The Círculo de Empresarios y Profesionales del Sur de Tenerife (CEST) has claimed there is an ‘urgent’ need for more agents of the Guardia Civil and the National Police in the main tourist areas of the south to maintain the image of a "safe and calm" destination.
After learning of the information published last week that only nine of this year’s 66 new Guardia Civil officers that have been deployed in the Canary Islands as reinforcements will go to the south of Tenerife, the president of CEST, Javier Cabrera, has warned that "Improving the human and material resources available to the State security forces in the region is really urgent”.
Cabrera criticizes that "the Ministry del Interior continues to turn its back on a reality that risks the image of a safe and calm destination that the institutions themselves boast of. They continue to ignore an indisputable fact because the data shows that the population of the eight municipalities in the south of Tenerife has almost doubled in the last 20 years, going from 150,000 inhabitants in 2002 to more than 250,000 in 2022”.
The president of CEST explained that “There is a Guardia Civil Job List Catalogue which, in 2002, estimated that the number of agents needed to offer an optimal service was 80. Twenty years later, and despite the exponential growth of the population, there are only 52 agents in the south, so we are already starting from a deficit situation to which a solution must be found as soon as possible”.
In addition, as Cabrera added, “No new infrastructures have been built in the last forty years. For a long time, CEST has been demanding a new barracks in the Las Chafiras area and, although it seems that there is a principle of agreement with the San Miguel de Abona City Council to cede some facilities to the Guardia Civil for traffic, it continues without being enough to cover the real security needs of a growing population in this region”.
