The City Council of La Laguna yesterday presented the results of the investigation of its anti-rumour strategy, promoted by the Social Welfare Area in collaboration with the ULL, for the prevention of racism, xenophobia and discrimination in the municipality. The document was presented by the mayor, Luis Yeray Gutiérrez; the mayor of the area, Rubens Ascanio; the director of the Tenerife Immigration Observatory and person in charge of the project, Vicente Zapata, and the technician of this initiative, Verónica Pascual.
Thus, La Laguna becomes “the first municipality in the Canary Islands to implement this strategy to fight rumors” and prejudices about migrants, Ascanio pointed out, who indicated that the next step will be to implement, “in a few weeks”, of a participatory action plan for 2022 and 2023 with awareness actions and that “entails an economic commitment”, still to be defined. He emphasized that “we are committed to a municipality where rumors associated with prejudice and stereotypes have no place.”
Likewise, the mayor stressed that La Laguna “is and will be a welcoming, tolerant and inclusive municipality.” For this reason, “we are going to continue working to fight against the stereotypes linked to migration and diversity, which are being used politically in a tortuous and intolerable way,” he added.
The project began last summer with the collaboration of neighbors, associations and entities and identified that the most widespread false rumors are statements such as that migrants have preferential access to social assistance, that they commit criminal acts and generate insecurity, and that they take jobs away of work. Against what an argument has been developed based on the data and the experience of the professionals.
A fact that Ascanio highlighted was that 60% of those interviewed consider the coexistence between locals and migrants to be positive. In addition, he pointed out that “only 33% of the population of La Laguna was born in the municipality”, which makes “we are a multicultural municipality”, valued Vicente Zapata.
Zapata announced some of the results of the report issued after the working visit of a group from the EU’s Intercultural Cities program, which states that “La Laguna is a reference municipality in terms of promoting social coexistence, which is being protected against hate speech.
Meanwhile, Verónica Pascual explained details of the diagnosis, such as that “most of the negative rumors are mainly associated with people from African countries, compared to people from Latin America, a situation associated with the installation of temporary reception devices ”.
Regarding these centers, the mayor affirmed that “we have detected, in general terms, a coexistence that has been peaceful”, and of their closure, he recalled that the State has transferred that in the first quarter of this year the of Las Raíces and, on that of Las Canteras, he sent “a message of solidarity to the rest of the municipal administrations so that they do their bit to be able to close these centers”.
