave of racist violence. Beginning online, ending on the street. With convictions. With victims. With perpetrators who were sometimes police officers themselves.
This is the story that's actually happening.
The officer who wouldn't tolerate "Sudacas" on his island
12 February 2021, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, just before ten in the evening. Two local police officers off duty, drunk, crossing the street. They hear a group of pedestrians speaking Spanish — with an Argentinian accent.
"What are you doing on my island?" one of them shouts. "Sudaca de mierda" — fucking Sudaca, a slur for Latin Americans. "Get out of Gran Canaria."
Then they start hitting. Four men are attacked, one suffers a torn thumb ligament, bruises to the face and ear. Ten days unable to work.
Residents come over, ask the officers to stop. The officers flash their badges. The residents step back.
The officers aren't done. Shortly afterwards they spot another man with "Asian appearance, dark skin" — he's a Nepalese man who barely speaks Spanish. "Fucking immigrant", "go back to your country", "blackie". Blows to the head, slaps, shoves.
The Audiencia Provincial in Las Palmas convicted both in 2024 of a hate crime. The Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Canarias raised the sentence on appeal from one year to a year and a half in prison and four and a half years of professional disqualification. The verdict is final.
The judgment notes: the officers acted "in coordination, jointly, with an unmistakable racist background".
These weren't just anyone. These were two officers of the local police of the Canary capital.
The Moor hunt
Wind back a few weeks. November and December 2020. The Canaries were hit by a migration wave of unprecedented scale — over 22,000 people arrived in 2020 in patera boats, many were housed in hotels.
What began as a humanitarian emergency turned into one of the darkest episodes of the recent Canarian past.
On WhatsApp, groups organised under the name "La caza del moro" — the Moor hunt. Audio recordings later passed to the magazine lamarea.com documented sentences like *"Estamos armados hasta arriba. Los moros van a morir"* — we're armed to the teeth, the Moors are going to die.
The Fundación Cruz Blanca, which managed a migrant centre in the El Lasso district of Las Palmas, documented nine attacks on Moroccan residents in a single week. Three formal complaints were filed with the Policía Nacional.
The attacks:
- A man approached a young Moroccan migrant with a machete, filming himself doing it
- Hooded individuals fired starter pistols at a North African family
- Stones were thrown from the roof of the migrant centre
- Cruz Roja warned residents not to leave the building for 48 hours
On 13 December 2020, dozens of locals gathered outside hotels housing migrants. *"¡Fuera moros! ¡Van a pagar, cabrones!"* — Moors out, you'll pay, bastards.
The Las Palmas prosecutor opened hate-crime investigations against several members of the WhatsApp groups.
The burnt girl
Jump to 2025. 16 July, four in the morning, Calle Roque Nublo in the La Isleta district of Las Palmas. A fire in a squatted apartment. A 17-year-old girl suffers burns over more than 50 per cent of her body.
The Policía Nacional arrests a 20-year-old Moroccan migrant — Abarrafía H. — who was with her in the flat. He had arrived a few weeks earlier in a patera in Lanzarote.
What happened online next was documented by the Observatorio Español de Racismo y Xenofobia, the monitoring office of the Interior Ministry. In July, hate messages against North Africans exploded on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and X.
86 per cent of the documented hate content that month targeted North Africans. Calls to violence rose from three per cent in June to twelve per cent in July.
What was being written? *"Son mierda"* — they're shit. *"Animales salvajes"* — wild animals. *"Hay que destripar al moro"* — gut the Moor. *"Tiros en la cabeza para todos"* — bullets in the head for them all. Skin the Moor alive and bathe him in bleach.
Vox leader Santiago Abascal wrote on Facebook on 28 July: *"Sánchez has not had one word for the women raped these last weeks. Nor for the girl burned alive by a savage who arrived recently in a patera."*
A demonstration in La Isleta was promoted with posters showing the girl's face and flames — caption: *"One aggressor: a 20-year-old Moroccan, just arrived by patera, with a deportation order, living in a squatted flat."* Podemos, Izquierda Unida and CCOO asked the Government Delegation to ban the demo for inciting racism. The demo went ahead anyway.
After 57 days in prison, Abarrafía H. was released. The girl testified in court: he tried to save her. The fire was an accident. Judge Tomás Martín concluded that she had been trapped in the room and would not have got out without him.
A remarkable detail from the court order: the witness who called emergency line 112 and accused Abarrafía was, five days earlier, part of an organised manhunt against Moroccan migrants in La Isleta. Several migrants had to take refuge in the police station that day.
After the acquittal, Vox leader Abascal still called Abarrafía "monster" and "killer". The hate vocabulary remained.
What the numbers say — and what they don't
The Spanish Interior Ministry publishes an annual report on hate crimes. The 2024 figures:
- 1,955 hate crimes or hate-motivated incidents in total — a 13.8 per cent drop from 2023
- 804 of these for racism and xenophobia — the largest category, slight decrease of 6 per cent
- 528 for sexual orientation or gender identity
- 181 for sex/gender discrimination
The seemingly good numbers hide a problem: the report itself notes that the dark figure of unreported racist hate crimes is estimated at 80 to 90 per cent. The real number would therefore be closer to 6,000 cases per year in Spain. Probably more.
We don't have separate figures for the Canary Islands. The Interior Ministry reports don't break things down by region. What we have is the documented individual cases, the convictions, the police reports.
What is certain: media and judicial attention are heightened on the Canaries — not because more happens here than elsewhere, but because the islands have become Europe's number-one migration entry point since 2020. Over 60,000 migrants arrived in 2024. In 2025 the number fell by 80 per cent.
How politics plays along
In July 2024, Vox broke its municipal coalitions with the Partido Popular in five Spanish regions — over a row about distributing 400 unaccompanied minor migrants from the Canary Islands to the mainland.
Vox spokeswoman Rocío de Meer announced in 2025 that she would "deport around eight million" migrants who had "not adapted" — including those of the second generation, born in Spain or arrived before the age of 12.
Vox launched its EU election programme in May 2024 demonstratively outside a migrant reception centre in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
On the Canaries, the regional coalition adopted the vocabulary. President Fernando Clavijo (Coalición Canaria) spoke of *"Estamos al límite"* — we are at the limit. The message: migration is a burden, not a problem of the wider society. The left counters that the real problem is housing, work, and mass tourism, not 22,000 patera migrants in a year.
In October 2024, thousands demonstrated in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Santa Cruz de Tenerife against "irregular migration". *"We are not racist, we have just been too welcoming"*, one demonstrator told the AFP news agency.
In May 2025, the courts closed a centre for unaccompanied minor migrants in Tafira (Gran Canaria) after twelve minors filed complaints of mistreatment, threats, and assaults by staff. Nine workers were arrested — for assault and hate crimes. The foundation responsible had already been investigated by the anti-corruption prosecutor.
What's really going on
Anyone trying to see clearly has to keep two things separate.
One is the organised racist violence against Moroccan, North African and African migrants, who mainly arrive in patera boats. It is real, documented, known to the police, condemned by the courts. It feeds on a charged debate over patera migration, in which Vox and parts of the PP play a central role, and which Coalición Canaria at least tacitly accepts.
The other is everyday crime, of the kind that happens in every tourist town in the world — thefts, street robberies, fights. When a "foreign resident" is robbed and brutally beaten in Morro Jable, that's a crime. But not automatically a hate crime.
Mixing the two is dangerous.
If every attack on a foreigner is reflexively sold as a far-right hate attack, the real hate-crime victims lose visibility. If the 2020 Moor hunt and a 2026 street robbery are thrown into the same pot, no one is helped — except those who can say "the left exaggerates the racism charge".
The reverse: if the real cases — the two convicted police officers, the 2020 WhatsApp manhunt, the 86 per cent anti-North-Africa hate of July 2025, the closed migrant centre in Tafira — are played down or ignored because they're inconvenient, then we normalise violence.
Both happen. Both are wrong.
What you need to know as a resident or tourist
If you live as a foreigner on the Canaries: You are very probably safe. The Canary Islands have a crime rate below the Spanish average. The majority of the population is tolerant, friendly, used to foreigners — the islands have been living off tourism and migration from all over the world for decades.
If you live in the surroundings of a patera-migrant centre — like El Lasso, La Isleta, or parts of Tafira — you should be aware of the political tension. Here the chance of getting caught up in an anti-migration demonstration or its aftermath is real.
If you look North African or Black: Statistically, you have a higher risk of being targeted by discrimination or attacks — not just on the Canaries, but across Spain. Hate crimes can be reported at any police station. The Oficina Nacional de Lucha contra los Delitos de Odio (National Office Against Hate Crimes) has a dedicated channel.
If you're here as a tourist: The likelihood of being the victim of a politically motivated attack is exceptionally low. Ordinary tourist crime — pickpocketing, street robbery at night — is what to watch for. As anywhere else in the world.
Where this leads
The Canaries are not a place of hate. But they are not immune to what's happening across Europe and Spain either.
A wave of racist online incitement against North African migrants is statistically well documented. Political actors amplify it. Individual incidents — from police hate violence in 2021 to organised manhunts in 2020 and online hate avalanches in 2025 — show where it can lead.
At the same time, the easy headline *"Anti-foreigner mob on the Canaries"* is wrong. The majority of locals protest against what they experience as an unjust distribution of the migration burden — not against foreigners as such. Most of these demonstrators explicitly reject violence. Some still tip into the hate discourse.
What's really burning isn't Fuerteventura in April 2026, where two hooded men robbed a man. What's really burning are the WhatsApp groups planning "Moor hunts". The hate hashtags that reach thousands of people within hours of the next incident. The political rhetoric that frames migrants as a threat. The police officers who, in uniform and off duty, beat up "Sudacas".
That is the story. It's uglier than a street robbery in Morro Jable. And more honest.
Anyone who loves the Canaries — as a resident or as a visitor — should take it seriously.