<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - Maricarmen]]> 10 <![CDATA[Rufián and Sánchez's head]]> Spain has not managed to complete a legislative term for more than a decade. The end of the two-party system and the fragmentation of Parliament have taken us to the polls six times, including those on November 29th. Two were electoral repetitions due to the impossibility of forming a government, an absurdity because the citizen mandate we received was: vote again because the politicians are not capable of making the numbers add up. Now, Pedro Sánchez, seeing the window of opportunity that opens for him after the failure of the housing decrees and the end of his pact with Junts, throws down the gauntlet once again: always moving forward, even if it seems like political suicide.

]]> <![CDATA[Women like you and like me who end up on the street]]>

You don't have to be evicted to end up on the street. It is not necessary for a vulture fund to buy your house for you to lose it, it is enough not to be able to pay for it. You don't need the police to remove you from your home, your children can do it. You don't need force, but you do need violence, to leave a pensioner without a home. You don't have to be Maricarmen. You can also be María del Carmen.

]]> <![CDATA[The Palma encampment on Maricarmen: "She has not died, they have murdered her by expelling her from her home and demonizing her"]]>

The death of Maricarmen has struck the housing encampment in Palma, which this Wednesday received the news in the middle of an assembly at the Plaça d'Espanya. In a statement released after learning of her death, the participants expressed their "anger and pain" and directly accused those responsible for the eviction and the administrations of not having prevented the outcome. "Her death would have been easy to prevent, but they did not want to. Because Maricarmen has not died. Maricarmen has been murdered," the encampment asserts in the statement.

]]> <![CDATA[Thanks, Maricarmen]]> Maricarmen is 87 years old and had lived for more than seventy years in the same apartment in the Retiro neighborhood, in the capital of the Kingdom. A little over a week ago, the police removed her from her home, on the fourth attempt, while hundreds of neighbors tried to stop it. The apartment had passed into the hands of an investment fund that wanted to charge her a rent impossible for a pension of 1,450 euros. In principle, nothing new: in the State, tens of thousands of evictions take place every year, and the Balearic Islands are the community with the highest rate of rental evictions, many of them of elderly people with pensions much lower than Mari Carmen's. The difference is that this time the country has seen it, and a reaction has arrived that, given the housing emergency situation, was long overdue.

]]> <![CDATA[3 ‘Abascals’ and 851 ‘Maricarmens’]]>

Abascal is a surname of toponymic origin with roots in the Basque Country. The first Abascal that those of us who are boomers like myself remember is José Manuel, a Spanish middle-distance runner who, despite not having the finishing speed that other athletes of his time like Sebastian Coe, Said Aouita, and José Luis González could have, managed an agonizing bronze medal in the 1,500-meter race at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, the same ones as Carl Lewis, Michael Jordan, and Juan Antonio San Epifanio, Epi.

]]> <![CDATA[The urgency of housing clashes with the limits of legislating in the heat of the moment]]>

The decrees approved this week by the Spanish government regarding housing in the wake of the Maricarmen case have opened a debate that goes beyond the content of the measures. Although the two regulations have not passed the Congress filter, the emergency response to a residential crisis that manifests itself in evictions, rental prices, and a lack of housing alternatives has also brought to the table the extent to which one can legislate quickly without simultaneously generating more legal uncertainty.

]]> <![CDATA[The encampment for the right to housing in Palma grows and prepares for a new day of mobilization]]>

The encampment for the right to housing at Plaça d'Espanya in Palma woke up this Wednesday with more tents and more people than the night before. The protest, which began in the early hours of Monday to Tuesday following the massive demonstration in support of Maricarmen at Plaça de Cort, thus continues to gain participants and is preparing for a new day of activities.

]]> <![CDATA[Prepare demonstrations in favor of housing this Saturday in Maó and Ciutadella]]>

The Platform for Decent Housing has announced through messaging channels that it is preparing demonstrations this Saturday in front of the town halls of Maó and Ciutadella in defense of the right to housing following the double state decree announced after the eviction of Maricarmen.

]]> <![CDATA[Close to 3,000 people fill the Plaza de Cort in Palma: "Maricarmen, you are not alone"]]>

Almost 3,000 people filled the Plaça de Cort in Palma this Monday afternoon to demand measures regarding the housing crisis and to call for the approval of what is known as the Maricarmen decree.

]]> <![CDATA[The machine for spitting out poor people]]> The appearance on screens of some faces of victims of real estate speculation has caused, at the very least, discomfort and the desire to formulate some type of response, both on the part of society and the political class. Everyone has heard of the case of Maricarmen, an eighty-seven-year-old woman from Madrid, who suffers from poor health and economic precariousness, and who has been evicted from the apartment where she had lived for more than seventy years. There was also another brutal and disproportionate action by the Police, who charged against the protesters who were demonstrating for Maricarmen's eviction with a brutality that recalled the one they exhibited in Palma on July 27th, at the end of the massive demonstration called by the Platform Less Tourism Less Life. Mobilizing in favor of the right to housing or to demand the rationalization of the tourism sector is not prohibited for the moment, but it is greeted, from the outset, with baton blows by unworthy police officers who beat up citizens who are exercising another fundamental right, that of demonstration. Afterwards, if they find themselves in the position of having to give any type of explanation, this terrible Police force resorts to a cowardly and lying victimhood, according to which they had allegedly 'defended' themselves from supposed 'threats' from the protesters.In Catalonia, in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, the death of Olga, a 54-year-old woman with two daughters, one of them a minor, who could not bear to lose her home and committed suicide, has come to light. And here we have seen the face of Pilar López Cabrera, a 65-year-old woman who explained at the Palma City Council plenary session, through tears, that after losing the home where she lived – on Joan Crespí street in the city – and having contributed for forty years as a hospitality worker, she has been left on the street and has had to spend this last summer sleeping in her car, showering at the Ciutat Jardí showers and having to take care of personal hygiene in hidden places in large shopping centers. You can read about it in Héctor Rubio's chronicle in ARA Balears. These are not extreme cases, but rather much more common than they might seem in our environment. To some, they may seem like marginal characters, but they are people as central as anyone else could be. No one is marginal; the margins are simply the spaces of injustice and existential torture that our economic model reserves for those who cannot cope – with money – with the pressure of speculators.Pilar Gómez Cabrera insisted on emphasizing that she is “Spanish”, assuming that her nationality, the fact of having been born in Spain, should protect her from injustice. Maricarmen and Olga also are or were Spanish. Faced with vulture funds and unbridled capitalism, however, nationalities are worth nothing: without money to pay the prices of speculation, we all become ‘immigrants’, because we are all reduced to the condition of being poor. And this thing we call ‘economic system or model’, which is nothing more than the law of the strongest and the one with the fewest scruples, swallows, chews, and spits out the poor. The first thing to understand is that we are all exposed to it. And at the same time –we must insist on it as much as necessary– that the right to decent housing is a constitutional right, and as such it must prevail over the right to property and the free market. Naturally, it is necessary to legislate to prevent vulture funds from continuing to trade with people's lives and basic rights. And naturally, it is necessary to restrict the purchase of housing by companies and foreign investors. In fact, it is urgent.

]]> <![CDATA[Beyond Maricarmen]]> The eviction of Maricarmen in Madrid is the symptom of a chronic illness. The ecosystem that allows housing to be treated as a simple financial asset began to be built with the land liberalization of the Aznar era and was fed after the 2008 collapse, when the pre-sales to the banks facilitated the sale of thousands of homes and real estate assets to vulture funds. Neither the intense but ephemeral indignation over the case—erected as a symbol—of an 87-year-old woman in a wheelchair thrown onto the street will manage to change the course of speculative inertia.

]]> <![CDATA[More housing, fewer evictions]]> What happened in Madrid with Maricarmen Abascal, who at 87 was kicked out of the apartment where she had lived her whole life and which she had paid for religiously, or the case of Pilar López from Palma, evicted and living in a car for months, is nameless. Even more dramatic is the suicide of Olga, 54, a mother of two daughters, which took place in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat. The housing crisis today marks a precariousness that no longer only affects the most vulnerable, but also the middle class, with young people especially lacking options that go beyond family support. The right to housing is a fundamental right, but the harsh reality is that more and more people do not have it guaranteed: when this affects the elderly or children, the problem, as a society, shames us.

]]> <![CDATA[A hundred people gather in Palma against the eviction of Maricarmen: "Tomorrow it could be you"]]>

A hundred people gathered this Wednesday afternoon in Mallorca to show solidarity with Maricarmen, the 87-year-old resident of Madrid who was evicted this Wednesday from the home where she had lived for seven decades. The protest was urgently called by the Mallorca Tenants' Union following the woman's eviction.

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