To die in the street
On January 1st, the body of a 52-year-old man was found dead in a park in the Camp Redó neighborhood of Palma. He was homeless and, according to news reports, died from various illnesses. And also, evidently, from the effects of living on the streets and spending nights outdoors during a cold snap.
On Three Kings' Day, two more men were found dead in the street, one in Badalona and the other in Barcelona. They were 55 and 57 years old, respectively. They died in the open, from exposure. In Barcelona, four other men have died in the same circumstances in the last month. In Badalona, the city's mayor, Xavier García Albiol, ordered the eviction—with unjustified police charges—of 400 homeless people on December 21st. They had been sleeping in the abandoned building of a former high school. They ended up under a bridge, where they have remained for weeks, receiving only assistance from social services and the Catalan government, which are clearly just stopgap measures that only prevent the problem from worsening. Albiol justified his decision as a way to combat "illegal immigration," and, with his usual lack of foresight, he made light of the situation, in the style of provincial Trump supporters.
Homeless people, also known as the homeless, are the ultimate expression of the problem of poverty, which is as urgent as ever: the percentage of the population at risk of exclusion remains around 20%, and an increasing number of these people end up on the streets, without a home and nowhere to go. As I said a few days ago,editorial from the ARA newspaperIt is a definitive step on the road to marginalization and, often, to death. People who live and die on the streets may be undocumented immigrants, as Albiol says, or they may not be. The man found in Camp Redó on New Year's Day was Spanish, and that didn't save him either. Poverty and shame have no nationality. In Palma alone, the Red Cross reports that there are some 600 people sleeping on the streets. The IMAS (Mallorca Social Welfare Institute) has had to add 25 new shelter spaces, in addition to the 570 it already had. Social services are overwhelmed.
Homelessness is a very serious social problem and, therefore, a political one as well. A lack of compassion has become a shameful trend in neoliberal discourse. In the case of Badalona, Albiol received Feijóo's full support, and therefore we must understand that the People's Party (PP) adopts racism and aporophobia as ingredients of its discourse, which are the true ideological ingredients of Albiol's behavior. Does the PP in the Balearic Islands also adopt them? Trump, whom we have already said is the benchmark of the right wing, mocks the poor. But mocking the poor, implying that dying of cold in the street is the fault of the deceased, is nothing more than an unequivocal sign of the decadence of a political system and a society. Poverty is, let us reiterate, the terminal expression of the imbalance of a system that, here and now, today in the Balearic Islands, is out of control and in the hands of the most brazen and avaricious speculators. A system that rewards the richest and punishes the poorest is an inefficient system, one that doesn't work and is headed down the path of degradation and collapse. But above all, it is a disgrace that concerns us all. In a country, on an island, in a city that allows people to die of exposure in the streets, no one can live in peace.
