Development & Aid, Europe, Headlines, Human Rights, Migration & Refugees, Population

SPAIN: Self-Immolation Highlights Plight of Trafficking Victims

Tito Drago

MADRID, Sep 4 2007 (IPS) - A Romanian immigrant set himself alight in Spain Tuesday, in a state of despair over his inability to take his family back to their home country. The man, who said he had been the victim of a false job offer, is in a serious condition in hospital.

The incident occurred in Castellón, near Valencia on the Mediterranean coast. The immigrant, whose name was not released, stood with his family in front of the central government offices in the city, asking for help to pay for their return journey to Romania.

When no one took any notice, he opened a bottle of gasoline he had brought with him, splashed it over himself and set himself on fire. His wife and two children tried to dissuade him, but were unable to.

Isabella, his teenage daughter, explained to a group of journalists that they were only asking for 400 euros (520 dollars) to make the trip home, and had promised to pay it all back within a year.

Due to the severity of his burns, which are life-threatening, the man was transferred to the Valencia burns unit.

The case has drawn attention to the plight of many immigrants who are brought to this country by gangs of people traffickers, who charge them large sums of money in return for promises of job contracts and a rented apartment.

The Romanian family, like others before them, were conned. There was no work and they had to live on the streets, Isabella said, picking through garbage to sell for recycling and selling soft drinks.

Isabella added that no one would take their plight seriously. "The police would send us to social services, and they would tell us to go to the Red Cross, and then we would be back at the beginning again, in an endless circle in which we never received any help."

This is not the first case of its kind. Another Romanian, Valentín Andrón, set himself ablaze for the same reasons, and died, in October 2004 in Valencia.

Conditions for illegal Romanian immigrants are not very different from those of immigrants from other countries, but there are many more of them because the land journey to Spain from Romania is relatively easy. They arrive in trucks and buses operated by the people-trafficking mafias.

At this season, thousands of Romanians are coming to the province of Castilla-La Mancha to work in the grape harvest.

It is a common sight to see vineyard owners waiting for the buses and trucks, and selecting temporary workers on the spot to take away to their fields. This was even more common in previous years.

In the village of La Herrera, population 380, hundreds of Romanians are living, eating and sleeping in the open. Each week another 200 or 300 are added to their number.

Why are these people hired illegally, when Spanish law requires that immigrant workers have a signed contract before they arrive in Spain? IPS asked Francisco López García, who lives in a small town in Castilla-La Mancha.

"We can’t hire workers until we know what the grape harvest will be like, because the vines can produce more or less fruit depending on whether or not it rains, and whether or not it hails during blossoming time," he said.

They thus bypass the official procedure for hiring workers abroad, which can take up to two years, depending on the backlog of red tape accumulated in the Spanish consulates in each country.

This year, the 600,000 hectares of vineyards in the province are expected to yield 2.7 billion kilograms of grapes, which will be used to produce 18 million hectolitres of wine.

Police sources reported that there are at present about 30 camps of Romanians in the province, and that problems have arisen.

The mayors of the villages of La Herrera and Llanos del Castillo, combined population 700, demanded that the camps in their areas be struck and that the Romanians leave. The immigrants gave way to pressure and left, only to camp in other nearby municipalities.

The paradox is that since Romania joined the European Union on Jan. 1, 2007, its citizens have the same right as those of any other member of the bloc, to move to Spain and live there, for example.

However, until 2009, Romanians will continue to be treated as nationals of non-EU countries, as far as labour laws are concerned.

The conflict has confronted the mayors with the heads of farming associations and cooperatives, who defend their right to hire temporary workers as needed.

Thus, the mayors and the central government are on one side of an unresolved conflict, and farmers and wine producers, led by the Young Farmers’ Agrarian Association and the Coordinating Committee of Farming and Livestock Organisations, are on the other.

And in the middle are the immigrants and their families, doomed to marginalisation and exclusion, to the extent that some are resorting to self-immolation.