The bitter blossoms of Spain

Rape, immigration, and suicidal empathy

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“There was much in it that I did not understand … but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

– George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

A beautiful young woman named Noelia Castillo Ramos has become the face of one of Spain’s most bitter moral arguments. After a long and painful legal battle, her request for euthanasia was formally approved in Catalonia in 2024. The Spanish government executed her today. This is not the nation’s first euthanasia case, but what turned hers into a national drama was her father’s repeated and desperate pleas to prevent her execution, arguing that she had mental health issues — depression, autism, and borderline personality disorder — that undermined her ability to make such a decision. Borderline personality disorder can indeed cause suicidal thoughts, but the standard treatment is close monitoring and therapy, not killing the person if they ask.

Nevertheless, courts rejected the father’s pleas again and again, and today the state put Noelia out of her misery. For many, this story is one about the morality of euthanasia. But for others, it’s a story about the horrors of European immigration. Noelia’s troubles began when she was brutally gang-raped in a state-run center for vulnerable youth. As a result, in 2022, she stepped out of a fifth-floor window. She survived, but fractured her spine and was left unable to walk and in constant physical agony thereafter. We don’t know who her rapists were because Spain does not report the ethnicity or country of origin for such perpetrators, fearing that this will lead to racial tensions. But we can make an educated guess. Using Spain’s Justice Ministry data, Visegrad24 reports that in Catalonia, where she was raped, 91% of rapists in prison are foreigners, despite making up only 17% of the region’s population.

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In 2018, NPR reported on the fact that African women migrants to Spain were arriving with horrific experiences of rape. NPR being NPR, they didn’t report on African men raping Spanish women, or African men raping African women, or even Spanish rape victims, but by reporting on African rape victims, you got a glimpse into the world from which they were fleeing — the world Spain has decided to import. In its November 2025 report, “Demography of Crime in Spain,” researchers at the conservative think tank CEU-CEFAS warn about “imported crime” due to mass immigration. They note that foreigners, who make up only 31% of Spain’s prisoners, commit 500% more rapes and 414% more murders than Spanish citizens.

The report also notes that, given Spain’s aging population, there should have been a steep decline in murders and rapes over recent years, but that the influx of migrants from Latin American and African countries — places with some of the world’s highest murder and rape rates — has led to a different outcome. Nor is this at all restricted to Catalonia. An internal police document from Navarre showed that foreign nationals accounted for nearly 63% of sexual offense arrests and over 73% of homicide arrests in the region, with Morocco and Algeria being the most frequently represented countries of origin among suspects.

But whenever I share such information with left-leaning friends, the response is invariably the same. Rape is illegal, so rape will be punished. Instead of discriminating against migrants, why not simply punish rapists, regardless of their background? Putting aside the strain this places on police, courts, and prisons in countries across Europe and North America, this line of reasoning also assumes that rape is, in fact, being punished. In 2019, for example, five men were acquitted in Barcelona after gang raping a young woman. The court ruled it was not rape because she was unconscious. The court added that the men did not use violence to rape her. But of course, they didn’t use violence because she wasn’t awake and therefore she didn’t resist. This is not an isolated case either. Far from it. But maybe you’re thinking this is confined to the squalid parts of certain cities. A problem, sure, but an avoidable one. Unfortunately, however, that is not the case either.

In 2024, Spaniard David Lledo saw three Moroccan migrants raping a 15-year-old girl outside his home in the posh village of Gata de Gorgos. The migrants had been squatting in a nearby vacation home. When David rushed to save the young girl, the migrants beat him to death with a baseball bat. David left behind five children. Nor has the problem improved. Just last month, a Senegalese migrant who raped a 14-year-old Spanish girl was ordered to pay a fine instead of going to prison, even though he openly admitted in court to raping the girl. This past February, in the exclusive Retiro area of Madrid, a 22-year-old Colombian, living illegally in Madrid and with a prior criminal record, was arrested after allegedly raping, beating, and robbing a 20-year-old woman. And this month, in the upscale district of Chamartín near the Santiago Bernabéu stadium, five minors of Spanish, Dominican, and Honduran nationality were arrested for stabbing a 14-year-old boy.

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One of the largest rape scandals in Spanish history is known as caso de La Manada, or “the Wolf Pack case.” It involved the 2016 gang rape of an 18-year-old woman during the San Fermín festival in Pamplona. Five men led the young girl into a building, raped her, beat her, filmed it all, and took her phone so she couldn’t call for help after. The case sparked national outrage. The BBC reported that it “galvanized Spain’s feminists” because the initial ruling treated the rape as a lesser sexual-abuse offense rather than rape. Thankfully, Spain’s Supreme Court later reversed that and sentenced the five men to 15 years. Feminists ranted about Spain’s “rape culture.” But the men were Spanish, not foreigners. So then what happens when nonwhite foreign men rape Spanish girls at levels never before seen? When the justice system fails to punish them? Do feminist activists flood the streets over incidents like these? Does the BBC report the story? Or do we get a mixture of leftists telling us why we really need to open the doors to more immigration along with a dose of media silence?

And despite it all, Spain recently announced it will give half a million undocumented migrants legal status. At the same time, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced the government will deploy an AI hate tracker, so as Spain brings more murderers and rapists into the country, and refuses to report their race, ethnicity, or religion, and refuses to punish them for raping young girls, it will also now likely punish anyone who speaks up about it, especially if they mention the perpetrator’s race or religion. Anyone who hops online to express frustration or anger over the latest MENA rape scandal will likely be fined or arrested for “spreading hate.” The United Kingdom is the blueprint.

In Barcelona, the arrival of spring is signaled each year by the pink petals of Judas trees and the fragrance of bitter orange blossoms. This year, after the government executed Noelia earlier today, the symbolic significance of those Judas trees and those bitter blossoms takes on a new meaning.