Manacles who defends life
This is an article in defense of pro-life people. The real ones, not the fundamentalists who blame women for choosing their own destiny. Of the people and groups who put their body and face on the line to defend the common good: the land, the water, the air we breathe. The defense of a dignified life for everyone, because it is impossible to live well if your neighbor has nowhere to fall dead, or a roof to protect them, as Schopenhauer rightly reminds us.
The entire system that surrounds us is oriented in the opposite direction: to extract the maximum benefit from the environment and from people, without caring much about the consequences. The problem is reduced to "managing flows well," as the employers' association argues, practicing absenteeism from a reality that we residents are increasingly less able to tolerate. This summer is being particularly bloody. Not only because with the excuse of the eclipse we will once again break records for tourists and human pressure, but also because cruise multinationals ignore the voluntary discharge limitations of the swarm almost every week. Because the limitations on cars are more announcements than effective measures. Because, as the Center for Research on Desertification has shown, even the sea breeze is in danger of extinction. Because the electrical system is leaving thousands of people stranded in the middle of a heatwave. Because restrictions on water consumption are already affecting more and more people and earlier. Because it is impossible to get anywhere on time by car, and also to take public transport without having to elbow your way through with the tourists.
Some will see this as another "normal summer," but it is not, and the facts show it. Remember that not many months ago, the Civil Society Forum revealed what many of us were denouncing and what the Government's own Resident Perception Survey confirmed: that a broad majority of the population demands limiting the arrival of tourists, that even more people hold tourism responsible for the rising cost of housing, and that tourism also generates saturation and pressure on public services. From here, the response from those in power has been to strengthen the mechanisms of propaganda and repression.
Since the rhetoric on sustainability was unsustainable in itself, President Prohens' 'moderate right' began to blame immigration for all the ills of our society, when migrants are the result – and not the cause – of previous problems, and they share and suffer the same problems as the rest of the population, perhaps even more intensely… That if now we will do 'politics for the locals', that if 'housing for the locals'… Remember that at Fitur she even scolded Escarrer because how could the CEO of Melià even think of offering employment to young people arriving by boat…
In parallel, repressive mechanisms have also been strengthened, based on the jurisprudence generated by the so-called 'Confetti case', when the judge ruled that splashing tourists with water and confetti was neither violence nor damage. To the extent that direct action by citizens has been increasingly concretized in symbolic blockades in subsequent years (actions against private jets in Ibiza, or against cruise passengers, blocking access roads for tourist vehicles such as buggies that destroy natural spaces…), the choice has been to either apply a gag law that should have been repealed long ago, with dissuasive effects, or to opt for new regulations, as in the case of Palma's 'Civic' Ordinance, to criminalize not only protest, but also poverty and precariousness induced by the system itself: if we don't see caravans or settlements, the housing problem disappears… What a contrast with the commercial overcrowding of public space by businesses oriented towards tourism!
The qualitative leap that the arrest of the two young women from Santa Maria has meant, with the attribution of belonging to a criminal group, is of unjustified and unjustifiable proportion, and it has all the appearance of having been cooked up in spheres of influence between economic and political power and the security forces.
Well, now in any case we already know: 'the locals' were the foreign real estate agencies that have grown in recent years with the complicity, it must be said, of some residents – because for a while now, many businesses in towns like Santa Maria have also turned their backs on residents – who fuel the expulsion of those who cannot afford what is unthinkable to live in their town, their neighborhood, their island. Of course, limits must be placed on tourism and speculation, but we must also start to view greed negatively, instead of naturalizing it to justify ourselves.
But now, above all, it is necessary that the demonstration of 26-J is a success and to remind the establishment that they can shackle those who defend life, but that not only will they not silence us, but we will shout louder and louder each time.