sensitive individuals. Next to them, the
head of the Epidemiological Surveillance
Unit is in constant contact with the
regional government of Madrid, which
has sent two specialists to explain the
functioning of the computer application
they work with or any other questions
about their job. It is 11 September,
the soldiers’ first day as trackers, and
everything is going according to plan.
They are part of the operation
Mission Baluarte, launched by the
Defence Ministry and led by the new
head of the Operations Command,
Lieutenant General Francisco Braco.
Once again, as with Operation Balmis,
all the interventions of the armed forces
are coordinated from the Retamares
base in Madrid, including the work of the
trackers.
Through the UME, the Defence
Department, has trained some 7,000
soldiers as trackers, who have been
offered by the government to Spain’s
President of Melilla Eduardo de Castro shows interest in the work carried out by the military trackers
at the city’s monitoring centre.
regions and cities. Fifteen of these
regions —all except Catalonia and the
Basque Country— have accepted the
offer and have been integrating military
members into their health systems.
At the close of this edition, some
3,000 trackers requested by the regional
governments were already working to try
to curb the spread of the epidemic.
Ciudad Autónoma de Melilla
TRANSFER OF COMPETENCIES
The first trackers of the UME were the
spearheads of Mission Baluarte. “As in
Operation Balmis, in order to give the
rest of the military units enough time
to be trained and create their teams”,
explained unit commander, Lieutenant
General Luis Manuel Martínez Meijide,
on the first day of contact tracing. “We
>SERGEANT CHRISTIAN SEVILLA RICÓS / ARMY
“We are warmly welcomed when
we say we are from the military”
SERGEANT Sevilla has found three different profiles among the
people he has traced from the COVID Coordination Centre in
Mallorca, where he works with civilian nurses. “There are those
who cannot hold back their tears when they find out that a family member
has tested positive, those who accept the result and are willing to do
whatever it takes and those who are in denial”. That is what happened
to one lady and her daughter: “They claimed that they were fine and
that they were not going to self-quarantine because they were afraid
of losing their jobs”. In the end, I managed to talk some sense into
them and whenever I called them, for monitoring purposes, they were
at home. If someone refuses to follow the rules, we apply the protocol:
“We call 112 and then we report to the State Security Forces, who show
up at their address and make sure they do not leave their home”.
When he has to deal with difficult cases, he remembers the
training received from the Defence Department and the Balearic
Region where “we also worked with real cases”. He is aware that his
main tools as a tracker are his voice and a persuasive attitude. “Most
people give us a warm welcome, in particular, when we tell them that
we are from the Ministry of Defence and that we work for the COVID
Coordination Centre”.
8 Revista Española de Defensa December 2020