Gonzalo Sanz, chief of staff to the government delegate in Ceuta, resigned on Friday, 11 September 2026. The trigger was documents from the Centro Nacional de Inteligenciadeclassified this week, which show that on 29 July 2026 his office received, via WhatsApp and in a subsequent phone call, information about a call circulating on social media for mass border crossings.
According to the documents, the information referred to posts in Facebookgroups with a combined total of around 180,000 subscribers, which announced attempts for the following day to swim across the border and climb the fence in Ceuta. A phone briefing lasting around eleven minutes between a member of the intelligence service and a member of the cabinet is also recorded. According to the government’s account in Madrid this was not a formal alert, but routine information-sharing; the information was also passed on to other security agencies, including the Guardia Civil.
The government delegate Miguel Ángel Pérez Triano said he had not personally received the WhatsApp message and had not taken part in the phone briefing. In his resignation statement, Sanz countered that he had forwarded the written message of 29 July to the delegate. The conflicting accounts had led to an “obvious incompatibility” which, he said, made his resignation necessary. The Delegación del Gobierno in Ceuta has thus laid bare a major crisis of confidence.
The mass border crossings took place on 30 and 31 July 2026. Political pressure has mounted since the documents were released on Wednesday: opposition parties speak of failures in the early-warning chain, while the government stresses that the information shared was part of routine situation reporting. Representatives in Ceuta are calling for clear rules on responsibilities governing the flow of information between the intelligence service, government delegations and security forces.
It is unclear whether there will be a parliamentary inquiry. Both coalition and opposition sources are considering steps to examine communication channels, decision-making procedures and responsibilities surrounding the events at the end of July. No reliable prediction can currently be made about personnel consequences beyond Gonzalo Sanz’s resignation.
Editor: Phillipe Schmidt-Araguin (Article created with AI assistance).