Hundreds of demonstrators protest against fracking in Santander, the capital of the northern Spanish region of Cantabria. Credit: Courtesy of Asamblea Contra el Fracking de Cantabria

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Jun 2 2015 (IPS)

Thousands of people in Spain have organised to protest the introduction of “fracking” – a controversial technique that involves pumping water, chemicals and sand at high pressure into shale rock to release gas and oil.

“We are all different kinds of people, local inhabitants, who love our land and want to protect its biodiversity,” activist Hipólito Delgado with the Asamblea Antifracking de Las Merindades, a county in the northern province of Burgos, told Tierramérica.

The company BNK España, a subsidiary of Canada’s BNK Petroleum, has applied for permits to drill 12 exploratory wells and is awaiting the environmental impact assessment required by law.

On May 3 some 4,000 people demonstrated in the town of Medina de Pomar in the province of Burgos, demanding that the government refuse permits for exploratory wells because of the numerous threats they claimed that hydraulic fracturing or fracking posed to the environment and health.

While no permit for fracking has been issued yet in Spain, 70 permits for exploration for shale gas have been granted and a further 62 are awaiting authorisation, according to the Ministry of Industry and Energy.

“Thanks to the fight put up by local inhabitants, “a permit for exploration in the northern region of Cantabria was cancelled in February 2014, activist Carmen González, with the Asamblea Contra el Fracking de Cantabria, an anti-fracking group mainly made up of people from rural areas in that region, told Tierramérica.

Critics of fracking say it pollutes underground water supplies with chemicals, releases methane gas – 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere, and can cause seismic activity.

“There are more and more negative reports on fracking,” geologist Julio Barea, spokesman for Greenpeace Spain, told Tierramérica. He said that in this country there is “complete social and political opposition to the technique, which no one wants.”

But Minister of Industry and Energy José Manuel Martínez Soria backs the introduction of fracking “as long as certain conditions and general requisites are fulfilled.”

A year ago, 20 political parties, including the main opposition party, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), signed a commitment in the legislature to ban fracking when the government elected in December is sworn in, “because of its irreversible environmental impacts.”

Only four right-wing and centre-right parties, including the governing People’s Party, which is promoting unconventional shale gas development, refrained from signing the accord.

Thousands of protesters took part in a demonstration against fracking on May 3, 2015 in the northern municipality of Medina de Pomar, where 12 permits have been granted for shale gas exploration. Credit: Courtesy of Ecologistas en Acción

Fracking involves drilling a vertical well between 1,000 and 5,000 metres deep, down to gas-bearing layers of shale rock. Then the well is extended horizontally up to three km, and between 10,000 and 30,000 cubic metres of water, sand and chemicals are injected at high pressure to fracture the rock and release the oil and gas, which along with the additives is pumped up to the surface.

The companies interested in fracking in Spain downplay the dangers and stress this country’s shale gas potential, especially in Cantabria, the Basque Country and Castilla y León – where Burgos is located – in the north, although exploration permits have also been granted in other regions.

“Like any activity it involves risks, but the technological advances make it possible to minimise them,” said Daniel Alameda, director general of Shale Gas España, a lobbying group for prospectors in Spain.

In an interview with Tierramérica, Alameda said the companies “are totally aware that they have to respect the environment.”

He argued that it is “technically impossible” for fracking to pollute aquifers since the hydraulic fracturing takes place some 3,000 metres below the underground water reserves, and the wells are isolated with a protective barrier of steel and cement.

“It’s a load of eyewash to say fracking doesn’t pollute,” activist Samuel Martín-Sosa, international coordinator at Ecologistas en Acción, told Tierramérica.

He pointed out that a court sentence has already been handed down against fracking, in the U.S. state of Texas, where an oil company was ordered in 2014 to pay damages to a family who suffered numerous health problems because of the proximity of a number of natural gas wells.

Shale Gas España also denies any link between fracking and seismic activity. “We don’t cause earthquakes. We have all of the tools necessary to ensure that the activity does not pose a threat to local residents or to the companies themselves,” Alameda said.

But in a 2014 document, the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain warned that fracking could cause radioactivity in water, pollute aquifers and the atmosphere, and cause earthquakes.

Martín pointed out that most lawsuits never make it to trial because the companies reach out-of-court settlements containing confidentiality clauses that prevent those affected by the wells from speaking out.

The United States is the world’s leading producer of shale oil and gas, followed by Argentina. In July 2011 France became the first country in the world to ban fracking, and 16 other European Union countries have since followed suit, while Spain and 10 others permit the use of hydraulic fracturing, with the United Kingdom in the lead.

Alameda said shale gas would create jobs, reduce energy dependency and improve the country’s trade balance.

Spain imports around 80 percent of the energy it consumes, according to statistics from the 2011-2020 Energy Efficiency and Savings Action Plan. Those involved in the exploitation of unconventional gas estimate that their wells will make the country self-sufficient for 90 years – although that can only be proven through exploration.

But to reduce dependency, “the way forward is not the extraction of gas; we can’t allow the continued burning of fossil fuels,” said Martín-Sosa of Ecologistas en Acción.

The environmentalist criticised “the absolute promotion” of shale gas by the government, when what is needed, he said, is “a change in energy model” starting with the replacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy sources.

But clean energy “faces more hurdles than ever” from the national government, he complained.

Shale Gas España, meanwhile, asserts that “the oil and gas industry is compatible with renewable energies.”

In 2013 and 2014, four of Spain’s 17 “autonomous communities” or regions passed laws banning fracking. But the central government introduced changes in the authority over the development of fracking, which allowed the regional laws to be revoked by the Constitutional Court.

Martín-Sosa said that what is needed is a national ban on fracking, rather than attempts to regulate it.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Trial of five police officers for alleged sexual abuse against immigrants held in the detention centre in the southern Spanish city of Málaga. This case is just one of many reported of mistreatment in these centres, whose closure is demanded by human rights groups. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain, Mar 27 2015 (IPS)

“They mistreat you, they don’t respect you. I’ve seen beatings, suffering, and you can’t defend yourself. When you’re locked in there it’s as if you were in another world,” Salif Sy, a Senegalese man who in 2011 spent eight days in an immigrant detention centre (CIE) in Madrid, told IPS.

Behind the walls of Spain’s eight CIEs, immigrants are frequent victims of abuse and mistreatment by the national police, who are in charge of guarding them, national and international human rights organisations warn.

They also complain about hurdles thrown in the way of investigations of reports of abuse, and about the prevailing impunity.

In the southern city of Málaga, five police officers are on trial for alleged sexual abuse of women held in the local CIE, in 2006. The centre operated in an old military garrison and was shut down when the dilapidated building was condemned in June 2012. A hearing of the trial was held Mar. 5.“Those who torture still have guaranteed impunity when they abuse people who are in especially vulnerable situations – undocumented immigrants, isolated from their families and friends, without money to pay a lawyer, and without knowledge of Spain’s legal system, let alone international law.” -- Carlos Villán

“The police would hold parties, where they would take advantage of the inmates sexually. It’s disgusting,” Jaime Ernesto Rodríguez, the attorney for three women who are protected witnesses in the case, told IPS. The accused face possible sentences of 27 years. The verdict is expected in April.

“Two of the agents had access to the lists of women who were coming in and they would choose,” said the lawyer for the three women, from Brazil, Honduras and Venezuela, who were deported to their home countries in 2006, despite the opposition put up by their attorney and several organisations.

Spain’s immigration law states that the CIEs are “public establishments of a non-penitentiary nature…for the detention and custody of foreigners subject to deportation orders.” It stipulates that no one can be held for more than 60 days.

But non-governmental organisations say the CIEs are “prisons in disguise,” where human rights violations are rampant.

Their demand that the centres be shut down was bolstered by the position taken by the new government of Greece.

The deputy interior minister of Greece, Yannis Panousis, announced Feb. 14 that the five immigrant detention centres in his country would gradually be closed, after a 28-year-old Pakistani citizen committed suicide in one of the centres the day before.

The latest accusation in Spain was filed on Feb. 3 for the alleged torture of Mohamed Rezine Zohuir of Algeria and Ben Yunes Sabbar of Morocco, who were detained in January in the CIE of the southeastern city of Valencia, lawyer Andrés García Berrio of the legal team of the campaign Tanquem Els Cies (Close the CIEs, in the Valencian language), told IPS.

He said the case is under investigation and that there are photos documenting injuries on the two men’s heads and faces, which the CIE authorities claim were self-inflicted.

In 2014, immigrants held in the CIE filed 40 formal complaints of abuse by police.

“Any complaint of mistreatment should be promptly, exhaustively and impartially investigated,” Amnesty International Spain’s head of domestic policy, Virginia Álvarez, told IPS. “We are concerned about the lack of adequate oversight and accountability mechanisms.”

In November 2014 the United Nations Human Rights Committee asked the Spanish government for explanations in the cases of alleged mistreatment in the CIEs and excessive use of force by the immigration authorities.

Spain’s interior minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, denied in a Feb. 22 interview that there were cases of torture in the CIEs.

“How could torture happen in the CIEs?” he said. “I would bet my life on the fact that no torture is being committed. And if anyone did commit such a barbaric act, they would be committing a crime. False reports have been made.”

But according to García Berrio, “there is no willingness on the part of the Interior Ministry to resolve this situation.” He also complained about “hurdles being set in the way of the investigations,” citing as examples two cases in which security camera footage that served as evidence “went missing due to supposed technical problems.”

In the CIEs there have been “aberrations,” said Rodríguez, the lawyer. He mentioned the case of the Brazilian immigrant, who is one of the protected witnesses in the trial against the police officers in the Málaga CIE. When she was taken to the centre, she had a high-risk pregnancy, and suffered a miscarriage while awaiting deportation.

Rodríguez filed a complaint against the police for omission of duty to aid a person in distress, which was thrown out.

“Impunity surrounds abuses by police in the CIEs,” the president of the non-governmental Spanish Association for the Human Right to Peace, Carlos Villán, told IPS. He said the agents “have not received adequate training, and they are not warned that torture and mistreatment are prohibited by both Spanish and international law.”

People held in the CIEs have died due to “inadequate detention conditions and lack of medical care,” said Villán, who did not mention a precise number.

“There have been suicides, rapes,” activist Luís Pernía, president of the Platform of Solidarity with the Immigrants of Málaga, an umbrella group made up of some 20 organisations, told IPS. “Many people have suffered all kinds of abuse in Málaga’s CIE for decades, and there is a legal vacuum.”

On Mar. 14, 2014, Spain’s Council of Ministers approved the regulations for the operation of the CIEs. Until then the inmates were in a legal vacuum without specific regulations such as those used to guarantee the basic rights of inmates in prisons.

But Villán believes that despite the regulations, “those who torture still have guaranteed impunity when they abuse people who are in especially vulnerable situations – undocumented immigrants, isolated from their families and friends, without money to pay a lawyer, and without knowledge of Spain’s legal system, let alone international law.”

“There is racism and a lot of suffering in the CIE,” said Salif Sy, who reached Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa, from Senegal, in a boat in 2006.

A few weeks before he was detained in 2011, Sy, who was heavily involved in different associations where he was living in the southeast Spanish city of Albacete, played King Balthazar in the city’s traditional Three Wise Men parade. Pressure from different organisations and his many friends blocked his deportation.

“We are all immigrants, we are all equals, I have to keep fighting for the people who will come after me,” said Sy, who is married to the Spanish woman who was his girlfriend when he was picked up by the authorities in their home in 2011.

Of the 49,406 foreign nationals detained in 2013 for breaking Spain’s immigration law, 9,002 were held in the CIEs and 4,726 were finally deported, according to the National Mechanism for the Prevention of Torture report published by the ombudsperson’s office in 2014.

Amnesty International’s Álvarez said people are detained in the CIEs “in the full knowledge that they cannot be deported if there is no repatriation agreement with their countries, along with people who are sick, possible victims of people trafficking, or potential asylum seekers; their human rights are being violated.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Two workers engaged in the removal of asbestos on the roof of a building where a cinema used to operate in the centre of the southern Spanish city of Málaga, in May 2014. Credit: Courtesy Plataforma Málaga Amianto Cero

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain , Feb 17 2015 (IPS)

“I would get asbestos in my mouth, spit it out and carry on working,” said 52-year-old Francisco Padilla. Exposure to this deadly mineral fibre over most of his working life has resulted in cancer and the removal of his left lung, the lung lining and part of his diaphragm.

Sitting on the sofa in his home in the southern Spanish city of Málaga, Padilla told Tierramérica with watering eyes that he has always looked after his health and has never smoked.

He used to cycle to and from the workshop where he has worked since the age of 18, until in May 2014 he was diagnosed with mesothelioma, an aggressive malignant tumor linked to occupational exposure to asbestos, and had to undergo radical surgery three months ago.“Thousands of people have died, are dying and will die in the future because of asbestos....its effects have been overwhelmingly silenced.” -- Activist Francisco Puche

The use of asbestos, a low-cost fire retardant and insulating material, was banned in Spain in 2002. Previously, however, it was widely used in construction, shipbuilding, and the steel, automotive and railway industries, among others.

Workers in these industries were at risk of contracting mesothelioma, lung cancer and asbestosis, whose symptoms could take 20 to 40 years to develop.

“Thousands of people have died, are dying and will die in the future because of asbestos. It is the great unknown factor, and its effects have been overwhelmingly silenced,” activist Francisco Puche of Málaga Amianto Cero, an anti-asbestos alliance, told Tierramérica.

Puche believes Europe should have “a plan for safe asbestos removal,” because the risk continues in spite of the bans.

He pointed out several water tanks made of cement containing asbestos fibres on the rooftop of a building in a central Málaga square, and warned that in their everyday lives, people are caught in a hazardous “spiderweb” of asbestos.

It is present in thousands of kilometres of water pipes, public and private buildings, warehouses, tunnels, machinery, ships and trains, although it is being progressively replaced by other materials.

Puche warned of the dangers involved in the deterioration and modification of structures containing asbestos, which breaks down into rigid microscopic fibrils that accumulate in the body by inhalation or ingestion.

Asbestos is banned in 55 countries, including the 28 members of the European Union, Argentina, Chile, Honduras and Uruguay. But more than two million tonnes a year are still being extracted worldwide, mainly in China, India, Russia, Brazil and Kazakhstan, according to the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat.

Every year 107,000 people worldwide die of lung cancer, asbestosis and mesothelioma linked to occupational exposure to asbestos, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

WHO estimates that 125 million people are in contact with asbestos in the workplace, and attributes thousands of other deaths a year to indirect contact with the material in the home.

“The asbestos issue shows the true face of a system that is only interested in profits,” said Puche, who is critical of “big business,” powerful lobbies linked to asbestos mining, and the “impunity” surrounding the illness and death of workers in Europe and around the world.

Swiss billionaire Stephan Schmidheiny, the former CEO of Eternit, a family business that set up asbestos factories across the globe in the 20th century, had been sentenced to 18 years in prison and payment of nearly one million euros (1.14 million dollars) in damages to thousands of victims. However his sentence was overturned by Italy’s highest court on Nov. 19, on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired.

“The other day I heard that a retired workmate of mine had died of mesothelioma,” José Antonio Martínez, the head of the Málaga Asbestos Victims’ Association (AVIDA Málaga), told Tierramérica.

Many workers die before the occupational nature of their ailment is recognised, and they are deprived of their right to disability pensions and compensation for damages.

Francisco González , a worker with the state railway company RENFE, died in 2005 at the age of 55 from mesothelioma. His daughter Anabel told Tierramérica that she and her mother finally achieved an indemnity payment after “a long struggle, without any help and against many obstacles.”

Being vindicated was more important than the money,” she said, even though it took five years after her father’s death.

In Spain and other countries, asbestos victims and their families are forming associations for information, mutual support and justice. AVIDA Málaga was created in June 2014; it has nearly 200 members, and is part of the Spanish Federation of Associations of Asbestos Victims.

Victims are demanding the creation of a compensation fund for those affected, like ones that have been set up in Belgium and France, paid for by the state and the companies concerned, which often refuse to shoulder responsibility retroactively.

Asbestos was used for decades in more than 3,000 products, so even today plumbers, electricians, building demolition and maintenance workers and car mechanics may come across this hazardous material in the course of their jobs, facing health risks if they fail to take precautions.

Padilla, who has a 29-year-old son, is still waiting for confirmation of his occupational injury pension and plans to claim compensation. By law, he has up to one year to do so from May 2014, when he was diagnosed with an ailment on the list of occupational diseases.

His company recognised his cancer as a work-related illness without his having to resort to litigation. This made legal history in Spain, where many people die without getting justice.

Padilla had chemotherapy before his major surgery, and is now undergoing radiotherapy. His wife, Pepi Reyes, who attends these sessions with him, has been advised by the doctor to have medical tests herself, because she handled her husband’s work clothes for years.

A study by the European Union reports that half a million people are expected to die of mesothelioma and lung cancer by 2030, due to occupational exposure to asbestos in the 1980s and 1990s. The study analyses mortality in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Francisco Báez, a former worker for the transnational company Uralita in the southern Spanish city of Seville, is the author of the book “Amianto: un genocidio impune” (Asbestos: an unpunished genocide). He complained to Tierramérica about the double standards applied by countries that prohibit the material within their borders, yet abroad “they promote its use and profit financially from the installation and maintenance of asbestos sector industries.”

Padilla opened a window in his home and pointed out the corrugated asbestos cement roofs of the warehouses opposite. Afterwards he brought out his mobile phone and showed a photo of his long operation scar, all along his left side, and said he feels lucky to be alive.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Valerie Dee

Estefanía reads in the top bunk while Encarni does homework on a table in her small room. This 12-year-old girl from Málaga is one of the faces of child poverty, which according to a new UNICEF report affects 36.3 percent of children in Spain. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain, Nov 1 2014 (IPS)

“I would like to have a big house, and I wish my family didn’t have to go out and ask for food or clothes,” Encarni, who just turned 12, tells IPS in the small apartment she shares with five other family members in a poor neighbourhood in the southern Spanish city of Málaga.

This girl with shoulder-length straight brown hair, brown eyes and broad forehead is one of the faces of child poverty in Spain, which has grown 28.5 percent since 2008, according to a report released Tuesday Oct. 28 by the United Nations children’s fund, UNICEF.

The report, “Children of the Recession”, which studied 41 industrialised nations, says child poverty in Spain climbed from 28.2 percent in 2008 to 36.3 percent in 2013. It includes Spain on the list of countries hardest hit by the economic crisis, along with Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Italy and Portugal.

Almost every day in the middle of the afternoon Encarni goes with her mother and her aunt to get food at the Er Banco Güeno, a soup kitchen run by the community in the Palma-Palmilla neighbourhood.

The soup kitchen has been operating for the last two years in what used to be a bank, which the local residents occupied for this purpose. They serve three meals a day to the needy.

“I worked in construction until the start of the 2008 crisis, when I was laid off,” Encarní’s stepfather, Antonio Delgado, tells IPS. Since then he has not found work, and has done a little of everything, ”from picking up junk to selling things in street markets.”

Antonio, with a lean face and teeth that have seen better days, brings in a few euros a day fixing things using a soldering machine and a tire pump, which he keeps in a corridor off the street, where several bird cages hang at the entrance.

Encarni explains that her mother, Inmaculada Rodríguez, found work for a couple of months taking care of an elderly person, but was fired.

The unemployment rate in this country of 47 million people currently stands at 23.6 percent. But in the autonomous community or region of Andalusia, where Málaga is found, it is 35.2 percent, according to the national statistics institute, INE.

“I really like to go to school. I especially love gymnastics,” Encarni says, with her sweet voice, although she adds that she gets sad when she feels they leave her out sometimes, “because they saw me go into the soup kitchen for food. But I just ignore them,” she adds, with a wan smile.

One of the apartment blocks in Palma-Palmilla, the poor neighbourhood in the southern Spanish city of Málaga where Encarni and her family live. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

A few days ago her aunt and three cousins moved to another house nearby. But until then there were 11 people living in Encarni´s house, the family said when they described their day-to-day life to IPS.

She slept in the top bunk with her cousin Estefanía, who is a year older than her. In the bottom bunk slept her aunt Ana María and her nine-year-old cousin Juan José. Encarni’s two-and-a-half-year-old cousin Ismael slept next to them in a crib.

Encarni’s mother, her stepfather, and four other members of her family slept in the rest of the rooms of the house, which only has one small bathroom which you reach by ducking under a clothesline, where the recently washed clothes are being dried by a fan, near the kitchen.

Estefanía and Ismael suffer from epilepsy, says their mother Ana María, who is unemployed and shows IPS the box where she keeps the medications that they have to take every day.

“Is your house big?” Encarni asks IPS while petting her dog, a friendly black pup named Gordo.

She goes on to ask: “Where do rich people get their money?”

According to the report “Even it Up: Time to End Extreme Inequality” by the international relief and development organisation Oxfam, the richest one percent of Spaniards have as much wealth as 70 percent of the entire population.

The report also says the number of billionaires around the world doubled to 1,645 as of March 2014, from 793 in March 2009, demonstrating that the rich actually benefited from the economic crisis.

Spain, in particular, is one of the 34 countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) where inequality between rich and poor grew the most during the crisis, according to its Society at a Glance 2014 report.

Between 2007 and 2010, the income of the poorest 10 percent of the population of Spain fell 14 percent, while of the other OECD countries it only dropped more than five percent in Mexico, Greece, Ireland, Estonia and Italy, and did not drop more than 10 percent in any other country.

Encarni wants to be a judge when she grows up. But she says that for now she would be happy just to be able to “dress well” and be able to buy more things in the supermarket.

“Everything we have was given to us because my parents don’t have enough money,” she explains, pointing to the clothes folded on the shelves, the packages of rice and lentils on a high shelf, and even the backpack that a neighbour gave her for school, where she eats lunch every day free of charge because she comes from a low-income family.

Encarni has fun skipping rope, playing Chinese jump rope and goofing off on the swings near her house. She also likes it when her stepfather gives her a ride on his bike.

She likes candy too, and enhoys singing and dancing with her cousin Estefanía, who swam in the sea this summer for the first time in her life, even though she lives only a few kilometres from the beach. “The water tasted salty,” Estefanía tells IPS.

Of every 100 children at risk of poverty in Spain, 25 are in the region of Andalusía, 15 are in Cataluña in the northeast, 10 are in Valencia in the east and 10 are in Madrid and the rest of the autonomous communities, according to INE figures cited by the report “Boys and girls, the most vulnerable in all of the autonomous communities”, by the organisation Educo.

The new UNICEF study warns that 2.6 million children have fallen into poverty as a result of the economic crisis in the most affluent countries, bringing the total number of poor children in the industrialised North to 76.5 million.

With her hair loose and recently combed, sitting on a bed near a window while the TV spits out news on the latest corruption scandals in the country, Encarni hugs her little cousin Ismael, who clasps a piece of bread in his hand while they wait for night to fall.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Socially marginalised people waiting for lunch at a stand run by the Ángeles Malagueños de la Noche association, whose volunteers serve three meals a day in the centre of Málaga, Spain. Cedit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain , Oct 28 2014 (IPS)

“It’s easy to end up on the street. It’s not because you led a bad life; you lose your job and you can’t afford to pay rent,” says David Cerezo while he waits for lunch to be served by a humanitarian organisation in this city in southern Spain.

Cerezo, 39, lives in a filthy wreck of a house in downtown Málaga with two other people. He used to work as a baker and confectioner but his drug abuse ruined his life, and separated him from his wife and his 36 and 39-year-old brothers.

Now he is determined to undergo rehabilitation, he tells IPS in front of the lunch counter of the Ángeles Malagueños de la Noche (Málaga Angels of the Night) association.

“Most of those who ask for food here have ended up on the street because of drugs or alcohol, but there are also parents coming for food for their kids, and very young people,” he says, pointing towards the dozens of people lined up under the midday sun for a plate of rice, which is steaming in a huge pot.

Spain’s long, severe recession and high unemployment rate, which currently stands at 24.4 percent according to the national statistics institute, INE, have impoverished the population while government budgets for social services for the poor have been cut. “On the street I feel vulnerable, so inferior. You lose your dignity and it’s hard to get it back. I want out of this.” -- Miguel Arregui

According to statistics from earlier this year, between 20.4 and 27.3 percent of the population of 47.2 million – depending on whether the measurement uses Spanish or European Union parameters – lives below the poverty line.

Nor does having a job guarantee a life free of poverty. The crisis drove up the proportion of working poor from 10.8 percent of the population in 2007 to 12.3 percent in 2010, according to the Dossier de Pobreza EAPN España 2014, a report on poverty in Spain by the European Anti Poverty Network.

Even worse is the fact that 27 percent of the country’s children – more than 2.3 million girls and boys – live in or on the verge of poverty, according to the United Nations children’s fund, UNICEF.

A study published Sept. 19 by the Association of Directors and Managers of Social Services reported that public spending on the neediest this year was 18.98 billion dollars – 2.78 billion less than in 2012.

“You find yourself in the street because you don’t have anyone to turn to,” said Miguel Arregui, 40. “And once you’re there it’s really hard to take flight again.”

The tall, black-haired Arregui, who is separated and has an 11-year-old son, told IPS that he spent 15 “endless” days sleeping rough, and that two bags holding his clothes and cell phone were stolen. For the past few weeks, he has been living in a shelter, where he is overcoming his addiction to drugs.

Cerrezo and Arregui are two of the thousands of homeless people in Spain – who total 23,000 according to the last INE census, from 2012, although the social organisations that help them put the number at 40,000.

But the 2014 study on exclusion and social development in Spain by the Foessa Foundation reports that there are five million people in this country affected by “severe exclusion” – 82.6 percent more than in 2007, the year before the lingering economic crisis broke out.

The report states that although homeless people are part of the landscape, most people have no idea what their lives are like. They sleep rough or in shelters, after ending up on the street as a result of numerous social, structural and personal factors.

In Málaga dozens of poor families, many of whom were evicted for failing to pay the rent or mortgage, are living together in squats known as “corralas”, in empty buildings owned by banks or construction companies that went bankrupt.

In the first half of 2014 there were 37,241 evictions in Spain, according to judicial sector statistics.

Since 2007 there have been 569,144 foreclosures, the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH) reports. At the same time, there are 3.5 million empty dwellings – 14 percent of the total, according to the INE.

A number of people wake up on the stone benches near the stand where breakfast is served at 9:00 AM. “The day I went to the shelter, they told me it was full and they gave me a blanket,” says José, 47, who spent 15 years in prison and admits that he has to steal to pay for a night in a pension.

“The system could use a turn of the screw, to provide permanent and unconditional housing, in first place,” the director of the RAIS Foundation, José Manuel Caballol, told IPS.

His organisation is promoting the Housing First model in Spain. This approach focuses on moving homeless people immediately from the streets or shelters into their own apartments, based on the concept that their first and primary need is stable housing.

The approach targets people who have spent at least three years living on the streets, or those suffering from mental illness, drug use, alcoholism or disabilities.

Caballol said people with severe problems have a hard time gaining access to homeless shelters, supportive housing or pensions, and that even if they do they fail to move forward with their rehabilitation or end up being expelled from the system once again.

“The results are spectacular,” he said. “The people are so happy, they take care of their house and of themselves because they don’t want to lose what they have.”

The activist is convinced that this approach, which emerged in the United States in the 1990s, “offers a definitive solution to the problem of homelessness and spells out significant savings in costs for the state, in hospital care for example.”

Since July, a total of 28 homeless people have been living in eight housing units in Málaga, 10 in Barcelona and 10 in Madrid, some given to RAIS and others rented by the NGO by means of agreements with city governments and foundations, and with economic support from the government.

“Changes are seen very quickly in the people involved,” said Caballol, who stressed the role played by social workers, psychologists and experts in social integration, who listen, support and assist the beneficiaries, depending on what they themselves decide, rather than the other way around.

“On the street I feel vulnerable, so inferior. You lose your dignity and it’s hard to get it back. I want out of this,” says Miguel Arregui just before going into a shelter in downtown Málaga for the night.

Another local NGO, Ayuda en Acción (Help in Action), warns that one out of every five people are at risk of social exclusion in Spain.

Cerezo says the social network for the homeless falls short of meeting the current needs, and calls for other models like “casas de acogida” – halfway homes or residential-based homes for the most vulnerable, “with orientation by professionals.”

The number of people assisted in Spain by the Catholic charity Caritas rose 30 percent from 2012 to 2013, according to a report it released Sept. 29.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

An ecological market that is set up every weekend on one of the busiest streets in Málaga. Similar markets can be found in towns and cities all around Spain. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Aug 12 2014 (IPS)

José María Gómez squats and pulls up a bunch of carrots from the soil as well as a few leeks. This farmer from southern Spain believes organic farming is more than just not using pesticides and other chemicals – it’s a way of life, he says, which requires creativity and respect for nature.

Gómez, 44, goes to organic food markets in Málaga to sell the vegetables and citrus fruits he grows on his three-hectare farm in the Valle del Guadalhorce, 40 km west of Málaga, a city in southern Spain,

And every week Gómez, whose parents and grandparents were farmers, does home deliveries of several dozen baskets of fresh produce, “thus closing the circle from the field to the table,” he told Tierramérica on his farm.

The economic crisis in Spain, where the unemployment rate stands at 25 percent, hasn’t put a curb on ecological farming. In 2012, organic farming covered 1.7 million hectares of land, compared to 988,323 in 2007, according to the latest statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment.

Organic farming generated 913,610 euros (1.22 million dollars) in 2012, 9.6 percent more than in 2011.

“Ecological farming is growing in Spain and Europe despite the crisis because those who consume organic produce are loyal,” agricultural technician Víctor Gonzálvez, coordinator of the non-governmental Spanish Society of Organic Agriculture (SEAE), told Tierramérica.

Organic food markets have mushroomed in the streets and plazas of cities and towns around Spain, and some supermarket chains now sell ecological produce.

The southern community or region of Andalusía has the largest extension of land under organic farming: 949,025 officially registered hectares, equivalent to 54 percent of the national total, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

Most production from Andalusía is exported to other European countries, like Germany and the United Kingdom – which seems contradictory to those in favour of organic farming that truly provides a local alternative to intensive, industrial agriculture, with a short food supply chain.

“It doesn’t make sense to talk about exporting ecological foods because production should bring benefits to the local economy,” Pilar Carrillo told Tierramérica from her La Coruja farm in the municipality of Tacoronte on Tenerife, one of Spain’s Canary Islands.

She and her partner, Julio Quílez, have been living there for a year with their young son. They have less than half a hectare of land, where they practice permaculture – the use of ecology and local ecosystems to design self-sustaining productive landscapes that, once established, need a minimum of human intervention. They sell their produce every Saturday in the nearby farmer’s market.

“When you buy local ecological products you are eating healthy food, you’re interacting with people from the countryside, and you generate wealth in your local surroundings,” engineer Juan José Galván, who for five years has been buying food in organic markets in Málaga, told Tierramérica.

José María Gómez walking among the tomato plants on his Bobalén Ecológico farm in the Valle de Guadalhorce near the southern Spanish city of Málaga, where he grows organic vegetables and fruits. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

Spain, with its mild climate, has the largest area dedicated to organic farming in the European Union, according to Eurostat 2012 figures, and the fifth largest area in the world, after Australia, Argentina, the United States and China, according to a report by the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements.

But the controls and certification of ecological agricultural production, which in Spain are carried out by both public and private bodies, are neither simple nor free of cost.

To be sold as organic food, products must carry a label with the code of the corresponding authority in each community, the Ministry of Agriculture explains on its website.

Certification of ecological farming takes at least two years to obtain, and the inspections are thorough, farmers told Tierramérica. The requisites and controls involved and the economic effort entailed drive up the prices of organic products, they argued.

Quílez, who grows aromatic and medicinal plants in Tenerife, said he has to pay for certification “as an ecological farmer and also as a seller of organic produce, which doubles the cost; a large part of the price of ecologically produced food goes into red tape.”

According to Gonzálvez, public funds in Spain go more towards conventional agricultural production and research in biotechnology than into supporting ecological farming.

He said farmers “are afraid to take the leap” into this kind of alternative production because there are no advisory services, unlike in intensive, industrial agriculture.

“Ecological agriculture is very empirical. If an aphid attacks my melons, I plant beans next to the melons because they draw the aphids away. Every year you get wiser,” Gómez said, standing among his tomato plants on his Bobalén Ecológico farm.

Gómez, who has tousled dark hair and skin tanned by the sun, argues that while “big industry produces market-oriented varieties, ecological agriculture, especially local farming based on geographical proximity, focuses on producing quality food,” as well as preserving the environment and soil fertility.

Critics argue that organic products are expensive and the production methods inefficient, “but it depends on what you buy, and where,” Esther Vivas, with the Centre for Studies on Social Movements at the Pompeu Fabra university in the northeast city of Barcelona, wrote in her article “Who’s afraid of ecological agriculture?”

Vivas told Tierramérica that although the level of consumption of organic products in Spain is still low compared to conventional farm products, the market for ecological produce is growing, as interest has been boosted by various scandals involving food products.

Galván said that while it is true that the higher cost of organic products can turn away consumers, “demand is steadily growing.”

“The real revolution has to come from below, from the consumer who goes to the markets to buy and who demands high-quality products,” Gómez said.

The ecological farmer – who worked for years as an environmental agent – stressed the social dimension of organic agriculture and short food supply chains, pointing to “the affection that your customers give you, as they are aware of the health benefits of the food and of the sustainability of the production.”

Quílez, who left a well-paid job in computers to dedicate himself to ecological farming, said “exploitative agriculture undermined food sovereignty,” and this is seen clearly in the Canary Islands “where 85 percent of the products consumed come from outside.”

On Gómez’s farm it’s time to plant beans, potatoes, cauliflower and broccoli to harvest in October and November. “I get up at 5:30 in the morning and farm for 15 or 16 hours,” he said.

But “it’s the best job I’ve had in my life,” he added, smiling.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Children in the cafeteria of the Manuel Altolaguirre public school in the poor neighbourhood of La Palma-Palmilla, in the southern city of Málaga, Spain, which provides meals to the poorest students in the summertime. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Aug 6 2014 (IPS)

It’s two in the afternoon, and María stirs tomato sauce into a huge pot of pasta. School is out for the summer in Spain, but the lunchroom in this public school in the southern city of Málaga is still open, serving meals to more than 100 children from poor families.

“My son has had to take my grandson to summer school because he doesn’t have enough money to feed him.” -- Mercedes Arroyo
“The kitchen is always operating, winter and summer,” Miguel Ángel Muñoz, the prinicipal of the Manuel Altolaguirre school, told IPS. “There are families in situations of extreme need. For many children, the only hot meals they eat are what they are served at school.”

The school is in La Palma-Palmilla, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in this city in the southern autonomous community or region of Andalusia.

A number of reports have described the dire economic situation faced by many families with children in Spain, and the resultant problems of poor quality diets and child malnutrition.

There are 2.3 million children in Spain – 27.5 percent of the total – living under the poverty line, according to a study by UNICEF, the United Nations children’s fund.

The report, “La Infancia en España 2014” (Childhood in Spain 2014), released Jun. 24, found that the number of households with children where no adult is working increased 290 percent since 2007, the year before the global financial crisis broke out. Between 2007 and 2013 the total climbed from 325,000 to 943,000 families.

The unemployment rate in this country of 46.7 million people stands at 25.9 percent, according to the National Statistics Institute. Then there is the “working poor” who earn wages too low to cover mortgage payments or rent, utility bills and food.

“My mother sells lottery tickets and my father is at home,” Rafa told IPS just after eating pasta, salad and watermelon for lunch in the Manuel Altolaguirre school lunchroom. The eight-year-old has siblings aged four, 10 and 12.

Sitting next to him, 11-year-old Yeray said he and his brother Antonio have lunch at the school every day while his father works “carrying luggage in the airport.”

“The food is good,” said Yeray, who wants to “fix cars or be a policeman” when he grows up.

Daniel Fernández, with the local non-governmental organisation Animación Malacitana, who has been responsible for summertime activities in the school for 13 years, told IPS that “there are entire strata of society in emergency situations” and in need of help in Spain.

Since 2013 the government of Andalusia, the most populous autonomous community in Spain, has extended through the summer vacation period the aid it provides during the school year, and subsidises summer school in institutions like Manuel Altolaguirre in cities throughout the region.

In summer school, the poorest children are served breakfast, lunch and an afternoon snack at no cost, while they participate in recreational and educational activities run by social organisations.

“My son has had to take my grandson to summer school because he doesn’t have enough money to feed him,” Mercedes Arroyo, who has three children – aged 18, 24 and 28 – and three grandchildren – two seven-year-olds and a 10-year-old – told IPS.

“And many of us are in that situation,” said her husband, Enrique Sánchez, outside the “25 Mujeres” “economato social” – government shops that sell basic foodstuffs and cleaning and hygiene products at cost to poor families – in La Palma-Palmilla.

It is now common to see grandparents supporting their children and grandchildren – and even great-grandchildren – on their small pensions. Rosario Ruíz, 67, draws a disability pension of 365 euros (500 dollars) and lives with her 26-year-old unemployed granddaughter who is a single mother of two children, aged two and five.

“Are you going to write about how I need help? Are you going to tell?” Ruíz asked IPS after shopping in the ‘economato’.

The families of some 200,000 children in Spain can’t afford a meal based on beef, chicken or fish every two days, the NGO Educo reported on its website.

Poor nutrition in childhood can have irreversible effects on children’s health, abilities and development, experts say.

“Parents need school lunchrooms to be open in the summertime too,” said Muñoz, who stressed the vulnerability of the children who attend schools in La Palma-Palmilla.

The children mainly come from gypsy (Roma) or other immigrant families, most of them from Romania. They are served breakfast and lunch, and are given an afternoon snack in a bag to take home, year-round as part of an anti-poverty plan run by the socialist government of Andalusia, one of the regions with the highest unemployment rates in Spain.

Different NGOs in Málaga also organise summer activities for poor children. For example, Málaga Acoge runs ¡Queremos montar un circo! (We Want to Mount a Circus!) for 120 immigrant children, financed through microdonations, while Prodiversa ran a summer camp in July for 23 children between the ages of six and 11, subsidised by the Obra Social la Caixa Proinfancia and offering meals, tutoring and counseling.

Spain is the European Union country with the second highest level of child poverty, following Romania, according to a report by Caritas Europa on the social impact of the austerity policies applied in the countries hit hardest by the economic crisis, released Mar. 27.

Caritas, a Catholic social assistance organisation, put the proportion of children under 18 in Spain living on the edge of social exclusion at 29.9 percent.

And the report Child Poverty and Social Exclusion in Europe published by Save the Children in June put the proportion at 33.8 percent.

“It’s a chronicle of impoverishment foretold,” economist Juan Torres López told IPS. He said the “policies involving steep cutbacks have dismantled the social services and basic collective assets,” turning Spain into “the country with the worst inequalities in Europe.”

According to the economist, the government of right-wing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has adopted “inadequate, unfair and ineffective” measures to combat the economic crisis, instead of opting for “alternatives that could bring good results such as tax reforms aimed at greater equality and financing that is not set up to benefit the banks.”

The budget earmarked for children in Spain fell 14.6 percent from 2010 to 2013, UNICEF reported.

Cuts in public spending began during the administration of socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (2004-2011). But the biggest cutbacks in social expenditure in democracy in Spain have been applied since Rajoy took office.

Teachers and members of social organisations told IPS that some students ask to fill their plates three times in the school lunchrooms. Many don’t even have hot water at home to take showers in the winter, because they live in broken homes or come from extremely poor families.

“Good thing the summer comes. Then I don’t mind taking a shower with cold water,” a boy whose family could not afford a water heater or gas cylinder every month told Fernández.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Spanish Refugee Aid Commission centre in the southern city of Malaga. The banner on the second floor balcony reads, “The right to live in peace.” Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Jul 21 2014 (IPS)

Little Samir covers his face with his hands as he plays under the orange tree in the centre of the inner courtyard of the Spanish Refugee Aid Commission (CEAR) centre in the southern city of Malaga. He is four years old and has spent nearly a year in Spain, where he arrived with his parents, fleeing the war in Syria.

Samir (not his real name) and his family, who remain anonymous at their request, were among millions of Syrians who abandoned their homes and way of life to escape the conflict that flared up in March 2011.

Some of those who seek protection in the European Union come to Spain by plane with a visa, but others come through Morocco, crossing the borders into the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa, with fake documents purchased on the black market.

“The journey from Syria to Spain can take up to three or four months,” Wassim Zabad, who is from Damascus and has lived in Malaga for 11 years, told IPS.

“Why does Spain offer less help to refugees and take longer to process asylum applications than Germany or Sweden? If I had known it, I would have travelled to another country." -- Adi Mohamed, a 33-year-old Syrian
Many people reach Morocco after travelling through Egypt, Libya and Algeria, said Zabad, who owns a travel agency specialising in taking Spanish tourists to Lebanon, Egypt and Syria. Business is bad because of the conflicts in those countries.

In his view, the conditions for refugees “are quite bad” in Spain, which is why “98 percent of Syrians” move on to other countries where they may have relatives or believe there are better facilities and economic assistance, especially France, Germany or Sweden.

Francisco Cansino, the CEAR coordinator for eastern Andalusia, told IPS that the majority of Syrians his organisation helps, coming from the Melilla Centre for the Temporary Stay of Immigrants (CETI), prefer to request asylum in other EU countries, although the standard procedure is for them to seek asylum in the country of entry, and this is what they are told.

The European Commission’s Dublin II Regulation of Feb. 18, 2003 establishes the principle that the first safe country entered by an asylum seeker is responsible for examining the asylum application, and provides for the transfer of an asylum seeker to that EU country.

“They don’t stay. They leave because they think their chances are better in other countries. They ask to leave the same day they arrive. They say they have relatives in Europe,” Cansino said. In his view, Syrian refugees are “suddenly facing an abyss of uncertainty.”

Four Syrians – a couple with two children – have been living at the Malaga CEAR centre for the past few weeks. They receive shelter, food, clothing, a monthly allowance (equivalent to 68 dollars per person), Spanish language classes and job training programmes. CEAR is an independent volunteer-based humanitarian organisation.

So far in 2014, some 200 people from Syria have been cared for in this centre, Cansino said.

“Only a minority of Syrian refugees come to Spain. The majority are displaced within Syria itself or seek safety in neighbouring countries,” David Ortiz, the head of the Red Cross Refugee Reception Centre in Malaga, told IPS.

At this Red Cross centre, one of seven in the country, 13 of the 20 beds are occupied by Syrians and Palestinians who were living in Syria. Among them are two families with children, who have been attending school since they arrived.

A total of 100,000 people have died in the war in Syria, 10,000 of them children. About 2.6 million people have fled to other countries, and 6.5 million are internally displaced, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“Syrian refugees come to us tremendously traumatised,” said Ortiz. They have to rebuild their lives, learn a new language and find work in a country like Spain, where the unemployment rate is over 25 percent, he said.

A report on the situation of refugees in Spain, presented by CEAR in June, indicates that the country received 4,502 applications for asylum in 2013, compared to 2,588 in 2012, owing to an increase in applications from persons from Mali (1,478) and Syria (725).

According to Eurostat data cited in the CEAR report, in 2013 some 435,000 asylum seekers came to the EU. The largest group came from Syria (50,000) and the applications were mainly directed to Germany, with 109,580 applications, followed by France and Sweden. But only three percent of Syrian refugees have been granted asylum in Europe.

“I hope to find stability here in Spain,” said Adi Mohamed, a 33-year-old Syrian, who had a visa that allowed him to fly to Malaga in April, where he lives with some Syrian friends. He owns a restaurant in Palmira, near Homs, and he is worried about the safety of his parents and the five brothers and sisters he left behind.

Mohamed, who ran a restaurant with fifty employees, asked, “Why does Spain offer less help to refugees and take longer to process asylum applications than Germany or Sweden? If I had known it, I would have travelled to another country,” he said.

The length of stay in the refugee reception centres is six months, renewable for the same period in the “very frequent” case that the asylum application has not yet been determined. Families with children may stay for up to 18 months, Ortiz said.

“Asylum processing times are different in different EU countries, and so are benefits for refugees,” said Ortiz. He complained that the Dublin Regulation was “unfair” to oblige refugees to apply for asylum in the country where they first enter the bloc.

In a report published Jul. 9, Amnesty International (AI) says that while 1.82 billion euros (2.46 billion dollars) of EU funding was allocated to control of its external borders between 2007 and 2013, only 700 million (950 million dollars) was spent on improving the situation for asylum seekers.

The AI report accuses EU migration policies of “putting the lives and rights of refugees and migrants at risk” when they try to cross into the EU, especially through Bulgaria, Greece and Spain, and warns that some 23,000 people have lost their lives trying to get into Europe since 2000.

Several NGOs have denounced inadequate conditions at the Melilla CETI, which houses hundreds of Syrian and sub-Saharan migrants, as well as delays in processing asylum applications, which prevents them from leaving Ceuta or Melilla under Spanish law.

According to the UNHCR report ‘Syrian Refugees in Europe: What Europe Can Do to Ensure Protection and Solidarity’, published Jul. 11, the CETI was housing 2,161 people as of Jun. 12, when its maximum capacity is 480. Among them were 384 Syrian adults and 480 children.

(END)

A hemp field in the Alpujarra mountains in the southern Spanish province of Granada. Credit: Courtesy of AEPTC

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, May 22 2014 (IPS)

Spain is experiencing a resurgence of hemp, one of the species of cannabis with the lowest THC content, which has been used for millennia to produce textile, medicinal and food products.

“Hemp has been planted since the beginning of time for its nutritional properties and health benefits,” said Pilar López with the Galihemp Cooperative, which makes and sells hemp products in the northeastern Spanish city of Lugo. “It’s a plant that remineralises the soil.”

The European Union allows the industrial and agricultural production of hemp with a concentration of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) – the chief psychoactive constituent of marijuana – no higher than 0.2 percent.

Varieties of cannabis sativa used to produce marijuana and hashish contain 0.5 to 10 percent THC.

Royal Decree 1729/1999 of Nov. 12, 1999 authorises the cultivation of 25 varieties of industrial hemp in Spain and establishes guidelines to grant subsidies to producers of fibre flax and hemp.

For thousands of years hemp was used to produce clothing, food and products like ship sails. And in Spain, hemp products experienced an upsurge during the country’s 1936-1939 civil war.

But in 1937 the United States banned all cannabis, including hemp, to benefit the production of cotton and synthetic fibres.

The age-old hemp industry collapsed, leading to a rural exodus of farmers who grew it. The final nail in the coffin in the United States was the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, in conjunction with international conventions.

Chemist Josep María Funtané from Catalonia in northeastern Spain told IPS he discovered the therapeutic properties of hemp when he was diagnosed with cancer and found that it helped ease the side effects of chemotherapy.

In 2011, in the Catalonian city of Barcelona, he founded Vitrovit, a company that produces medicinal products, cosmetics and fertilisers derived from hemp.

Patients generally only need cannabis with the lowest levels of THC and the highest possible content of cannabidiol, a major, non-psychoactive constituent of cannabis with anti-inflammatory and analgesic effects."Hemp production could be a green revolution that would help reduce unemployment in rural areas in these times of economic crisis." -- Fernando Montero

Funtané is drawing up a map of Spain to boost the recovery of the cultivation of industrial hemp, offering detailed information by community and province.

Producers of industrial hemp, a fast-growing crop adaptable to most kinds of terrain, underscore its enormous potential and complain that they are subject to confiscation of merchandise and even arrest.

On May 7, the authorities closed down a therapeutic grow-shop that sold cannabis-derived products in Calahorra, a town in the northern region of La Rioja. “Two civil guards showed up without a warrant and closed the shop,” the owner of the business, who only gave his first name, Dionisio, told IPS.

And a producer of hemp-derived products, Miguel Arrillaga, complained to IPS that “since January, the authorities have seized three of my shipments of industrial hemp when they confused it with marijuana, causing problems for shops and customers.”

There is “an epidemic of ignorance” about a crop whose growers even receive state subsidies, he argued.

Arrillaga, like other producers who spoke to IPS, buys legally certified seeds from France, because Spain does not certify seeds. His seeds are planted by farmers in the southern region of Andalusía.

He sells all parts of the hemp plant – seeds, leaves and stems – which are used to make “hemp milk” (a drink made from seeds that are soaked and ground into water), infusions, soap, and skincare products.

“Hemp production could be a green revolution that would help reduce unemployment in rural areas in these times of economic crisis,” the president of the Spanish association of hemp producers (AEPTC), Fernando Montero, told IPS.

The AEPTC was created in 2012 in the village of Bubión, in the heart of the La Alpujarra mountains in the southern Andalusían province of Granada.

Montero, who sells hemp along with his son in their company LaKaraba, said that even though they “meticulously” comply with all of the legal requirements, they are always a bit nervous when they plant, for fear that the authorities will swoop in at any given moment.

Civil guard lieutenant Pablo Cobo in the Andalusían city of Algeciras told IPS that “even though it isn’t what it looks like,” a package of industrial hemp has the same appearance and smell as marijuana.

When the authorities find a shipment of a package of hemp leaves, the results of the analysis come up positive for THC, no matter how low the percentage.

That automatically leads to confiscation of the product and the submission of a sample to the health authorities for a second lab test.

“The problem is that the initial test and identification of the product by the authorities“ are not reliable and must be contrasted by a second test, a lawyer who asked to remain anonymous told IPS.

And while the tests determine whether or not the cannabis complies with the legal limits for THC content, the product can languish in a warehouse for weeks or even months, Arrillaga complained.

He also cited Juan Zurito, a Granada farmer who was arrested several times for crimes against public health, and who has been in prison since February.

Spain is a signatory to the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, and the 1988 United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, which ban the cultivation, production and sale of cannabis as a drug, but do not restrict the production of industrial hemp.

Hemp fibre can be used to make clothing, rope and paper, while the oil from the seeds can be used to produce biofuel or animal feed.

“What could be better than working with something so good,” argued López, of the Galihemp Cooperative, which will produce hemp pulp to make paper, using a special machine.

She told IPS that “the ignorance about this plant in some places in Spain, at the level of the civil guard [police force], is a disgrace.”

The hemp sector faces numerous hurdles in Spain, where it is even hard to find hemp seed dehulling machines. In other EU countries like France, Germany or Austria, meanwhile, the number of hectares dedicated to hemp production is growing fast.

Nevertheless, López believes industrial hemp has a “splendid” future in Spain and says she has “no doubt” that it will prosper, although she admits that ignorance about hemp and the interests of big industry are obstacles.

Funtané concurred. “There are a number of powerful industries, like the textile or steel industries, which are not interested in the potential of hemp and won’t let it steal markets from them,” he said.

Hemp can be used to make components for the car industry, and durable insulation material is made from hemp fibre for the building industry.

Solar panels on one of the buildings of the Museum of Science and Technology of Catalonia. Credit: Chixoy CC BY-SA 3.0

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain , May 6 2014 (IPS)

Until recently it was inconceivable for small groups of organised citizens in fully electrified industrialised countries like Spain to generate their own power from clean sources of energy, challenging the prevailing energy model.

But now anyone who wants to become an “agent of change” can be a co-owner of community projects that promote renewable energy, such as the Huerta Solar Amigos de la Tierra, a 20-kW solar energy plant in the municipality of Sisante in southeast Spain.

Friends of the Earth Spain and the non-profit company Ecooo are behind the creation of the plant.

“We have to change the 20th century paradigm, where energy equals fossil fuels, and citizens are seen as mere consumers,” Héctor de Prado, head of energy and climate in Friends of the Earth Spain, told Tierramérica.

“Buying shares, starting at 100 euros, people become co-owners, and receive profits,” Ecooo spokesman José Vicente Barcia explained to Tierramérica. Ecooo has 65 collective solar installations placed on rooftops in rural and urban communities around Spain.“The most ecological and economical kilowatt is the one that isn’t consumed.” -- Ecooo spokesman José Vicente Barcia

Ecooo, which forms part of the Platform for a new energy model, made up of over 300 organisations, also installs and maintains solar panels for private individuals and carries out energy audits to analyse consumption.

“Installed capacity is higher than what is needed, to the profit of the energy corporations,” said Barcia. “What is needed is a culture of energy savings, because the most ecological and economical kilowatt is the one that isn’t consumed.”

Another possibility for energy consumers who want to support clean energy collectives is to switch from a traditional power utility to one of several “green” cooperatives operating in Spain, such as Zencer in the southern region of Andalusía, Som Energia in Catalonia in the east, or GoiEner and Nosa Enerxia in Galicia in the northwest.

“We want to make consumers participants in managing the energy they consume,” architect Francisco Javier Porras, founder and president of Zencer, told Tierramérica.

Zencer has been supplying electricity generated by renewable sources at a national level since January 2013.

The cooperatives can purchase electricity from the traditional utilities, but they guarantee that all of the energy they sell comes from clean sources, by granting renewable energy certificates to producers of clean energy.

According to Porras, between 30 and 40 percent of the energy produced in Spain now comes from renewable sources.

In his office in Fuengirola in the southern region of Málaga, Porras said consumers “are reluctant to accept changes in terms of energy supply” even though their electricity bills have soared in recent years.

The cost of electricity for the members of the cooperatives is no higher than what consumers pay for power from the big corporations like Iberdrola, Gas Natural Fenosa, Endesa, HC and E.On, and it can even be lower, while users have the satisfaction of knowing they are helping to support clean energy, say advocates of the cooperatives.

In this southern European country, where unemployment stands at 25 percent and the cost of electricity continues to climb, there is a new phenomenon: energy poverty.

The number of people who are finding it hard to pay their electricity bills grew by two million from 2010 to 2012 in this country of more than 47 million people, according to a report by the Association of Environmental Sciences (ACA).

The study found that the proportion of households affected by energy poverty has risen to more than 10 percent – or more than four million people.

José Luis López, who led the study, believes that collective energy management initiatives can have “a certain influence” on reducing energy poverty when they are able to bring down the costs of the members’ energy bills, although he said “there is no immediate short-term effect.”

Promoting renewable, independent energy production also reduces dependence on fossil fuels, thus bringing about a reduction in the millions of euros in fixed costs for the state coffers, López added.

Friends of the Earth Spain complains that the government is standing in the way of the progress of renewable energy in this country, whose enormous potential is not being harnessed, it says, while other European Union countries see green energy as a way to combat emissions of greenhouse gases.

“The government has some nerve to do what it is doing,” said Marc Roselló of Som Energia, referring to the government’s energy policies, which privilege large corporations that use fossil fuels.

In July, the centre-right government introduced an energy reform, and in December it approved an amendment to the electricity sector law, which was opposed by the hundreds of members of the Platform and 14 opposition parties.

Roselló told Tierramérica that in late 2010, a year after the energy market was liberalised, Som Energia transferred to Spain the solid experience of companies like Ecopower in Belgium or Enercoop in France.

“We don’t only sell energy; we also produce energy through our own projects,” he said. The cooperative’s bills provide the more than 14,000 members with details on the origin of the electricity it distributes. In 2013, for example, the energy distributed by the cooperative came from solar, wind and biogas plants.

Zencer’s Porras also sees “the big objective” for the 600-member cooperative, which is accredited to distribute energy throughout Spain, as producing energy through small-scale electricity generation projects using its own funds.

Although a few years ago social participation in the energy system was not possible, thousands of people from all walks of life – investors concerned about the environment, ecologists and others – are now taking part or investing in clean energy projects, like Viure de l’aire, a community wind energy project in Catalonia.

“Each green kWh that you add to the energy grid is one kWh less from burnt fossil fuels,” said Héctor de Prado.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Families demonstrating to demand respect for their right to a roof over their heads, before the authorities evicted 13 families, including a dozen children, from the Buenaventura “corrala” or squat in the southern Spanish city of Málaga. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Apr 9 2014 (IPS)

“I don’t want them to grow up with the notion that they’re poor,” says Catalina González, referring to her two young sons. The family has been living in an apartment rent-free since December in exchange for fixing it up, in the southern Spanish city of Málaga.

Six months ago González, 40, and her two sons, Manuel and Leónidas, 4 and 5, were evicted by the local authorities from the Buenaventura “corrala” or squat – an old apartment building with a common courtyard that had been occupied by 13 families who couldn’t afford to pay rent. The evicted families included a dozen children.

Since then, she told IPS, her sons “don’t like the police because they think they stole their house.”

Spain has the second-highest child poverty rate in the European Union, following Romania, according to the report “The European Crisis and its Human Cost – A Call for Fair Alternatives and Solutions” released Mar. 27 in Athens by Caritas Europa.

Bulgaria is in third place and Greece in fourth, according to the Roman Catholic relief, development and social service organisation.

The austerity measures imposed in Europe, aggravated by the foreign debt, “have failed to solve problems and create growth,” said Caritas Europa’s Secretary General Jorge Nuño at the launch of the report.

“We’re doing ok. The kids are already pre-enrolled in school for the next school year,” said González, a native of Barcelona, who left the father of her sons in Italy when she discovered that “he mistreated them.”

She started over from scratch in Málaga, with no family, job or income, meeting basic needs thanks to the solidarity of social organisations and mutual support networks.

According to a report published this year by the United Nations children’s fund UNICEF, in 2012 more than 2.5 million children in Spain lived in families below the poverty line – 30 percent of all children.

UNICEF reported that 19 percent of children in Spain lived in households with annual incomes of less than 15,000 dollars.

“Child poverty is a reality in Spain, although politicians want to gloss over it and they don’t like us to talk about it because it’s associated with Third World countries,” the founder and president of the NGO Mensajeros de la Paz (Messengers of Peace), Catholic priest Ángel García, told IPS.

Spain’s finance minister Cristóbal Montoro said on Mar. 28 that the information released by Caritas Europa “does not fully reflect reality” because it is based solely on “statistical measurements.”

But in Málaga “there are more and more mothers lining up to get food,” Ángel Meléndez, the president of Ángeles Malagueños de la Noche, told IPS.

Every day, his organisation provides 500 breakfasts, 1,600 lunches and 600 dinners to the poor.

For months, González and her sons have been taking their meals at the “Er Banco Güeno”, a community-run soup kitchen in the low-income Málaga neighbourhood of Palma-Palmilla, which operates out of a closed-down bank branch.

According to Father Ángel, child poverty “isn’t just about not being able to afford food, but also about not being able to buy school books or not buying new clothes in the last two years.”

“It’s about unequal opportunity among children,” he said.

The crisis in Spain is still severe. The country’s unemployment rate is the highest in the EU: 25.6 percent in February, after Greece’s 27.5 percent.

In 2013, the government of right-wing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy approved a National Action Plan for Social Inclusion 2013-2016, which includes the aim of reducing child poverty.

Caritas Europa reports that at least one and a half million households in Spain are suffering from severe social inclusion – 70 percent more than in 2007, the year before the global financial crisis broke out.

“Entire families end up on the street because they can’t afford to pay rent,” Rosa Martínez, the director of the Centro de Acogida Municipal, told IPS during a visit to the municipal shelter. “More people are asking for food. They’re even asking for diapers for newborns because they are in such a difficult situation.”

Of the nearly 26 percent of the economically active population out of jobs, half are young people, according to the National Statistics Institute, while the gap between rich and poor is growing.

As of late March, 4.8 million people were unemployed, according to official statistics. The figures also show that the proportion of jobless people with no source of income whatsoever has grown to four out of 10.

Social discontent has been fuelled by austerity measures that have entailed cutbacks in health, education and social protection.

A report on the Housing Emergency in the Spanish State, by the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH) and the DESC Observatory, estimates that 70 percent of the families who have been, or are about to be, evicted include at least one minor.

“The right to equal opportunities is dead letter if children are ending up on the street,” José Cosín, a lawyer and activist with PAH Málaga, told IPS.

Cosín denounced the vulnerable situation of the children who were evicted along with their families from the Buenaventura corrala on Oct. 3, 2013.

Fifteen of the people who were evicted filed a lawsuit demanding respect of the children’s basic rights, as outlined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which went into effect in 1990.

The Convention establishes that states parties “shall in case of need provide material assistance and support programmes, particularly with regard to nutrition, clothing and housing.”

The number of families in Spain with no source of income at all grew from 300,000 in mid-2007 to nearly 700,000 by late 2013, according to the report Precariedad y Cohesión Social; Análisis y Perspectivas 2014 (Precariousness and Social Cohesion; Analysis and Perspectives 2014), by Cáritas Española and the Fundación Foessa.

And 27 percent of households in Spain are supported by pensioners. Grown-up sons and daughters are moving back into their parents’ homes with their families, or retired grandparents are helping support their children and grandchildren, with their often meagre pensions.

“When times get rough, the social fabric is strengthened,” said González. She stressed the solidarity of different groups in Málaga who for three months helped her clean up and repair the apartment she is living in now, which is on the tenth floor of a building with no elevator, and was full of garbage and had no door, window panes or piped water.

González complained that government social services are underfunded and inefficient, and said she receives no assistance from them.

Like all young children, her sons ask her for things. But she explains to them that it is more important to spend eight euros on food than on two plastic fishes. It took her several weeks to save up money to buy the toys. Last Christmas she took them to a movie for the first time.

Demonstrators with torches and placards reading “No more deaths on the borders” in Malaga on Feb. 12, to call for an investigation into the deaths of 15 immigrants six days earlier in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in northern Africa. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Mar 10 2014 (IPS)

“Who will speak for them now? Who will tell their stories to their families in Cameroon or Ivory Coast?” asked Edmund Okeke, a Nigerian, about the 15 migrants who died while trying to swim to the shore of the Spanish city of Ceuta from Morocco.

The victims were driven back with rubber bullets fired by the Spanish Guardia Civil (militarised police) from the beach of this Spanish enclave in north Africa, on Feb. 6.“The nights were terrible. The waves were like mountains." -- Gora Ndiaye

“These are people living in unbearable conditions of poverty and who are seeking a better life. Why else would they want to leave their country and embark on such a long and dangerous journey?” said Okeke, the president of the Palma-Palmilla Immigrants Association in the southern Spanish city of Malaga.

Okeke has lived here for 14 years and he believes that the actions of the Spanish border authorities “cannot be justified.”

That is why, he told IPS, he is calling on the government of rightwing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy for a “proper” investigation and the prosecution and trial of “those responsible for giving the order to fire” on people “who were neither aggressive, nor represented a danger to anyone.”

The 15 migrants drowned when dozens jumped into the sea to try to reach Ceuta by swimming around the breakwater separating Moroccan and Spanish waters.

The Interior minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, admitted on Feb. 13 when he appeared before parliament that the authorities had fired rubber bullets and tear gas from the land to the water.

“But not at the people,” he emphasised in his description of the facts being investigated by the attorney general’s office, following a complaint lodged by a score of non-governmental organisations.

Fernández Díaz visited Ceuta and Melilla, the other autonomous Spanish city in northern Africa, on Mar. 5 and 6. There he announced that the fences separating the enclaves from Morocco would be reinforced with special wire mesh to make them even harder for immigrants to scale.

Every year thousands of Africans, mostly from the sub-Saharan region, try to get into the European Union by climbing the three rows of fences lined with razor wire that separate Moroccan territory from Ceuta and Melilla, or by crossing the border in small boats from Morocco or their home countries.

But swimming across was an even more desperate option.

Tina Adrasubi, a 34-year-old Nigerian, left her home in Benin 13 years ago to come to Spain in order to help her family.

“I went to Mali by car with a friend, and then on foot to Morocco to cross to Ceuta,” she told IPS, rocking her two-month-old daughter, Gloria. Many sub-Saharan Africans take years to reach Morocco.

Each of the young men who drowned has his own story, and perhaps a mother who is waiting for a phone call that never comes, but “it seems that does not matter at all when you are poor,” complained Okeke to IPS.

The five bodies recovered on the Spanish side of the border fence lie in anonymous graves in a Ceutan graveyard. The others were taken to Moroccan morgues.

The governing People’s Party rejected a move in Congress to open a commission of enquiry into the tragedy.

Cecilia Malmström, European Commissioner for Home Affairs, suggested in a letter to minister Fernández Díaz that “the rubber bullets could have provoked panic among the group of immigrants” attempting to swim ashore, contributing to the deaths.

Some 80,000 immigrants, 40,000 in Morocco and another 40,000 in Mauritania, are waiting their chance to enter the EU through Ceuta and Melilla, the minister said on Mar. 4, according to figures provided by Morocco and corroborated by his office.

Union leader Gerardo Cova, who between 2001 and 2007 was head of the Information Centre for Foreign Workers in the resort of Marbella, told IPS: “the government wants to create social alarm and is criminalising immigrants in order to justify its actions and make cutbacks on foreigners’ rights.”

In 2013, a total of about 100,000 immigrants were intercepted trying to cross maritime and land borders into the 28 member countries of the EU.

Spain is the fourth most frequent route of irregular entry, according to the December 2013 figures from the European Agency for the Management of External Borders (Frontex), quoted by its assistant director, Gil Arias.

“Instead of rescuing them, they were treated like animals,” Christiana Nwokeji, the president of the Malaga Union of Nigerian Women, complained to IPS in her home.

While she was talking, a video on the television showed several survivors who managed to swim to shore in Ceuta, only to be immediately sent back to Morocco.

Nwokeji remarked that Spaniards, too, are emigrating because of the extremely high unemployment rate, due to the economic crisis and the new regulations that make it easier to fire workers. “Everyone in the world emigrates when they face a lack of opportunities,” she said.

“I was born in a crisis. We have always lived in crises,” Gora Ndiaye, a 28-year-old Senegalese man, told IPS. He said he felt “very afraid and very cold” in the small boat in which he and 45 of his fellow countrymen spent a week, travelling from Dakar to the Spanish municipality of Hoya Fría on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands.

Ndiaye, who has a wife and a six-month-old son in Senegal, said “people here have to help Africa,” and he justified migration “because we have no food, we must send money to our families. We cannot live on nothing.”

“The nights were terrible. The waves were like mountains. I felt stabbing pains in my arms and legs,” said Ndiaye, who cannot swim, and who paid about 500 euros (693 dollars) for the crossing in a flimsy boat. “I am lucky to have lived to tell the tale,” he said.

According to Balance Migratorio en la Frontera Sur de 2013” (Migration Balance on the Southern Border 2013), a report presented in February by the Andalusian Human Rights Association (APDHA), 7,550 immigrants were intercepted reaching Spain by boat or through Ceuta and Melilla.

The number of people who died or disappeared in the attempt were 130 in 2013.

The study reported that 45.25 percent of African immigrants, over half of them from sub-Saharan Africa, arrived in boats and 27.4 percent on inflatable rafts. Some 15.75 percent scaled the fences at Ceuta and Melilla.

On Feb. 28, 200 immigrants climbed the fences at Melilla and their celebration of their arrival with hugs and laughter was shown on television.

Yvette Edere, from Ivory Coast, told IPS she felt “very sad” about what happened in Ceuta, and said she “had to struggle very hard” to get legal residence in Spain, where she arrived with a visa 20 years ago.

“Many white people from Europe and the United States come to Africa,” said Okeke. He is presently helping some Spaniards who want to go to work in Nigeria.

“They exploit its gold and its oil, and no one fires on them. There are no barriers or documents required. They are treated like kings,” he concluded.

Poster demanding justice 10 years after the death of journalist José Couso. Courtesy: Family, Friends and Colleagues of José Couso

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Feb 24 2014 (IPS)

The pursuit of universal jurisdiction in Spain is drawing to a close because of a bill that will entail the dismissal of over a dozen criminal investigations in the country’s courts and will make it very difficult to open new cases of crimes against humanity.

The rightwing government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and the governing People’s Party (PP) were able to fast-track the reform of the Organic Law of the Judiciary Power in parliament thanks to their absolute majority, and are swiftly heading to block universal justice proceedings in one of the countries that has enforced them most.“Spain will become a paradise for impunity.” -- Ignacio Jovtis, Amnesty International

A reform bill, rejected by all the opposition parties, was presented on Feb. 11, with the effect that requests for reports and other legal procedures were blocked. And on Feb. 17 the Ministry of Justice asked Congress for measures to accelerate the process even further.

The bill will be rushed through parliament after debate in a single plenary session, it was decided on Thursday Feb. 20, again with the votes of the PP alone, ensuring its speedy entry into force.

If it is approved, “Spain will become a paradise for impunity,” Ignacio Jovtis, an expert on universal jurisdiction who works for the Spanish chapter of Amnesty International, told IPS.

In his view, the proposal “does not only limit the principle of universal jurisdiction, it makes it disappear.”

On Thursday Feb. 27 the senate will vote on the bill.

The principle of universal jurisdiction empowers national courts to prosecute and try a number of serious crimes that affect the international community, independently of where they were committed and the nationality of the perpetrators and victims.

Spain’s proposed reform is criticised by over one hundred NGOs and national and international institutions that stated on Wednesday Feb. 19 that its approval “would be a devastating blow to universal jurisdiction and a violation of Spain’s international obligations.”

The government has treated the reform as a matter of urgency since Feb. 10, when a judge of the Spanish National Court issued international arrest warrants for five former leaders of the Chinese Communist Party on charges of genocide, torture and crimes against humanity during crackdowns on the people of Tibet in the 1980s and 1990s.

“It’s an ad hoc reform to shut down cases that are awkward for Spain,” lawyer Lydia Vicente Márquez, the executive director of Rights International Spain, told IPS.

The reform bill imposes “impossible” conditions on Spanish courts wishing to investigate and prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes of a universal nature, she said.

When it is approved, Spanish judges will only be competent to investigate these crimes in cases against Spanish citizens or foreigners resident in Spain, or who are in Spain and whose extradition has been denied by the Spanish authorities, the text says.

“The economic agenda takes precedence over human rights,” Jovtis said.

This reform is a step towards impunity in criminal policy, he said, and “it may also be an invasion of the Judicial Power by the legislative branch,” because parliament would establish the dismissal of cases already open until the new conditions are met, according to its final transitional provision.

Amnesty researcher Jovtis predicted that the majority of the approximately 15 cases before the Spanish National Court based on universal jurisdiction will be shelved because of the reform.

One of these may be the case of José Couso, a Spanish journalist who died in Baghdad on Apr. 8, 2003 during an attack by the U.S. army on the hotel where independent foreign reporters were staying. A Spanish judge has indicted three U.S. military personnel as responsible for his death.

“We are angry and worried. This reform is a complete botch-up and it’s made to measure to dismiss our case,” Javier Couso, the victim’s brother and a member of the Family, Friends and Colleagues of José Couso, told IPS.

The journalist’s brother pointed out that Rajoy met with U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington before the reform was proposed.

He also said that lawmakers should not be the ones to decide the provisional dismissal of cases, because that is the province of judges.

Couso did not rule out taking a complaint to Spain’s Constitutional Court, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg or courts in other countries, if the case against the U.S. military personnel is closed because of the reform.

Couso’s family met with spokespersons from all the Spanish parliamentary parties on Feb. 11 to express their deep concern about the bill. The main opposition party, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), promised to study the possibility of appealing the bill on the grounds of unconstitutionality.

Jovtis said it was “shameful” that Spain, “a reference point and a beacon of hope for some countries in Latin America,” should undo what it has done and go against the European and global trend towards incorporating the principle of universal jurisdiction in national legislation.

On Friday Feb. 21, Argentine judge María Servini, acting in a case against crimes committed during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975), asked the Spanish justice authorities to exhume the body of a victim of the Franco era.

The deceased in question is Timoteo Mendieta Alcalá, a trade unionist who was executed in the cemetery of the central city of Guadalajara in 1939, and is buried in a common grave along with 17 others.

“Some 84.4 percent of countries in the world have universal jurisdiction legislation and allow judicial investigations on the basis of this principle for at least one type of crime,” said Amnesty’s Jovtis.

Spain “was formerly in the vanguard” of universal justice and “now we should not let it  fall behind,” according to the over one hundred associations signing the joint declaration against the reform bill that was handed in to the European Parliament by the International Campaign for Tibet.

In addition to the universal justice cases on geniocide in Tibet and the death of José Couso in the Iraq War, the Spanish National Court is currently investigating cases of genocide in Guatemala, Western Sahara and Rwanda.

It is also investigating the murder of Spanish priest Ignacio Ellacuría in El Salvador in 1989, and of Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria in Chile in 1976, during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

“There is an international consensus that what are regarded as the gravest crimes should not go unpunished. We do not want impunity, as this would mean they could happen again,” concluded Márquez.

Members of the Malaga Association of Friendship with the Saharawi People in the storehouse where they collected food to be sent with the Caravan for Peace to the Saharawi camps at Tindouf, in the Algerian desert. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Feb 19 2014 (IPS)

Volunteers are hard at work in an industrial warehouse in the Spanish city of Malaga, organising thousands of kilos of rice, sugar, lentils and oil to be shipped this February to Saharawi refugee camps in Tindouf, in the west of Algeria.

“We hope to send some 60,000 kilos of basic foods,” said Isabel González, the president of the Malaga Association of Friendship with the Saharawi People (AMAPS), as she showed IPS the boxes piled on wooden pallets in the storehouse outside Malaga.

This is a common sight here and in other Andalusian cities this month.“The problem is not food. A long-term solution is needed, and it involves a political solution to the conflict.” -- Saharawi, Ahmed Sid Ahmed

On Saturday Feb. 15, in Malaga and other Andalusian cities, trucks were being loaded to form part of the Caravan for Peace, which will leave the eastern city of Alicante for Oran in Algeria on Feb. 22, and then continue into the desert.

After Spain abandoned Western Sahara, formerly under its dominion, in 1975, thousands of Saharawis fled the Moroccan troops who occupied the territory. Now the refugees are living in the Tindouf camps.

In addition to the solidarity practised by citizens, Spain must make “a political commitment” that will repay its historical “debt” to the Sahara, González said.

The desert in Tindouf “is no place to live. There is nothing there,” she said.

Every year, Saharawi children aged seven to 12 travel to Spain to spend the hot summer months of July and August with volunteer families all over the country.

The Vacations in Peace programme was initiated in 1993, after the ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario Front, the leading group of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, also known as Western Sahara.

Participants in these holidays can brush up on Spanish, their second language, “live in a different reality and bring a message of peace,” González said.

During their first week in Spain the Saharawi children are given medical checks and receive any necessary treatment, thanks to an agreement with the Spanish health services.

Since the inception of the programme, 30,000 Saharawi boys and girls have been welcomed into Spanish homes, according to the Andalusian Federation of Associations in Solidarity with the Sahara (FANDAS), which covers the eight Andalusian provinces.

“Children are the best ambassadors for their people’s cause,” said González. She highlighted the goals of awareness raising and denunciation in her association, which belongs to FANDAS.

In 2013, 81 Saharawi children came to Malaga, 1,400 to Andalusia as a whole and about 4,000 to the whole of Spain, González said. The economic crisis in this country has undermined support for the programmes, which are carried out in coordination with the Saharawi Red Crescent.

Antonia Silva, a nursing aide from Malaga, has been an AMAPS volunteer since 2005 because “it’s a human rights issue” of which “the public must be made aware,” she told IPS.

She hosted the same girl for four consecutive summers, but can do so no longer. At the age of 14, the teenager died of a liver tumour.

Rafael Gálvez, also from Malaga, founded a humanitarian association named MRABIH in honour of a Sahariwan friend who died. It set up an emergency healthcare school in the camps to train Sahariwa volunteers in first aid.

Gálvez also organises talks in Spanish schools, as well as sponsored runs and other activities to raise awareness and collect funds for food, medicines and clothes for the Caravan for Peace.

The caravan is a nationwide effort, but the regions organise their consignments on a rotation basis so that they reach Tindouf at regular intervals. Now it is Andalusia’s turn.

There are some 200 organisations working in solidarity with the Saharawi people. They come under the umbrella of the State Coordinating Committee for Associations in Solidarity with the Sahara (CEAS), which has delegates in every autonomous region and in Madrid.

“It is the largest solidarity movement in Spain,” Abdalahe Jalil, the Saharawi delegate for the cities of Malaga and Granada, told IPS.

The aid effort has a humanitarian and a political side. On the political side, the associations and Saharawi delegates lobby political parties, unions and national and international bodies, putting pressure on them to hold a referendum for the self-determination of the Saharawi people.

According to repeated United Nations resolutions, when decolonising a territory the colonial power must hold a prior referendum on self-determination in the colony.

Saharawi activists complain of the neglect of the refugees in the Algerian desert camps, but also of imprisonment and torture of those who demand a self-determination ballot in the parts of Western Sahara occupied by Morocco.

“The voice of Saharawis in the occupied zone is not heard anywhere,” said Jalil, speaking from the warehouse where the food is stored.

“We disseminate what is happening: the injustice faced by political prisoners, the lack of freedom of expression and the violations of human rights,” he said.

Another Saharawi, Ahmed Sid Ahmed, who was a teacher of Spanish in refugee camp schools between 1989 and 2003, told IPS that food aid is basic for the survival of the refugees.

But “the problem is not food. A long-term solution is needed, and it involves a political solution to the conflict,” he said.

Ahmed, who has lived in Malaga since 2003 with his wife and three sons, aged 16, 12 and one, said many Spanish families who host Saharawi children visit the camps.

“Once a father took his 11- or 12-year-old son along so that he could see the situation that other children have to live in,” said Ahmed, who studied in Cuba and whose parents and siblings live in the camps.

Over the years the Malaga association has sent four ambulances, a water supply truck, furniture for 16 primary school classrooms and 1,200 solar panels for single family homes.

While the refugees barely survive in the Algerian desert, and are dependent on food aid, a fishing agreement adopted in 2006 by the European Union and Morocco allows European boats to fish in Western Sahara’s territorial waters. It is an agreement that Saharawi activists say represents the exploitation of their people’s natural resources.

The U.N. does not recogise Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.

“Western Sahara is a magnificent example of how political and strategic interests can hamper the realisation of the principles and values enshrined in law,” the Spanish Society for International Human Rights Law concluded in its 2012 publication “Peace, migrations and the free determination of peoples”.

Women carry heavy loads on foot across the border from Spanish enclaves to Morocco. Courtesy: Cortesía de José Palazón/Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos de la Infancia

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain, Jan 28 2014 (IPS)

Before sunrise, a Moroccan woman waits her turn at the pedestrian border control separating her country from the Spanish city of Melilla. Hours later she crosses over, takes up an 80-kilo bundle of merchandise and carries it back to her country, for a payment of less than six dollars.

Every day thousands of women like her cross the border posts between Morocco and the cities of Ceuta and Melilla, Spanish enclaves in the north of Africa, to pick up heavy loads of goods and carry them across the border on foot, a trade worth millions of euros that is profitable to business on both sides.“Humiliating treatment is meted out to the women, who are mistreated by the police on both sides of the border. You only have to be there for five minutes to realise this.” -- Amin Souissi

The business community in Melilla “lives off this contraband trade,” made possible by thousands of women porters who work “to survive and feed their children,” José Palazón, the founder of the Asociación Pro Derechos de la Infancia (Children’s Rights Association), who has lived in the city for 14 years, told IPS.

“They are single mothers, widows, abused women, with disabled husbands, women excluded by society, who turn to contraband in order to make ends meet,” union leader Abdelkader El-Founti of the Melilla General Workers’ Confederation (CGT) told IPS.

When the Barrio Chino border post in Melilla opens at 9:00 a.m., the woman porter shows her passport and walks to an esplanade where several vans have left bundles ready for carriage early in the day.

She ties the huge bundle to her back with ropes and walks back for over 200 metres, weaving through the crowds in the narrow pathway. She delivers her load on the Moroccan side and returns to carry more bundles across until the border post closes at 1:00 p.m.

In Ceuta and Melilla this activity is known as “atypical trade”, and Moroccans live with it as tolerated contraband.

White signs bearing black silhouettes of men and women porters hang high on the iron railings of the narrow passage in Barrio Chino to indicate the entrance.

The women are paid when they deliver their loads on the Moroccan side, where men with wheelbarrows or vans wait to collect them. The amount depends on the weight carried. “The maximum is 10 euros [13 dollars] a day. For each load they are paid three to five euros [four to six dollars] according to weight,” El-Founti said.

In addition to the physical exertion, the women must put up with “all kinds of abuse from the Spanish and Moroccan police,” he said.

“Humiliating treatment is meted out to the women, who are mistreated by the police on both sides of the border. You only have to be there for five minutes to realise this,” Amin Souissi, a Moroccan national belonging to the Andalusia Human Rights Association (Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos de Andalucía) in the southern Spanish city of Cadiz, told IPS.

Souissi recalled the death in September 2013 of a young porter from the Moroccan city of Tetouan who, “tired of so much humiliation,” set himself alight at the border post of El Tarajal in Ceuta, after his country’s authorities confiscated the goods he was carrying.

“We don’t want them to lose their livelihood, but we do want the human rights of these persons on the borders of Ceuta and Melilla to be respected,” said Souissi, who has seen police push women porters around with their truncheons.

Souissi complained about corruption among the Moroccan authorities, who take bribes, as well as the arbitrary way in which border crossings are handled, as permission “depends on the official on duty.”

The enormous loads contain all sorts of goods, such as blankets, used car tires, food and diapers. The vast majority of porters are women, but some are men, especially young men with limited resources.

Many women cross the border with smaller packages. Others work as domestic employees in homes in Melilla and Ceuta and go home to Morocco at the end of the day.

About 40,000 people cross daily between the Moroccan town of Beni Ansar and Melilla, but only 10 percent of them have visas, said El-Founti. Porters have to show their passports, and the rest have special permits, under an agreement between the Spanish and Moroccan governments, to work in Melilla during the day and return home at night.

“They are construction labourers, domestic employees and hotel workers who work a 10- or 12-hour day for less than 200 euros [270 dollars] a month, without any labour rights,” he said.

El-Founti complained that business owners in Melilla take advantage of the fears of “cross-border employees” of losing their jobs, and of their poverty. “Many Moroccan women who work as domestics in Melilla are illiterate and ignorant of their labour rights,” he said.

The traffic in goods carried by the porters “moves a great deal of money both sides of the border,” said Palazón, who believes it will be “very difficult” to stamp out this situation; however, he called for greater dignity for the workers and improved border facilities for their daily crossings.

“There is not even one drinking water tap,” said Souissi about the El Tarajal border crossing in Ceuta, which “is more like a cage than a pedestrian border crossing,” with narrow passages that the porters can barely squeeze through.

The border trade is worth 1.4 billion euros (1.8 billion dollars) a year to both sides of the frontier, and contributes one-third of the economy of Ceuta and Melilla, the two autonomous Spanish cities.

Some 45,000 people depend directly for their livelihoods on this activity, and 400,000 are indirectly employed, according to the American Chamber of Commerce in Casablanca, Morocco, quoted in the Declaration of Tetouan signed by almost 30 organisations in April 2012.

The declaration states that “an important quantity of money” is paid as bribes, totalling 90 million euros (121 million dollars) a year, according to the independent Moroccan weekly Al Ayam.

Conditions at the border crossings, where thousands of people crowd together, have already caused fatalities. In November 2008, Zafia Azizi was trampled to death in Melilla and on May 25, 2009, Busrha and Zhora, two Moroccan women, died in a human avalanche at the Ceutan border post of Biutz.

Activists consulted by IPS said the European Union (EU) is not paying proper attention to the human rights violations suffered by the Moroccan women porters.

Ceuta and Melilla enjoy a special fiscal regime with substantial tax rebates and are not part of the EU’s Customs Union. Both cities can import goods at lower tariffs than the rest of the EU and sell those products to Moroccan citizens, who send them to Morocco through the irregular cross-border transit system for re-sale.

Students on the Spanish island of Tenerife talk to youngsters from a school in the Sahrawi refugee camps outside of Tindouf in western Algeria. Credit: Courtesy Red Canaria de Escuelas Solidarias

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain , Jan 15 2014 (IPS)

Hundreds of students from Spain’s Canary Islands, Senegal and the Sahrawi refugee camps outside of Tindouf in western Algeria are meeting each other and breaking down cultural barriers thanks to the Red Educativa Sin Fronteras.

In the “Educational Network Without Borders”, students, teachers and parents build bridges between classrooms on both sides of the miles of Atlantic Ocean that separate them.

“Hi, my name is Ángel, I’m 13 years old and I go to school at the CEO (Centro de Educación Obligatoria) Mogán in the south of Gran Canaria Island. I would like to meet students from Senegal,” says one boy in a video taped by Ivanhoe Hernández, a teacher of literature from that school.

The CEO school arranges virtual and snail mail exchanges with the students of Mbake Gueye, who teaches Spanish in Louga in northwestern Senegal.

The RESF network is made up of volunteer teachers, parents and students from Senegal, Western Sahara and Gabon in West Africa, Haiti in the Caribbean, and the Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa.

It emerged in 2004, at the initiative of the Puente Humano or Human Bridge association, based in Senegal and the Canary Islands, with the aim of tearing down day by day “the wall of ignorance that exists between our people,” Amadou Ba, who also teaches Spanish in Louga, told IPS in a videoconference.

“We are teachers from both sides [of the Atlantic] and we propose a cultural and educational change that makes it possible to form global citizens,” Rafael Blanco, a teacher of Latin and Greek who belongs to Puente Humano, told IPS. He is the coordinator of RESF in the Canary Islands, and is presently visiting Senegal.

Ba, a 33-year-old who has been a teacher since 2004, said the communication between students from Africa and Spain focuses on specific subjects prepared ahead of time, such as immigration, family life or the environment.

“Hearing about the need to care for the environment, for example, from Spanish students of the same age reaches them better and sensitises them more,” said Ba, who teaches in the Artillerie Nord school in Louga, which coordinates RESF in Senegal.

As part of RESF, students between the ages of 12 and 16 write short reports, tape video recordings, ask and answer questions, take photos and make drawings that travel back and forth across the Atlantic by email or through the postal service.

The direct communications are through video conferences or audio conferences, using cellphones connected to speakers.

Blanco mentioned the material and technical difficulties in Senegal, where some of the schools involved do not have Internet connection, and where power cuts are frequent. For that reason, much of the communication depends on postal delivery services.

Puente Humano covers the cost of establishing Internet connections in the schools in Louga.

Some 650 students in 13 schools in Senegal currently interact with students and teachers in the Canary Islands.

Blanco estimated that another 720 students are involved in the project in the Canary Islands and in three schools in the Tindouf refugee camps – where almost all of the roughly 250,000 Sahrawi people live today, 1,465 km southwest of Algiers.

A school in Ansé a Pitres, in southeast Haiti, also took part in the exchanges in 2012, but did not continue in 2013 due to technical difficulties.

“Our aim is to multiply real cooperation by means of communication,” says the Puente Humano website.

Blanco believes “you can’t cooperate with something you don’t know,” and paraphrased
Madou Ndeye, a Senegalese teacher and writer who died in March 2013, who said “we would be more advanced if the money that went to cooperation and aid was dedicated to getting to know each other and communicate with each other.”

Ba said participation in RESF would encourage his students to take photos and tape short videos of their day-to-day lives in Louga, to share with the students in the Canary Islands.

“We have values, customs, rich things to show,” said Ba, who believes development aid projects carried out by non-governmental organisations “should not only be based on giving, but also on receiving.”

He also lamented that the information that reaches Europe from Africa “is only trade-related, because the business community isn’t interested in us communicating with each other.”

The teachers involved in RESF incorporate the student exchanges in their daily coursework. For example, a math teacher on the Canary island of Tenerife suggested that her students analyse “the statistics of inequality,” comparing the cost of living and of the basic basket of essential items in Spain and Senegal.

“Awareness-raising is the most important thing we have managed to do, with our students,” said Cristóbal Mendoza, a teacher in the Mario Lhermet school on the Canary island of La Gomera, in an interview broadcast by the Irradia radio platform, taped in Senegal during a visit by several Canary Islands teachers to Louga.

During the 2010-2011 school year, the coordination of RESF was incorporated in the Red Canaria de Escuelas Solidarias (roughly, the Canary Network of Schools in Solidarity), which carries out projects for educational cooperation with Africa.

RESF’s blog presents the different subjects, activities and experiences of the teachers of different subjects. Blanco and his students at the Instituto Cabrera Pinto school in Tenerife investigated myths from Spain and West Africa in a course on classic culture.

“There are networks that bind and networks that bring people together. Never get tired of weaving those networks that bring people together,” wrote Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano in a message of support to the RESF, which he applauded for its work of South-North educational cooperation.

The famous writer stressed that the initiative develops values, applies new technologies to cooperation, enriches educational subjects and courses, and develops knowledge of different cultures and realities.

“They are in Senegal, but they have the same worries, fears, emotions and goals as you do,” Ivanhoe Hernández, originally from the southern Spanish city of Málaga, explains to his students in the Canary Islands.

He said “educating and learning together helps break down prejudice and racism.”

Blanco said in a videoconference from Senegal, where he is working on coordination of the network thanks to a one-year sabbatical leave: “We are creating a culture of knowledge directly, without depending on the television, making use of communication tools and technology, and in a language that allows people to communicate and share.”

The network has made possible exchange trips to Senegal for students and teachers from the Canary Islands and vice versa, where they visit schools, stay in the homes of local families, and become familiar with the culture.

As the Spanish government cuts development aid funds, RESF is growing in the number of students involved. And although the project is moving ahead “without haste” and represents “a few drops of water, that is a lot,” Blanco said.

Collage of news reports on trafficking in the Spanish press, from Mujer Emancipada de Málaga, an NGO that provides assistance to women in need. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain , Dec 23 2013 (IPS)

María came to Spain from Paraguay to work as a housekeeper in a hotel. But it was a false job promise, and she ended up in a nightclub, where she was forced to work as a prostitute.

One night she told a client the truth. Moved by her story, he started hiring her services day after day until he managed to find her a job somewhere else – and married her in the end.

It may sound like the plot of a movie with a happy ending, but it is a real case that happened recently, and was told to IPS by Felicia Carmen Marecos, a social worker with the general consulate of Paraguay in the southern Spanish city of Málaga.

It is just one of many stories of women who were trying to flee poverty and fell prey to human trafficking networks.

Most victims of trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation in Spain come from Brazil, China, Nigeria, Paraguay and Romania, according to the police, who estimate the number of victims in the country at 12,000 and the earnings of the sex trafficking rings in Spain at five million euros (six million dollars) a day.

María (not her real name) came to the country encouraged by her sister, who was already living in Madrid and was in on the scheme.

Women forced into prostitution tend to be drawn in with the help of family members, friends or acquaintances.

The young woman dared to speak out and file a complaint. But most victims do not do so “because they are coerced from their countries of origin,” Helena Maleno, an expert in migration and human trafficking with Colectivo Caminando Fronteras, an NGO that defends migrant rights, told IPS.

Many of the victims do not speak Spanish and are under threat, in debt, and unaware that help is available. They are also undocumented immigrants, and are afraid to go to the police.

Besides, “they don’t tend to recognise that they are victims,” said Paula Mandillo, a social worker with Mujer Emancipada, an association in Málaga that helped over one hundred women, mainly from Nigeria and Romania, in 2012.

The first European Commission report on human trafficking in Europe, published by Eurostat in April 2013, put the number of victims between 2008 and 2010 at 23,632, with the number growing by 18 percent over the three-year period. Of that total, 15 percent were children and adolescents.

In 62 percent of the cases, the victims – mainly women – were trafficked for sexual exploitation, while 25 percent were trafficked for forced labour, and 14 percent were victims of other kinds of trafficking, such as organ removal.

In 2010, Spain had the second-highest number of victims of human trafficking in the European Union, after Italy, according to the study.

The organisations making up the Spanish Network Against Human Trafficking are calling for a comprehensive law against the crime, which would penalise trafficking in all its forms and not only sexual exploitation.

They are also demanding a human rights focus, arguing that an approach based on crime prevention, law enforcement and control of migration currently predominates.

One example of this was the case of an undocumented immigrant who was arrested and deported when she reported to the police in a coastal town in the province of Málaga that she had been raped, IPS was told by sources with the Guardia Civil immigrant support team (EDATI) in this southern Spanish province.

And a 24-year-old Romanian woman, who was fined by the police several times for working as a prostitute on the streets of Barcelona, committed suicide on Sept. 23. Only then was it discovered that since 2000 she had been a victim of a trafficking ring that sexually exploited some 200 women, and that the pimp was her own husband.

“To raise society’s awareness about what is happening, it has to be made clear that trafficking is not prostitution or irregular immigration, but that there are undocumented immigrants and people who are sexually exploited who are victims of trafficking,” Maleno said.

If the authorities in Spain find signs that an undocumented immigrant is a victim of trafficking, they must inform her that she has a 30-day grace period, when deportation procedures are suspended.

During that period, she receives advice and support from specialist organisations, and decides whether to report the crime and work with the police and judicial authorities in the investigation.

If she cooperates, she is eligible for a residency permit, under a 2009 reform of the law on aliens.

“It’s a problem for the prosecution of the crime to be based on whether or not the victim files a formal complaint. Even if they don’t report the crime, their human rights must be protected,” and that means not deporting them to their countries of origin, where their lives may be in danger, Maleno said.

Many Nigerian women who fall prey to trafficking networks have made a hazardous journey, involving walking across part of the Sahara desert, often pregnant or with children, to Morocco, where they take ‘pateras’ – small, flimsy boats used to traffic immigrants from North Africa – to the Spanish coast.

“The 30-day grace period is very short compared to what they have gone through,” said Maleno. In countries like Norway the period is six months, and NGOs participate in identifying victims, the Colectivo Caminando Fronteras activist pointed out.

Human trafficking was not classified as a crime in Spain’s penal code until December 2010. It is now punishable by sentences of five to 10 years in prison.

In the four cases that since then have resulted in firm convictions, 10 perpetrators were found guilty, Marta González, who heads Proyecto Esperanza of the Congregación de Religiosas Adoratrices, an order of Catholic nuns, told IPS.

According to Maleno, there is “an extremely big problem” in Spain involving victims of trafficking for sexual purposes from Romania, because they are legal immigrants, since Romania is an EU member.

For that reason, “they don’t enter into the circuit of protection established by the protocol against trafficking,” she said, adding that another problem is how frequently they are moved around the country and Europe as a whole.

The sex trafficking rings often use babies, whether to help women from sub-Saharan Africa get into Spain or to coerce them into forced prostitution, she said.

Until this year, when pateras landed on the coast, the authorities did not identify the babies. But now they have started to take their fingerprints, and are increasingly carrying out DNA tests on women and children at border posts, to verify that they are related, Maleno said.

In September, the government granted asylum for the first time to a woman who was a victim of a sexual exploitation network – a Nigerian mother of a three-year-old girl, who arrived by patera in late 2010 and decided to report and fight against the trafficking ring.

Juani Valdivia, José López and Santiago González in the office of the Guardia Civil immigrant support team (EDATI) in Mijas, Málaga. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Dec 10 2013 (IPS)

They are members of Spain’s Guardia Civil. But instead of pursuing undocumented immigrants like the rest of the police in Spain, they are there to defend them from the crimes to which they often fall victim.

“We frequently dress as civilians and go around the province to gather complaints in Guardia Civil [Spain’s federal military-status police force] barracks, and in homes, hospitals and non-governmental organisations [NGOs],” Santiago González, a member of the Guardia Civil immigrant support team (EDATI) in the southern region of Málaga, told IPS.

The regional Málaga EDATI unit, made up of three men and one woman, began to function in 2006 and is one of the 13 EDATI units operating since 2000 along Spain’s Mediterranean coast, from Barcelona in the northeast to Huelva in the southwest. All of the units must have at least one female member.

Their mission is not to fight irregular immigration, but to advise undocumented immigrants on their rights, help them fill out paperwork, such as applications for residency in Spain, and work against those who attempt to cheat, mistreat or exploit them.

Unlike the rest of Spain’s police, including the Guardia Civil itself, the EDATI units neither arrest nor deport immigrants.

For that reason, immigrants can turn to them without fear in order to file complaints and reports about theft, lost passports, exploitative labour conditions, the sale of fake work contracts, abuses or rape.

But actually, undocumented female immigrants who report gender violence cannot be deported, since an amendment to the law on rights and freedoms of immigrants in Spain was passed in 2011.

“It is often the rich who exploit them the most,” González said.

For example, a Russian magnate who owns a mansion in the luxury resort city of Marbella on the coast in the Málaga region kept undocumented household staff from Tibet locked in “without money or food” during his sometimes lengthy trips outside of Spain, EDATI agent Juani Valdivia told IPS.

In one of its latest operations, the Málaga unit dismantled an illegal business set up by three women who offered work in domestic service over the internet to undocumented immigrants, who they charged a commission for their services.

Stories like these are common. “In Málaga we work above all with South American immigrants, mainly Paraguayans, and with people from Senegal,” said another EDATI agent, José López.

Nationwide, the EDATI units assisted 10,700 immigrants in 2012, most of them men from North Africa, Eastern Europe or South America, the Guardia Civil website reports. A total of 12,000 operations were carried out, 11,200 at the initiative of the agents themselves and the rest in response to complaints filed.

In this southern European country of 47 million there were 5.4 million foreign nationals living legally in 2012, according to the National Statistics Institute.

Official data also shows that 573,712 immigrants without permits to live in Spain are “empadronados” or registered with municipal governments. There are also an indefinite number of undocumented immigrants who have not registered.

According to the Interior Ministry, last year 3,804 immigrants were intercepted in the attempt to enter the country in unseaworthy boats – 30 percent fewer than in 2011 and less than 10 percent of the 39,180 who were intercepted in 2006.

The ministry also reported that 26,457 undocumented immigrants were deported in 2012 – 16.3 percent fewer than the previous year.

Minors under 18 cannot be deported from Spain.

The ultimate obverse of the EDATI units is the decision by the government of right-wing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to install razor-sharp concertina wire, starting in late October, in the valley that separates the Spanish city of Melilla in North Africa from Morocco – a move that has drawn fire from the European Union and human rights groups.

“There are lawyers and businesspeople who are shocked that as ‘guardias civiles’ we don’t detain undocumented immigrants. At first it was even hard for people on the force to accept it,” González said in an interview in his office in the seaside town of Mijas.

“It’s also important for immigrants to get to know us better, and to trust us,” he added.

Fear of deportation makes many immigrants reluctant to file complaints, despite the frequency of bad working conditions, false promises of work contracts and regularisation, and supposed lawyers and advisers who demand large sums of money for obtaining documents that are sometimes cost-free or who sell fake job contracts.

“It’s others committing crimes against them,” said Rafael Porta, another member of the Málaga EDATI unit, during seminars and activities on immigration held Oct. 26.

“When you work with immigrants, you become almost more of an ‘NGO’ type than a police officer,” said Porta, who is studying Arabic to be able to communicate better with the people he is tasked to protect.

Hana El Rharnati, a 28-year-old who works in the Moroccan Association for the Integration of Immigrants in Málaga, has suffered fear of deportation.

She went to EDATI when she was an undocumented immigrant, after she was turned down for a renewal of her student residency permit and her purse was robbed on the bus. “They filed the complaint for me,” she said.

El Rharnati, who has been living in Spain since she was 18, says the members of EDATI are “a mix of social worker and ‘guardia civil’ who have a human touch, not so administrative and bureaucratic.”

She said there will be no decline in crimes against undocumented immigrants as long as the requirements for living and working in Spain are “so tough.”

Foreign nationals who want to legalise their immigration status must prove that they have lived constantly in the country for at least three years, show that they have no criminal record, and have a work contract for at least one year, signed by an employer.

Without so many requirements, “immigrants wouldn’t feel forced to enter into false marriages or buy ‘empadronamientos’ [municipal registrations] or job contracts,” she said.

She argued that it was contradictory for the authorities to set rigid requisites for obtaining or renewing residency permits while employing Guardia Civil agents to combat attempts to swindle or cheat them.

The minimum fine for employing an undocumented immigrant is 10,000 euros [13,000 dollars], but “levying fines is not the solution because someone else will replace them and they will continue to cheat immigrants,” the young Moroccan woman said.

Miguel Pajares, who specialises in immigration issues, told IPS that the EDATI units and protocols of best practices for security forces were important. “But there is still much to be done,” he added, “given that the Aliens Act takes primacy over the protection of the basic rights of people.”

“Half man, half woman”: a drawing by an eight-year-old girl from Aragón, Spain that shows her inner conflict before her family accepted her female identity. “The man part has a broken heart,” the little girl, who was born a boy, tells her mother. Credit: Courtesy Asociación Chrysalis

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain/BUENOS AIRES , Nov 7 2013 (IPS)

Gabi was born six years ago biologically male, but dressed up as a princess and wore necklaces and long hair so that everyone saw a little girl instead.

“They aren’t children locked into the wrong body, but children born with genitals of the opposite gender than the one they identify with,” her mother, Pilar Sánchez, tells IPS in an interview in their home in the southern Spanish city of Málaga.

The brand-new green skirt of the girl’s uniform from the school Gabi attends with her two brothers, ages eight and 13, has hung in a closet unused since September. The school won’t let her dress as a girl, in infringement of regulations set by the government of the region of Andalusía.

Gabi’s mother and the families of two other transsexual children, ages eight and nine, who also attend Málaga schools, asked the Andalusía government to ensure that their children are called on in class by the names they go by, which reflect their chosen gender identity; that they are allowed to use uniforms and other clothing that reflects their gender identity; and that they can use the bathroom they feel comfortable using.

Two schools lashed out at the government’s decision, which was favourable to the families. But not Gabí’s school.

However, a group of around 100 parents at the school called the government decision “arbitrary” and argued that “no thought has been given to the adverse effects that it can cause in the normal social and psychological development of the rest of the students,” according to a signed statement that they delivered to the regional government.

“Transsexual children are a reality that is concealed by prejudice,” says Sánchez. She says she is living a “nightmare” because “I’m the school idiot, when the only thing you want is for your child to be happy.”

“They have a right to be happy, to be who they are,” Mar Cambrollé, president of the Association of Transsexuals of Andalusía, says during activities against discrimination and hate crimes held Oct. 24 in Málaga. “Denying them that right is cruel, and it is a crime.

“In a secular state, laws and the rule of law must prevail over ideologies and religion,” says Cambrollé, referring to the stance taken by Gabi’s school, which is run by a Catholic foundation and is partly funded by public money.

The principle of equality and non-discrimination on gender grounds is enshrined in article 14 of the Spanish constitution.

As he wraps the string around a top, nine-year-old Carlos Martín, short-haired and olive-skinned, tells IPS that he is happy in his new school in Málaga, where he is treated as the boy he feels like, even though he was born a girl.

“They have been mean to my boy since he was seven years old,” says his mother María Gracia García, referring to the school he used to attend, which was a “hell” where he was called “transvestite” and teased and bullied.

Schools in Spain have no protocol for how to deal with transsexual children.

“These are kids who have nightmares, who have a hard time concentrating, who don’t want to go to school,” says Cambrollé. “Treating them in accordance with the gender they identify with restores their happiness.”

She said gender identity “is an innate, immutable feeling that is fixed between the ages of two and five.”

Eva Witt, the mother of David, who was born a girl eight years ago, underlines that children “persistently assert their identity since they first start to express themselves. They draw themselves according to the gender they feel, and they assume that role in games.”

At the age of six, David obtained an identity card with his male name – one of three that have been granted so far in Spain to transgender minors, explains Witt, who heads the Chrysalis association which represents some 50 Spanish families with transsexual children.

Argentina has gone even further.

Six-year-old Luana, who was born biologically male like her fraternal twin brother, now has an identity card where she figures as a girl, and a birth certificate that has been modified to show the gender with which she identifies.

The situation was traumatic for the family, and led the mother, Gabriela (whose last name is withheld at her request), to take her child to doctors and psychologists.

The process was painful, she tells IPS, although she clarifies that her daughter is happy now.

Luana’s psychologist, Valeria Paván, says “She has no pathology or deficit of any kind. She simply builds her identity in a different manner, and as professionals we must reflect on how this affects our practice.”

Luana’s case was the first time that a state has intervened to recognise the transsexual identity of a child at such a young age and without requiring a court decision, according to the Argentine Homosexual Community.

“Suddenly you understand everything, all the pieces fit together,” the mother of a nine-year-old girl born into a boy’s body in Aragón in the northeast of Spain tells IPS. “You realise that you weren’t letting your daughter be who she was.”

Since her female gender identity was recognised, “she’s very happy” and wants to go outside with her long hair and dresses.

But the families interviewed by IPS can’t stop thinking about what lies ahead and worrying about what will happen when their children hit puberty.

In Spain, sex reassignment surgery is not allowed until the age of majority.

But Witt explains that it is possible to start reversible treatment with hormone blockers, which help prevent the suffering of adolescents “who bind their breasts” to hide the physical changes in their bodies dictated by biology.

With reporting by Marcela Valente in Buenos Aires.

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Oct 24 2013 (IPS)

“It’s just like a prison. One day in there is like 100 years,” says Jennifer, a 35-year-old Nigerian woman, describing what her aunt went through in the Immigrant Detention Centre (CIE) in this city in southern Spain before she was deported.

But perhaps it’s even worse than a prison.

In women’s prisons in Spain, the guards and other staff are female. But in the CIEs, female immigrants “are prisoners in jails supervised by men,” the president of the Platform for Solidarity with Immigrants in Málaga, Luis Pernía, told IPS.

That means conditions are ripe for abuse.

The second hearing in a trial against five Spanish police officers charged with sexually abusing female detainees in the Málaga CIE in 2006 will take place Oct. 30. At the time, the CIE was operating in a former military barracks, which was closed in June 2012 because of the ruinous state of the installations.

Tie clips were found on the shelves of the women who filed complaints that they were raped. “The cleaning women found condoms and bottles of alcohol. Police officers without shirts were caught on film embracing female detainees,” the lawyer handling the case, José Luis Rodríguez, told IPS.

These cases of alleged abuse, which have come to trial seven years later, were just “the tip of the iceberg,” said Rodríguez, an expert on immigration with Andalucía Acoge (Andalusia Welcomes), an NGO that works on behalf of immigrants.

There is “a sensation that these police enjoy absolute impunity, fuelled by the lack of transparency, regulations, and controls” in the CIEs, he said.

Four of the six women who reported the sexual abuse were deported the same year they spoke out. “What would have happened if the victims were Spanish women?” asked Hakima Soudami, a Moroccan woman who serves as an intercultural mediator for Accem, an organisation that provides assistance to immigrants and refugees.

Pernía said Spanish society has not yet heard or listened to the problems faced by immigrants in the CIEs. Fear plays a role in this. One woman who was held in the CIE in Málaga and later released was too frightened to tell her story to IPS.

According to Spanish immigration law, the CIEs are “public establishments of a non-penitentiary nature…for the detention and custody of foreigners subject to deportation orders.” Legally, immigrants can only be held there for a maximum of 60 days.

There are seven CIEs in Spain, with a capacity to hold 1,526 people, government sources told IPS. In 2012, 11,325 immigrants were taken into custody in the centres, and of that total, “4,390 were released that year,” the Interior Ministry informed parliament in a document dated Oct. 17.

Women in the CIEs “do not eat well, and get sick,” said Jennifer, who lives in Spain with her Spanish husband.

Women immigrants “are denied the basic right to healthcare within an institution of the state, which can even lead to death,” Paloma Soria, an activist, told IPS. She coordinated the report “Women in the CIEs; Realities behind bars”, published in 2012 by the NGO Women’s Link Worldwide.

Death was what Samba Martine, a 34-year-old Congolese woman, found in the Aluche CIE, in Madrid, on Dec. 19, 2011. Because the authorities did not have her health records, she did not receive the antiretroviral treatment she needed, and was not taken to hospital until the day she died.

The ensuing scandal “has not helped bring about measures to prevent a repeat of the tragedy,” says an Oct. 11 communiqué issued by the campaign to close down the CIEs – “CIEsNo” – which groups some 30 rights groups in the southern city of Valencia.

“In case of pregnancy, the women do not receive regular checkups, nor are they informed of their right to get an abortion,” which is legal on demand in the first trimester in Spain, Soria said. She described the denial of these rights as “appalling.”

In August 2006, a Brazilian woman with a high-risk pregnancy, who was a witness to the police abuse that had come to light a month earlier in the Málaga CIE, suffered a miscarriage while awaiting deportation.

Some female immigrants arrive in Spain as victims of human trafficking. But they are held in the CIEs and deported without being identified as victims, the president of Andalucía Acoge, Silvia Koniecki, told IPS.

“Effective oversight of these centres by non-governmental organisations is needed to overcome this serious problem of defencelessness,” she said.

Soudami had a hard time containing her emotions as she said “immigrant women suffer misfortune from the start. They are fleeing from war and from poverty.

“In some cases, their families have been killed, and they walk long distances with their [surviving] children. They come from Nigeria, Sierra Leone… it takes them years and they suffer mistreatment before they manage to pay for the trip in ‘pateras’ [the small wooden fishing boats used by traffickers to transport migrants into Spain] and end up in the CIE – if they survive the journey.”

Soudami has been living in Málaga for 15 years. Her work has brought her into contact with many women held in the CIE, and she says she is “disgusted” by the treatment they receive from the authorities.

Complaints about not enough, and poor-quality, food, a lack of information and outright misinformation, and a lack of interpreters for immigrants who don’t speak Spanish are some of the problems documented by the Women’s Link Worldwide report.

In several CIEs visited by members of the organisation, the women were given less time than the men outside in the patio, and their common areas were smaller than the men’s. In the Valencia CIE, they had to clean their rooms themselves, while there was a cleaning service for the men’s rooms, Soria said.

Last year, the government approved the draft of a decree to temporarily regulate the CIEs. But the text does not include “in-depth modifications,” according to Rodríguez.

Human rights groups are demanding, for example, that the CIEs be overseen by civilian guards rather than the police.

In 2010, an underage boy from Nigeria who was being held in the Málaga CIE, and who had a long history of abuse and mistreatment suffered until he made it to Spain, was deported despite the recommendations to the contrary made by several organisations.

“Immigration policies prevail over human rights,” said Pernía. “The dehumanisation is terrible.”

Families and activists protest the Oct. 3 eviction from the Buenaventura squatter community. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain , Oct 4 2013 (IPS)

A police cordon kept everyone out of the Buenaventura “corrala” on Thursday after the police evicted 13 families living in the occupied building in the centre of this southern Spanish city early in the morning.

“Tonight we’ll sleep at a friend’s house. I don’t have any work or money. We have to start over again from scratch, and it’s really complicated,” Catalina González, 39, told IPS, crying.

The families, who have been living here since February, unable to afford other housing, have a total of 12 children between them.

The corralas are communities of squatters that have emerged in crisis-stricken Spain in the last few years, as foreclosures and evictions have skyrocketed due to the housing and mortgage crisis.A total of 362,776 people in Spain lost their homes because of mortgage arrears and foreclosures between 2008 and 2012. -- Platform for Mortgage Victims

The term corrala refers to the galleried tenement buildings with common courtyards and shared services that proliferated in working-class neighbourhoods in Spain’s cities in the 16th to 19th centuries, and has been adopted to stress the sense of community in the occupied buildings.

González, who comes from Barcelona in the northeast, sought shelter in one of the apartments in Buenaventura, a four-storey block of flats, two months ago. She had just arrived from Italy, fleeing her husband who she said mistreated her sons, four-year-old Leónidas and three-year-old Manuel.

The children were playing, sitting on the ground with their two dogs, near a police van while several officers tried to reach, with the help of fire fighters, three activists who were resisting the eviction order and protesting from their perch on the rooftop of the building.

Dozens of people who have been evicted, members of social movements like Stop Desahucios (Stop Evictions), the 15M “indignados” movement, and squatters from other corralas in Málaga gathered for several hours in the street under intermittent rainfall, chanting slogans like “people without a home, homes without people, how can this be?” or “another eviction, another occupation”, until the authorities arrested several activists and left.

The Buenaventura building belonged to the Bankinter bank, which acquired it after the construction company went under and sold it – complete with families living in some of the apartments – to Gestiones Hospedalia, a real estate company.

There are some 3.5 million vacant housing units in this country of 47 million people, equivalent to 14 percent of the housing stock, and 700,000 of them are in the southern region of Andalusia, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE).

Although most of the people who were occupying the Buenaventura apartments have found a place to stay for the time being, “some families have nowhere to go,” José Cosín, a local lawyer, told IPS.

Cósín is an activist with the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH), which helps block evictions and foreclosures and repairs empty buildings to provide housing for people in need, while trying to negotiate social rents.

Montse, who has an 11-year-old daughter and preferred not to give her last name, told IPS that she was going to live in a trailer.

Andrés Clemente said he would ask a friend if he could stay in his garage again.

Carolina, who also wanted to remain anonymous, and her children will stay for now at a friend’s place in the La Suerte corrala – another occupied building.

Since the start of the economic crisis in 2007, the number of occupied buildings has soared. Many of the buildings are brand-new, and owned by banks or real estate companies.

The squatters in Buenaventura held months-long talks with the local and regional authorities, the bank and the company that owns the building.

“But in the end we got nowhere. They’ve been fooling around with us, and merely referred us to the social services,” said Leticia Gómez, 32, who was living in the corrala because she “had nowhere to go” after breaking up with her partner.

The Málaga city government gave each family evicted from the corrala an average of 1,000 euros (1,362 dollars) to cover the cost of rent for the first few months. But those who received the payment say it is not enough help, and are asking for the empty units to be converted into affordable housing, where each family pays according to their income.

“They gave me 900 euros (1,226 dollars) for three months rent. And after that what am I supposed to do? We’ll be back on the streets again,” said Yuli Fajardo, 42, hugging her cinnamon-coloured dog.

José Manuel, standing next to her, said he would occupy an apartment in another empty building. He described how early that morning, the police broke through a human chain that had formed around the corrala to prevent the eviction operation.

Finding a place to rent is not easy for these people, who often have no guarantor to sign for them and no formal job, and who can’t afford to put down a deposit of several months’ rent.

Some of the people who were evicted complained that the police used excessive force and “tore the doors off.”

The police, however, told IPS that the operation “went normally.”

“Even the heavens are crying for us,” Kira Vela, 37, exclaimed when she heard thunder.

Vela ended up in Buenaventura after she lost her home in the Málaga neighbourhood of Ciudad Jardín because she got behind on her mortgage payments. One of her three children, Yolanda, was also living in the corrala with her one-year-old baby.

A total of 362,776 people in Spain lost their homes because of mortgage arrears and foreclosures between 2008 and 2012, according to a report by PAH.

So far, the organisation has managed to block 757 evictions and has rehoused 712 people.

Soaring unemployment, which stands at over 26 percent in Spain – the highest rate in Europe after Greece – has led many families to lose their homes when they are unable to meet rent or mortgage payments. Dozens of people have committed suicide because of the evictions.

“There are many empty homes,” Carmen Gil, who lives near Buenaventura, commented to IPS while watching the protesters shout at a dozen police officers posted at the entry to the building. “They should give them to these families with kids. It’s not a crisis, it’s a scam.”

A number of the people evicted from the building have been out of work for years. Many of them used to work in the construction industry.

“If I could afford to pay rent, I would,” Clemente, a carpenter, told IPS.

In April, the government of the autonomous region of Andalusía, where Málaga is located, approved a decree-law on the social function of housing, establishing the need for a stock of social housing units.

The regional law also provides for the temporary expropriation – for a period of three years – of the housing units of families facing imminent eviction, “in cases where there is a risk of social exclusion or a threat to the physical or mental health of persons.”

“Why do we have to leave?” eight-year-old José asked his mother Silvia, who was holding him and his six-year-old sister Esther by the hand during a protest demanding “the right to a roof over our heads” the day before the eviction.

In May, the legislators of the governing right-wing People’s Party (PP) passed a law containing measures to strengthen protection for mortgage-holders, make more affordable housing available, and require banks to renegotiate mortgages.

The law was originally based on two bills: one presented by the executive branch, and the other by PAH, which collected 1.5 million signatures and presented a “popular legislative initiative” to Congress.

But the PAH proposals were eliminated from the final version of the bill.

The remains of 2,840 victims exhumed from a common grave will be laid to rest in the memorial in the old San Rafael cemetery in Málaga. The families will be able to reclaim them after each body is identified. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Sep 27 2013 (IPS)

A pyramid is being built in the old San Rafael cemetery in the southern Spanish city of Málaga – a monument to thousands of people shot by firing squads here during the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War and the 1939-1975 dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.

Their bodies were exhumed from the biggest of the mass graves from that era scattered around Spain.

On a Wednesday Sept. 25 visit to the cemetery, which was closed in 1987, IPS saw the nearly complete mausoleum in the shape of a pyramid, which will be covered in slabs of white marble engraved with the names of the people buried there.

The rest of the abandoned cemetery will be a public garden.

The monument and mausoleum will be completed in a few weeks. But it will be many years before the remains of each body to be placed there are identified and, in some cases at least, handed over to the families.“We are asking that the bodies be removed from the ditches so they can be buried as people.” -- Francisco Espinosa

“The only thing I remember are my mother’s screams when they took him away,” said José Dorado, 79, who was three years old when Franco’s troops shot his father, Pedro Dorado, a railway worker, in the nearby village of Bobadilla.

It was 1937. The body of Pedro, 33, was dumped along with the corpses of his workmates in a huge ditch dug in the San Rafael cemetery, Dorado told IPS.

Documents show that 4,471 people were shot by right-wing firing squads here during the civil war and the early years of the dictatorship, presumably because they were “republicanos” – in other words, they belonged to the side that was defeated by the Franco troops or Franquistas in the civil war.

From October 2006 to October 2009, 2,840 bodies were recovered here, in one of the largest exhumations carried out in Western Europe.

The rest of the bodies may have been moved at some point to the Valley of the Fallen in Madrid – a monument that the Franquistas built in the 1940s and 1950s, said Francisco Espinosa, with the Málaga Association against Silence and Oblivion – Historical Memory, which represents more than 400 relatives of victims.

Dorado, the president of the association, describes himself as “a person who likes to give battle.” In 2002, he started to wage the struggle to exhume the bodies in the common grave in San Rafael, which finally got underway in 2006.

The University of Málaga took DNA samples from the bodies to compare to the DNA from over 1,000 relatives of the people killed here, Antonio Somoza, a founding member of the association, told IPS.

The remains now lie in boxes, waiting to be put in the new mausoleum.

The names of the 4,471 victims have been identified. But it will take years to match the specific remains in the boxes to names, Somoza explained, adding that none of the 2,840 bodies recovered had been specifically identified so far.

Over the space of four decades, between 88,000 and 130,000 people were killed and buried in common graves across Spain, and some 30,000 babies were stolen and sold in illegal adoptions, according to human rights groups.

“We are asking that the bodies be removed from the ditches so they can be buried as people,” said Espinosa, 76, who has struggled for over three decades to find the body of his father, a carpenter from Argentina.

“My father died here. I was still in my mother’s belly, and my brother was three years old,” he told IPS in the San Rafael cemetery.

No attempt at investigating the mass graves around the country has been successful, because the courts invoke the 1977 amnesty law that blocks investigation or prosecution of Franco-era human rights crimes.

Moreover, the conservative government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy closed down the office that was coordinating the exhumations around the country and the funds collecting money to help pay for the costly DNA tests.

Emilio Silva, the 47-year-old grandson of another of the Málaga victims, took part in a Monday Sept. 23 meeting in Madrid with two experts from the United Nations Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances visiting Spain Sept. 23-30 to examine the measures taken by the government on the prevention and eradication of forced disappearance, and the response given to the victims’ families.

In the meeting, the victims’ relatives asked the Working Group to review its decision not to address forced disappearances committed before 1945, when the United Nations was founded.

“We have hundreds of well-documented cases from prior to that date, and forced disappearance is an ongoing crime [not subject to any statute of limitations],” Silva told IPS.

His grandfather, Emilio Silva, was executed in October 1936 in Priaranza del Bierzo, in the northern Spanish province of León.

“He was the first victim of Franquista repression in Spain to be identified through a DNA test,” said Silva, a member of the Association for the Recovery of the Historical Memory. “Now he is buried next to my grandmother.”

The U.N. experts “should be flexible and should accept the cases of forced disappearance dating before 1945. If they don’t, the majority of the cases of the victims of reprisals will be left out,” said trade unionist Cecilio Gordillo, who coordinates the Todos los Nombres (All the Names) web site, which has a list of the names of nearly 78,000 victims.

There is a possibility that the Working Group will reconsider its decision when it presents its final report to the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2014.

The Working Group urged the government to repeal the 1977 amnesty law.

The Truth Commission Platform launched the campaign #DiseloalaONU (Tell the U.N.) this week, to denounce that “there are more than 2,500 common graves that have not been exhumed.”

Dorado hopes to bury his father’s remains in Bobadilla, where the body of his mother Pilar Cubero, who was 29 years old when her husband was killed, rests. “If I’m alive then [when the bodies are identified through DNA tests], I’ll take him there. I’ve already bought a niche,” he said.

Investigating in Argentina

On Tuesday Sept. 24, a Spanish prosecutor challenged the arrest of four former agents of the dictatorship requested by Argentine Judge María Servini.

Servini is investigating human rights crimes committed in Spain, based on the principle of universal jurisdiction. Hers is the only investigation of Franco-era crimes.

Under the principle of universal jurisdiction, crimes against humanity, genocide and terrorism, which are not subject to statutes of limitation or amnesties, can be tried at any time in any place.

The trade unionist Gordillo, who met Friday Sept. 27 with the U.N. Working Group experts in the southern city of Seville, said one aspect of Judge Servini’s investigation involves forced labour to which political prisoners were subjected in Spain.

“The state ‘rented out’ prisoners to private companies, which used them as slave labour to build roads, airports and canals. There were around 250,000 victims of forced labour,” said Gordillo, whose great-uncle was killed by the firing squads.

Emilio Silva said most of the exhumations around the country have been carried out thanks to the work of the victims’ families and volunteers.

Miguel Alba, another founding member of the Málaga association of families, is the grandson and great-grandson of a mayor and justice of the peace who were killed by the firing squads.

For eight years, he has investigated forced disappearances in 31 villages and towns in Axarquía, a comarca or region east of Málaga.

“It’s not about opening old wounds,” Alba told IPS. “It’s about closing them in good conditions, and without political bias.”

The steps to the university, increasingly inaccessible to students in Spain who can’t afford tuition. This is the entrance to the Psychology Faculty at the University of Málaga. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Sep 25 2013 (IPS)

Adopt a tree. Adopt a polar bear. Sponsor a child in a poor country. The concept has caught on in Spain’s troubled academic system and now people and companies can sponsor a university student.

The “Higher Education Sponsorship Programme” at the public University of Málaga in southern Spain invites individuals or businesses to donate money to a fund to finance the tuition of new students who prove that they can’t afford to pay and who failed to earn the minimum grade of 5.5 out of 10 on the entrance exam to qualify for a state scholarship, a source at the university explained to IPS.

The sponsors will be given tax reductions, access to university services, and public recognition as donors.

The idea is “to sponsor a student, just like you would sponsor a child,” Adelaida de la Calle, dean of the University of Málaga and president of the conference of Spanish university deans, told the press.“The Education Ministry should sponsor students instead of attacking the heart of the educational system by raising tuition and cutting scholarships.” -- Fidel González

Tuition in public universities in Spain runs between 680 and 1,280 euros (921 to 1,734 dollars) a year.

Because the requisites for scholarships are stricter now and the amounts of aid granted have shrunk, there are fewer new students and more are dropping out after the first year, the spokesman for the Coordinator of Student Representatives of Public Universities (CREUP), Aratz Castro, a sociology student at the University of the Basque Country in northern Spain, told IPS.

Under a decree-law passed in early August, the minimum entrance exam grade for qualifying for free tuition the first year is 5.5 out of 10. But the minimum grade required for other kinds of direct financial aid, like free transportation, essential for poor students, was raised one point.

Sponsoring students “or any other initiative that complements the scholarship system is positive,” Castro said. But it should be public institutions that take on that mission, he maintained.

Fidel González, the president of the Federation of Associations of Progressive Students, said the University of Málaga’s idea is “a cry for help” in the face of the danger that “hundreds of students will be left out and others won’t be able to continue studying.”

But “this is not a question of charity or solidarity, but of social justice and equality,” González told IPS. He argued that it is the Education Ministry that should “sponsor students instead of attacking the heart of the educational system by raising tuition and cutting scholarships.”

In the 2012-2013 school year, the funds earmarked by the government for scholarships fell 8.3 percent, according to the annual report on academic statistics, Datos y Cifras del Curso Escolar, published Sept. 16 by the Education Ministry.

The number of beneficiaries of scholarships shrank by 24,520 students, 3.1 percent fewer than the previous school year.

And the proportion of students receiving any kind of aid, especially assistance for purchasing school materials, dropped by nearly 60 percent: 578,549 students were left without support.

In crisis-stricken Spain, the state has cut public education across the board. Some educational institutions in the eastern region of Valencia could not even afford to pay for heating in the winter of 2012.

“I’ve studied thanks to a scholarship over the past two years,” said Florencia Zucas, a fourth-year student of labour relations and human resources in the Faculty of Social Studies and Labour at the University of Málaga. “Without that, it would have been impossible,” she told IPS.

The university is 12 km from the home where Zucas lives with her uncle and aunt. The 25-year-old student, who is from Argentina, has lived in Spain for 13 years. She used to have a part-time job to earn money for tuition, but her wages were low and her work took time away from her studies, making it difficult for her to pass the majority of the courses she was taking – a requisite to maintain the scholarship.

“The state should pay,” Cristina Enamorado, 20, told IPS, as she headed in to take an entrance exam on the University of Málaga campus.

Enamorado wants to study early childhood education. Because of the lack of prospects, several of her friends dropped out of high school and moved to the United Kingdom or Germany.

Spain’s unemployment rate is the second-highest in the European Union, after Greece’s: 26.6 percent, according to the latest figures from the National Statistics Institute.

Many heads of households are now unemployed or have suffered wage cuts, and can’t pay tuition for their sons and daughters.

“My parents’ salaries have both gone down a lot,” said Martha Caparrós, 19. “Since the state doesn’t help, it’s ok for individuals or companies to lend a hand,” she said.

Sitting on the stairway outside the Law Faculty after taking her entrance exams, Caparrós told IPS that she would apply for a scholarship to study social education. Her brother is also starting university this year and the question of paying tuition “is complicated” for her family, she said.

“My mother was saving up for a year in case they didn’t grant me the scholarship,” Raquel Ávila, 20, told IPS. She just began her fourth years at the Faculty of Social Studies and Labour Relations.

So far she has always qualified for a scholarship that has paid her tuition of 1,200 euros (1,626 dollars) a year.

The students start class in October but don’t find out whether or not they were granted a scholarship until December. Ávila said last year, students and professors took up a collection to pay one student’s tuition.

The sponsorship programme “is good because at least it helps people start their university studies,” she said.

But with youth unemployment standing at over 56 percent, young people in Spain need sponsors even after they graduate, just to find work.

That is the aim of the Fundació Príncep de Girona, a foundation in the northeastern region of Catalonia, which launched the “Sponsor Talent” programme, which helps students with university degrees join the labour market.

"You do not represent us" says one demonstrator’s sign in a street protest in Málaga in southern Spain. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Aug 9 2013 (IPS)

The corruption scandal enveloping the governing conservative People’s Party in Spain and its leader, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, calls into question the funding model for political parties and points towards the need for strict controls, experts say.

Spain’s political leaders enjoy absolute impunity,” said lawyer José Cosín, the author of the book “Mafia y corrupción” (Mafia and Corruption), published in 2008, which describes the relationships between organised crime, money laundering and political corruption that were in evidence even then.

Cosín told IPS that in Spain today, “many judges are politicised, and the courts lack the means to investigate political parties.”

Law 8/2007 on the financing of political parties states that they are private associations with a mixed revenue system, collecting on the one hand public funds, in proportion to their representation in parliament, and on the other hand private contributions from individuals and corporations – excluding those that provide goods or services for public entities – which must not exceed reasonable limits.

Illegal financing of political parties is an administrative offence rather than a crime under Spain’s criminal code, although payment of bribes to obtain a public service contract is a crime.

In 2008 the political parties received a total of 299.5 million euros (398.7 million dollars) in public subsidies for day-to-day operations and election expenses, 44.7 million euros (59.5 million dollars) in membership fees and contributions from supporters, and 6.4 million euros (8.5 million dollars) in donations, according to the latest Court of Audit report.

The fact that the Court of Audit, the supreme body exercising oversight over the accounts of political parties, has a five year backlog means that the statute of limitations may have lapsed on any financial irregularities, since investigations must be initiated within four years, according to the current law on financing of political parties, which reformed the 2007 law in October 2012.

Rajoy announced a wide set of measures to fight corruption, like a draft law on transparency, access to public information, and good governance, that “will be approved by the end of the year,” he promised in his appearance before parliament Aug. 1 to respond to accusations against himself and the People’s Party (PP).

He refused to step down, as the opposition is demanding, and denied any connection with the scandal unleashed by Luis Bárcenas, a PP finance manager and treasurer for over two decades.

Bárcenas told a judge he accepted millions in cash donations from construction firms, some of which he said he gave to senior PP officials, Rajoy included, in the form of bonuses. He has been in jail since June, under investigation for fraud, money laundering and tax evasion.

The Rajoy administration’s “national democratic regeneration plan”, to be presented in September, would make illegal financing a criminal offence under the law, and reform the criminal procedure act to speed up trials.

“I am convinced that these changes to penalties, deadlines and procedures will end the sensation of impunity that is irritating Spanish society,” Rajoy told parliament.

In Spain, which is suffering from harsh spending cuts due to the severe crisis and where unemployment has soared to nearly 27 percent, political parties are widely seen as the most corrupt institutions.

Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer, published Jul. 9, found the perception of corruption in Spain’s political parties was 4.4 on a scale of 5.

“The lack of transparency in political parties’ accounts has paved the way for cases like that of Bárcenas,” Carmen Molina, spokeswoman for the Green party EQUO in the southern Spanish city of Málaga, told IPS.

In her view, Rajoy’s promises are not enough. “Citizens are fed up because politicians do not do what they say, no progress is being made and no drastic measures are being taken to end corruption.”

She advocated wider reforms, including changes in the election law, which she said favours a two-party system – of the PP and the opposition centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) – which works against the interests of minority parties.

José Luis Centella, congressional spokesperson for the Plural Left party, is in favour of strict controls to ensure transparency and avoid illegal funding. At the same time he believes the Court of Audit “is deeply constrained and has few resources” to carry out its work.

Cosín said that today “we don’t know for sure how much money is given to political parties and what they do with it.”

He said the draft law on transparency, approved by the Council of Ministers on Jul. 12, 2012, is “inadequate” and violates the right of access to information, because it provides for what is known as “negative administrative silence” – in other words, a lack of response from a government body implies that the request for information is refused.

“Government agencies should be compelled to answer, because the right to information is basic,” he said.

Centella told IPS that the Plural Left party supports public financing of political parties, “to reduce as much as possible the acceptance of private contributions” apart from membership dues, “because there is a greater risk of influence peddling with private donations.”

The law on party funding approved in October 2012 stipulates that the Court of Audit must be notified of private donations larger than 50,000 euros (66,000 dollars), or any real estate, within three months. Infringement of these rules draws a fine of twice the value of the irregularly received contribution.

The same law sets a limit of 100,000 euros (133,000 dollars) a year on debt forgiveness from credit agencies to the parties.

Centella was critical of the spiralling costs of elections in spite of the economic debacle. He said political campaigns seem to pursue “the sale of a product” rather than “a debate of ideas,” leading to “costs in the millions” that encourage illegal political funding.

The Court of Audit reported that during the last general elections, in November 2011, election expenses amounted to more than 62 million euros (83 million dollars), with the PP and PSOE together accounting for 41.6 million euros (55 million dollars).

However, Centella believes the true figures to be higher, and he is calling for “greater plurality” so that small parties can, for example, advertise on public television during election campaigns.

"Corrala Buenaventura Is Here to Stay!" reads this protest banner in Málaga. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Jul 28 2013 (IPS)

“You live there for free, don’t you?” asked a woman as she passed by the Buenaventura “corrala”, a community in a building in this southern Spanish city occupied since February by families evicted from their homes for falling behind in their mortgage payments due to unemployment.

“We don’t want any handouts. We want to pay, through a social rent scheme,” replied 42-year-old Yuli Fajardo, who was living in a tent before she found shelter along with some 40 other people in one of the 13 spacious apartments in this four-storey block of flats in the central Malaga neighbourhood of La Trinidad.

Occupations by homeless families of vacant buildings owned by banks or real estate agencies have multiplied throughout Spain since the economic and financial crisis broke out in 2007.

But as a collective phenomenon, the new wave of squats started in the nearby city of Seville with Corrala Utopía, a block of 36 apartments belonging to a bank that has been occupied since May 2012 by around a hundred people, 40 of them children, Juanjo García of the 15-M (the May 15 “indignados” – Spain’s Occupy movement) housing committee in Seville province told IPS.

They call themselves “corralas” to indicate that they are community and neighbourhood associations, similar to the concept of the typical buildings of that name with common courtyards and services that proliferated in working class neighbourhoods in Madrid and other Spanish cities in the 16th to 19th centuries.

The new squatter communities receive support and advice from social movements like 15-M, the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH) and Stop Desahucios (Stop Evictions).

The National Institute of Statistics (INE) reports that there are some 3.5 million vacant housing units in this country of 47 million people – nearly 14 percent of the housing stock – mainly in the hands of banks. There were a total of 363,000 evictions because of mortgage arrears and foreclosures between 2008 and 2012, according to a report published in January by PAH.

Yanira, 20, and her 18-year-old boyfriend José were renting a house until they lost their jobs and took refuge in Buenaventura, one of the four corralas in Málaga.

Montse, who has an 11-year-old daughter, also lost her job and could not afford to pay for housing. Macarena, the most recent addition to the community, lives on the ground floor with her two small children, after her “alcoholic father threw us out on the street.”

“Do you think any of us would be here if we had an alternative?” asked Fajardo, who regrets the unsuccessful attempts to negotiate social rents with the bank that owns the building, and says that according to a Málaga court ruling, the corrala is due to be evicted on Oct. 3.

Buenaventura has just been sold by the bank to a private investor, lawyer José Cosín told IPS.

“We asked for an opportunity for marginalised, poor and socially excluded people to make a go of it. We carry our stigma like a brand on our skin, and we are judged by it,” said Fajardo, adding that “decent housing is a human right.”

The root of the problem, according to García, is “the commodification of the right to housing” during the construction boom that preceded the bursting of the real estate bubble five years ago.

There are now thousands of empty housing units and thousands of homeless people unable to make their mortgage payments because they were left jobless. The unemployment rate is 26.3 percent, according to INE figures for the second quarter of the year.

In Seville, 10 vacant buildings have been occupied by families that are being advised by 15-M. The squatters are unemployed, work in precarious jobs such as construction, are young people with good educational levels who have left their parents’ homes, or are over 65, García said.

“We are fighting for a roof over our children’s heads,” said 28-year-old Lidia Nieto, a member of the Las Luchadoras corrala in a new building in the La Goleta neighbourhood of Málaga belonging to a real estate company, which has been occupied since April by nine single mothers with their children.

Nieto lives on the ground floor of the apartment block with her eight-year-old son Yeray. She has a weekend job cleaning businesses and offices.

“We saw this empty building and decided to occupy it,” she told IPS while she chopped vegetables discarded by a nearby shop “because they are damaged and can’t be sold.” She used to live with one of her sisters and her parents.

“We saw ourselves living on the streets with our children. Do you think if we had proper jobs we would be living here? I’ve been unemployed for two years,” she said.

“Collective occupations are completely legitimate and are based on practical and ethical reasons,” said Iván Díaz of the Seville 15-M housing committee, at a conference in Málaga.

Squatters in new corralas are demanding that electricity and water meters be installed, so they can pay for utilities.

María, who lives next to Corrala Buenaventura, told IPS she is on good terms with the squatters. But the vendor at a nearby fruit shop said he had heard that some neighbours complained about noise at night.

The Málaga city government cut off water to Buenaventura on Jul. 18. But after the families protested by camping all night outside the town hall, the authorities re-established the water supply the next day.

The government of the autonomous region of Andalusía, where Málaga and Seville are located, approved a decree-law Apr. 12 on the social function of housing, establishing the need for a stock of social housing units.

The regional law also provides for the temporary expropriation – for a period of three years – of the housing units of families facing imminent eviction, “in cases where there is a risk of social exclusion or a threat to the physical or mental health of persons.”

This measure, appealed in July by the national government of rightwing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy on the alleged grounds that it is unconstitutional, has benefited “only 12 families for three months,” complained García, who said it fell far short and was plagued with “flaws and defects.”

The European Commission – the EU executive arm – and the European Central Bank criticised the Andalusían anti-eviction decree, arguing that it could undermine the stability of the banking sector and economic recovery in Spain, according to a Jul. 10 report.

The University of Alicante course “Researching Biodiversity: Present and Future” ended in May with a tasting of edible worms and arachnids. Credit: Courtesy of the University of Alicante/Jesús Ordoñez

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain, Jul 2 2013 (IPS)

A 280-square-metre warehouse in Coín, a municipality in the southern Spanish province of Málaga, is home to a unique type of farm, where insects are raised for human consumption and the production of animal feed. But despite FAO’s endorsement of insects as food, there are numerous obstacles holding back the development of this industry.

“We dehydrate the crickets and grasshoppers, then turn them into a flour that conserves almost all of their protein and other nutritional properties, which can be added to biscuits, cereal or energy bars,” explained Laetitia Giroud, a French national and the director of sales and product development at Insagri, the company that runs the farm.

Quality control systems have been established for each type of insect raised at the farm in Coín. Thousands of black soldier fly and mealworm larvae are bred for the production of feed for reptiles, fish and cattle, while the grasshoppers and crickets are processed for human consumption.

“Mealworms can also be dehydrated and used to make chips with a bit of salt added, and make an excellent snack,” Giroud told Tierramérica.

Insagri, which will begin to sell its products in August, has already found buyers for its insect flour for use in restaurants in the United Kingdom, France and Belgium, where interest has also been expressed by companies that specialise in the production of tomato sauce and other food products.

These three countries and the Netherlands are the only countries in Europe where there are regulations in place for the “sale of insects for human consumption,” explained Eduardo Galante, president of the Entomological Society of Spain and director of the Ibero-American Centre for Biodiversity at the University of Alicante, in southeast Spain.

In Spain, where Insagri is aiming at the cattle feed and dog and cat food markets, there is “a legal vacuum that permits the eating of insects in restaurants (which buy them from foreign suppliers) but not their sale for consumption,” Galante told Tierramérica.

Galante recalled that in 2008, health authorities vetoed an edible insect shop in La Boquería, a large public market and popular tourist attraction Barcelona.

These obstacles run counter to the recommendations from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) regarding the consumption of insects and their byproducts as a means of fighting world hunger.

A FAO report released on May 13, “Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security”, notes that insects are a “highly nutritious and healthy food source” due to their “high fat, protein, vitamin, fibre and mineral content.”

According to Giroud, in addition to the lack of appropriate regulation, there is a “cultural barrier” that acts as a deterrent to the human consumption of insects in Spain, unlike some countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia where it is a common practice.

“Eating insects is disgusting,” proclaimed Marisa, a resident of Málaga and mother of an eight-year-old daughter. She added, however, that the idea of eating them after they have been processed and turned into flour was “interesting”, because “at least that way you wouldn’t see them.”

FAO estimates that insects form part of the traditional diet of at least two billion people around the world, and that there are more than 1,900 edible species. The most commonly eaten include beetles, caterpillars, bees and wasps, ants, grasshoppers, crickets and locusts.

Southern Spain offers the “ideal weather conditions for raising insects, which need temperatures between 28 and 35 degrees,” said Giroud, who stressed that raising insects for food and feed is “cheaper and more environmentally friendly” than raising livestock, since they require less land and water and can be fed more sustainably.

“To obtain a kilogram of protein from cattle you need 13 kilograms of vegetation, while the same amount of protein can be obtained from grasshoppers with just 1.5 kilograms of feed,” she stressed.

In addition, she emphasised that Insagri is “the only company in Europe that uses organic feed for its insects.” For example, its mealworms are fed with organic flour supplied by a nearby producer.

Giroud also noted that eating insects is healthier “because they pose a much lower risk of transmitting diseases to humans,” which she attributes to the fact that they are cold-blooded and not hot-blooded like cows or pigs.

The concept of large-scale insect farming for food for humans is relatively new, although there are examples offered by cricket farms in Laos, Thailand and Viet Nam, notes the FAO report, which has sparked conflicting opinions in Spain.

“FAO’s proposal to fight world hunger by eating insects does not address the root of the problem,” said Esther Vivas, a researcher specialising in food and agricultural policies who insists that the solution “is not to find new inputs but rather to deal with the causes of hunger.”

Vivas, a journalist, sociologist and member of the Centre for the Study of Social Movements at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, told Tierramérica that “food must be made more accessible to the world’s population, because there is enough food produced to feed everyone.”

According to figures from FAO, while there are currently seven million people in the world, there is enough food produced every day to feed 12 billion.

Nevertheless, the UN agency notes in its report that overfishing, climate change and water shortages could have profound implications for food production for the nine billion people expected to live on the planet in 2050.

“It is precisely in these times of crisis, when responsible consumption and protecting the environment are needed more than ever, that it is easier to break down cultural barriers around the consumption of insects,” said Giroud, who launched her insect farm with Julien Foucher, another French national, for an initial investment of 24,000 euro (31,494 dollars); 5,000 euro (6,561 dollars) of this start-up capital was contributed by the non-profit Valle del Guadalhorce Rural Development Group, which is supported by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD).

“They are the best alternative for carrying out a change in diet,” added Giroud.

Galante, for his part, pointed out, “We eat crustaceans, and insects are related to them. We eat shrimp and lobster, which are similar to grasshoppers, as well as mussels, octopus and shrimp.”

The Spanish entomologist, who is also a professor in the zoology department at the University of Alicante, added that there are insects that have been part of our daily lives for years, although we are often not aware of it. This is the case, for example, with the cochineal, an insect used to produce the natural, deep-red dye known as carmine. It is commonly used in a wide range of food products as well as cosmetics, particularly lipstick, and is sometimes labelled as E120.

Galante said that he has eaten “all kinds of insects, some of which were very delicious,” although he recognises the aversion provoked by the idea in most European cultures.

He does not believe that the use of insects as a food source will help to end world hunger, but he does consider it “a way of opening up new markets.”

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Workshops for budding entrepreneurs are mushrooming in Spain, like this one in Benalmádena, Málaga. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Walter García and Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Jun 18 2013 (IPS)

The people in the textile factory where Lourdes Soler presented the design of her skirts had never seen such detailed “blueprints” of a garment. Spain’s depressed labour market forced the technical architect to reinvent herself and create her own job – a growing trend in this crisis-stricken country.

“We were educated with the idea of having the same career for our entire lives, and when a crisis hits and jobs are scarce, we find ourselves paralysed and we don’t know what to do,” the 41-year-old mother of three children between the ages of seven and 11, with 15 years of professional work experience, told IPS.

María Jesús González, 38, says she doesn’t “know how to do anything else,” after 13 years in positions of responsibility in the Newco airport services and Spanair airline companies.

Laid off in 2012, shortly before she gave birth to her son, she is still waiting for her severance pay, which she hopes to use to open a café-indoor playground, with two other partners, in the southern Spanish city of Málaga.

May 2013 saw the largest month-on-month rise in the number of self-employed workers since the start of the crisis in 2009, with 12,532 newly registered that month. The number of people registered as self-employed with the social security system totalled 3,029,843 in May, according to the Ministry of Employment and Social Security.

But the number of self-employed workers has actually dropped from year to year since 2009, and in May there were 34,651 fewer than in May 2012.

“Since 2009 we have lost 200,000 self-employed workers,” María José Landaburu, secretary general of the Union of Associations of Self-Employed Workers and Entrepreneurs (UATAE), told IPS. She said “the hikes in the high season (May-September) do not compensate for the drops in the low season.”

Landaburu attributed the increase in May “mainly to the lack of alternatives for the millions of unemployed people, who see self-employment as a solution.” But it was also due to “measures adopted by the government to foment self-employment,” she added.

“This is the first time I am setting out on my own,” Giselle Rocha, a 36-year-old administrative employee from Brazil told IPS. She was left without work along with 5,000 other people when Orizonia, one of Spain’s largest tour operators, went under.

Rocha, who has lived in Spain for five years, is now getting ready to open a small business selling natural juice and vegetarian food, along with a fellow Brazilian, in this city in the southern province of Andalusía.

She complained that because of her age she is not eligible for most of the options of government support for entrepreneurs. “The aid is for the young, but it should be made available to everyone, or to no one,” said Rocha, the mother of a seven-year-old boy.

On May 24, the government approved a bill on support for entrepreneurs, aimed at facilitating the creation and financing of businesses and encouraging an entrepreneurial spirit, in educational plans in schools.

“The lack of financing is the entrepreneur’s main problem,” rightwing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said on Jun. 11 during a ceremony in the seat of government where he presented the bill to some 50 entrepreneurs and small businesspersons.

Rajoy urged banks to support the initiative, saying “those who grant loans must rise to this challenge.”

Spain’s unemployment rate of 27 percent is the highest in the European Union after Greece’s. And half of the 4.9 million jobless people in this country of 47 million are 25 or younger.

Landaburu said the bill “does not strongly address major needs, especially the need for credit.”

But she said it does contain “interesting measures, like ones that foment business ventures or that stipulate that a person’s home cannot be foreclosed on for private debts up to 300,000 euros (just under 400,000 dollars).”

Among the novel aspects of the new law, expected to pass this month, is a special Value Added Tax (VAT) measure that would prevent self-employed workers and small businesses from having to pay the tax until they are paid.

It also creates a special VAT for young people, which would cut costs for entrepreneurs under 30.

Sources at the Centre of Support for Business Development (CADE), a government agency, in Málaga told IPS that the main concern of entrepreneurs who visit their offices is the lack of financing.

“They run into negative answers when they ask for loans in banks, which require more and more guarantees,” said Susana Benítez, with CADE.

According to the Financial Stability Report, published May 7 by the Banco de España –Spain’s central bank – “the rates of acceptance of loan requests from non-financial companies have gone down, from levels of around 45 percent in 2006 to around 30 percent during the crisis.”

Rocha and her partner were able to set up their small business with minimal seed capital, and without having to apply for a bank loan.

But González plans to seek credit, and complains that “the banks aren’t lending.”

Entrepreneurial activity is growing above all among groups that have been hit hardest by soaring unemployment: people over 55, young people, women and immigrants, said
Landaburu.

Sales and the hotel industry are the areas most frequently chosen by entrepreneurs, although the number of self-employed people and small businesses has gone up in scientific, technical and health-related fields.

But while the number of new entrepreneurs shot up in May, “the percent that survive is much smaller than what would be desirable due to the credit shutdown, the consumption slowdown, and the lack of advice,” said the UATAE spokeswoman. She added that helping these initiatives stay above water “is our real collective challenge.”

“I am self-taught,” said Soler, who believes the biggest obstacle for entrepreneurs is often themselves. “I find my own raw materials, I make my designs, and I learn about making clothes along the way. I’m building my own future. You have to know yourself, and discover where your talents lie.”

In April 2013, 8,938 new businesses were created in Spain, 23 percent more than in April 2012, according to the National Statistics Institute. But 2,090 businesses went under in April, compared to 1,414 in the same month of 2012.

According to the World Bank’s Doing Business 2013 report, Spain ranks 136th out of 185 countries on the “ease of doing business” index. In this country, it takes 10 steps and 28 days to set up a company, the report says.

The death of a young Senegalese man from tuberculosis in Spain, following alleged lack of medical care, triggered a new outcry by civil society organisations against the law passed last year that excludes undocumented immigrants from the public health system except in emergencies.

“There are cases of undocumented pregnant women and children running into difficulties getting health care at hospitals and health centres. There are quite a number of instances,” Sylvia Koniecki, the head of Andalucía Acoge (Andalusia Welcomes), an NGO that works on behalf of immigrants, told IPS.

Immigrants in Spain have little access to public healthcare. Credit: Bigstock/IPS

Royal decree-law 16/2012, enacted Apr. 20, 2012 by the government of the rightwing People’s Party (PP), stipulates that foreign women have the right to public health care during pregnancy, childbirth and the post-partum period, regardless of their legal status in the country.

It also states that all undocumented immigrants under 18 shall receive free health care “in the same conditions as Spanish citizens,” and those over 18 shall receive “emergency health care in cases of serious illness or accident due to any cause, until they are medically discharged.”

As a result, most undocumented immigrants have limited access to health care. They can purchase state health insurance for 710 euros (913 dollars) a year, excluding medicines, but many of them cannot afford it, human rights groups say.

Alpha Pam, a 28-year-old undocumented Senegalese immigrant, died Apr. 21 at the Inca Hospital in Majorca, one of the Balearic Islands off the east coast of Spain, from tuberculosis. His family complained of negligence, while the authorities claim that he received proper care. However, the hospital’s director, Fernando Navarro, was removed from his post on Wednesday May 22.

The case was reported to the European Commission – the EU executive – on May 17 by the Communist Party-led Izquierda Unida (United Left) coalition.

As part of its fiscal austerity policies, the government of conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy estimated savings of 500 million euros (645 million dollars) as a result of cancelling the health cards of 873,000 undocumented immigrants as of September 2012.

But “there will be no such savings,” said Gabriel Ruiz, who is in charge of the migrants’ programme for the southern city of Málaga’s branch of Doctors of the World, an international humanitarian organisation. He said exclusion from primary health care would only mean more users coming to the emergency services “which are more expensive to provide.”

Ruiz told IPS that the immigrant population is generally in a state of social exclusion and is therefore more vulnerable to diseases propagated by overcrowding or inadequate nutrition. “Excluding immigrants from the public health system not only puts their health at risk, but also that of the rest of society because of the possible spread of illnesses,” he stressed.

The government justifies the measures by claiming that undocumented immigrants were overloading the health system. But a 2012 report by the Ecology and Development Foundation (ECODES) concluded that Spanish citizens were the main users of the public health system.

The Málaga branch of Doctors of the World and Málaga Acoge (Málaga Welcomes) have met with immigrants who show them bills to be paid for emergency health care, which is against the decree-law. “They come to us in desperation, with invoices for huge sums that are accumulating interest because they have not been paid,” said Ruiz.

The government of the autonomous community of the Balearic Islands, also in the hands of the PP, said on May 8 that it would cancel all improperly issued bills and repay the money that immigrants have shelled out for emergency health services.

Each one of the 17 autonomous communities that make up Spain has applied the decree-law differently. Andalusia, Catalonia, Asturias, the Basque Country and the Canary Islands have refused to enforce it.

Social organisations in Andalusia – where the province of Málaga is located – are drawing attention to the many cases they encounter, and solving most of them by acting as intermediaries between immigrants and the authorities.

According to Ruiz, “there is a lack of clear guidelines from the local government for the health facilities in Andalusia.

“In a single week we have had two or three cases of undocumented immigrants who have been refused primary care or have been directed to other bodies like the National Institute of Social Security, when it was the responsibility of the health centre itself to provide assistance,” Ruiz said.

The provincial health authority in Málaga admitted that there have been instances, even before the decree-law came into force, but said they were “isolated cases” that they were trying “to solve as soon as possible,” a spokesperson told IPS.

But “there should not be a single case,” Alejandro Cortina, the head of Málaga Acoge, told IPS. “Precise instructions from the provincial authority to the hospitals and health centres are needed in order to keep this from happening.”

A study carried out by Málaga Acoge from Sept. 1 to Dec. 17, 2012, found 42 cases at 20 health centres in six Andalusian provinces, affecting 69 immigrants, of whom 77 percent were undocumented.

The report says 38 percent of those affected were denied a new health card, 23 percent were refused an appointment with a primary health care doctor, and another 23 percent were billed for the health care they received. Among those affected were eight children under 18 and three pregnant women.

Ruiz said he believes these cases are just the tip of the iceberg, and that the number of undocumented immigrants facing difficulties in accessing health care or being wrongly charged for services is much higher.

In a tour of primary care health centres in Málaga, employees confirmed to IPS that there was a marked decline in the number of undocumented immigrants seeking care, which they attributed to a lack of information among users about the continuity of services for immigrants in Andalusia in spite of the decree-law.

However, some receptionists have turned immigrants away. The report by Málaga Acoge concludes that most instances of denial of health services to undocumented immigrants were the responsibility of public health centre staff in direct contact with the public.

Isabel Rodríguez decided to pull her then nine-year-old son Ulises out of the school system and homeschool him instead – an alternative chosen by more than 2,000 families in Spain, who are calling for a law that would overcome the legal vacuum surrounding the growing phenomenon.

“I don’t think schools offer an ideal education for children,” Rodríguez told IPS. She believes it is parents who should organise the learning process of their children in keeping with their particular interests and needs. Ulises today is 17 years old and wants to study graphic design.

Other homeschooling parents told IPS that they were not seeking solutions for the traditional school system, and that their intention was not to criticise or replace it.

They are simply asking for the country’s laws to officially recognise it as an alternative, in order to facilitate access to academic diplomas and certificates and eventual admission of homeschooled children to the educational system.

“We want a legal framework to be developed to provide support and coverage to families who choose this form of education and thus put an end to the persecution that some are facing,” Manel Moles, a high school teacher who belongs to the Catalonian Coordinating Committee for the Recognition and Regulation of Home Education, told IPS.

The group was created in Gerona, in the northeastern region of Catalonia, in 2007.

Some families have been reported to the authorities, on the argument that their children have dropped out of school. But very few cases have gone to court.

In Spain, 10 years of education are compulsory. This is generally understood to mean school attendance, but there is no law that clearly states that homeschooling is illegal.

However, the most recent Constitutional Court sentence on the issue, from Dec. 2, 2010, ordered a group of homeschooling parents to send their children to school in the southern Spanish city of Málaga.

In Europe, homeschooling is legal in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

The phenomenon is most widespread in the United States, followed by the UK. It is illegal in a number of European countries, including Germany and Sweden, where the authorities have gotten tough on homeschoolers in recent years.

A member of the Spain-based Association for Free Education (ALE) who preferred to remain anonymous told IPS that in this country there are some 2,000 homeschooling families, and that the number is growing as more and more people find out about education at home.

One ALE mother who homeschools her three children aged three to seven told IPS that despite the stereotype that families choose homeschooling for religious reasons, those who practice it are actually a broad range of middle-class families, with different philosophies and methods.

While some parents completely teach their children themselves, others hire tutors. There are couples who decide from the start never to send their children to school, while others come to homeschooling because their children have attention deficit disorder problems, are failing classes, are being bullied at school, or have special education needs.

“My three-year-old daughter was bored in class – she would finish everything quickly and start to cry. Now she’s moving ahead at home and is happy,” said the mother of three.

Isabel Rodríguez said that while Spain’s laws try to protect children by safeguarding their right to an education, “they are too narrow” because they do not recognise alternatives like education at home.

“It’s not about teaching methods, but about human beings,” another ALE mother who homeschools her three children between the ages of three and 15, who asked not to be named, told IPS.

Homeschooling families are also demanding that their children be allowed to earn the ESO – compulsory secondary education – diploma at age 16, like everyone else. Currently, homeschooled youngsters have to wait until they are18 to take the exam.

“It is a totally unjustified two-year penalty that keeps these people from continuing their higher education studies merely due to red tape,” said Moles, author of the book “No quiero ir a la escuela” (“I don’t want to go to school”).

One of the strongest criticisms against homeschooling is the lack of socialisation. But Moles argued that “we parents are more concerned than anyone that they form relationships,” which is why the children go to after-school classes and workshops and are fully integrated in their communities.

ALE, which groups homeschooling families, also organises periodic gatherings.

“I would have preferred to go to school because I lost the contact with other children,” one woman who asked not to be identified told IPS, explaining that her mother, a schoolteacher, did not send her to school until she was nine years old.

In Spain there are also families who enrol their children in schools from other countries, where homeschoolers can earn a diploma or educational certificate. But they face problems getting the educational programme and diploma recognised in Spain, Laura Mascaró, a lawyer who homeschools her children and is the president of the Platform for Educational Freedom, told IPS.

The Ministry of Education has an Official Distance Learning Centre. But it serves children and young people who work in show business – the circus or as singers or actors – or elite sports, professions that force them to move around.

Mascaró, who just returned to Spain after visiting Mexico, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia, told IPS that in those Latin American countries, as well as in Chile and Peru, “homeschooling is neither recognised nor prohibited. It is allowed because there is a legal vacuum, and there is no kind of registry or control.”

But according to the lawyer, the phenomenon is spreading in Latin America. In Uruguay, it is just now starting to emerge, and in Mexico it is mainly religious families, both Catholic and evangelical, who teach their kids at home.

Activists and local residents protesting eviction of a Moroccan family on Oct. 24, 2012 in Málaga. Credit:Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain , Apr 23 2013 (IPS)

A new mortgage bill approved by Spain’s lower house of parliament would merely put a bandaid on the plight of people whose homes are being repossessed, and would not guarantee protection for most families facing eviction, activists complain.

The bill was passed Apr. 18 thanks to the votes of the right-wing governing Popular Party (PP), and is expected to make it through the Senate because the party also holds an absolute majority there.

Hundreds of thousands of families have been evicted since 2008 in crisis-stricken Spain, which has the highest unemployment rate in the EU – 26 percent.

The vote on the bill came after the European Court of Justice ruled Mar. 14 that Spain’s legislation was in breach of EU consumer protection laws because it did not allow judges to halt evictions, even if mortgage contracts contained unfair terms.

The verdict stated that judges must be granted the authority to delay repossession and eviction while reviewing mortgage contracts to determine whether they have “abusive” clauses.

The abusive terms referred to by the court ruling include late interest payments of 18 percent or evictions of homeowners after they have missed just one or two payments on a 30-year mortgage.

Under Spanish law, people must continue to pay off their mortgages, complete with interest and late fees, even after they have been evicted and their home – whose value is appraised by the bank itself – has been repossessed.

Several people who lost their homes or were on the verge of losing them have committed suicide in recent months, and the protest movement against evictions has ballooned.

The bill that has now gone to the Senate allows courts to suspend eviction for two years in certain cases where unfair mortgage terms have been identified, and sets a limit on late charges.

But it failed to respond to the main demand of the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH), a movement that collected 1.5 million signatures to demand that all defaulters be allowed to merely hand over the keys and walk away from the outstanding mortgage payments.

The petition, which also claimed that the change should be retroactive, was delivered to Congress on Feb. 12 as part of a Popular Legislative Initiative (ILP).

“This is a law to protect the banks,” Sara Vázquez, a lawyer with the PAH chapter in the southern city of Málaga, told IPS. “The public institutions have been taken hostage.”

The social movement accuses the government of distorting the ILP, which also called for a moratorium on evictions and the conversion of vacant housing in the hands of banks into affordable rental units.

The National Statistics Institute reports that there are 3.4 million vacant housing units in Spain – nearly 14 percent of all housing – and that most of these units are owned by banks.

Evictions totalled 363,000 between 2008 and 2012, according to a report released by PAH in January.

The new law delays eviction for two years for low-income families who meet certain standards of vulnerability. It also forces banks to renegotiate the debt and agree to a discount of 35 percent if the homeowners pay off the loan in five years and 20 percent if they do so in 10 years.

But Vázquez said that “paying 65 percent of the debt in five years starting from the original date set for repossession is impossible for nearly all of the affected families.”

“The PP disappoints people and is not living up to what citizens are demanding when it approves a law that distorts the demands of the ILP,” PAH national spokeswoman Ada Colau told a public radio station. She said the bill “excludes most victims.”

But the government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said it was “very satisfied” with the bill. After the vote in the lower house, Vicente Martínez, PP legislative spokesman on the economy, said the new law “was designed looking into the eyes of thousands of people…whose living conditions will now be improved.”

Vázquez, however, said banks in Spain “take advantage of the repossession procedure, which is illegal according to the European court ruling,” and has been “since 1993, when the EU consumer protection law was passed.”

Who is wondering about what has happened to the hundreds of thousands of families who have been evicted over the past few years without a chance to defend themselves from unfair terms in their mortgage contracts? she asked.

“Most of the evicted families in Spain signed unfair contract clauses,” said Vázquez, who described the chaos in the courts as “hell” because, in light of the European ruling, all of the evicted families should have the right to demand reparations from the state for damages.

Meanwhile, judges have begun to apply the European Court of Justice ruling.

“Given the government’s failure to act, judges are moving ahead of the legislators,” José Cosín, a lawyer and activist with PAH Málaga, told IPS. He described the law as “a bandage on a mortal wound in the aorta.”

Judges in Málaga agreed Friday Apr. 19 to halt evictions in cases where unfair contract clauses have been found. The judiciary has set a May 8 deadline for courts nationwide to come up with unified criteria to apply the European Court of Justice verdict.

To foment the conversion of vacant housing to rental units, the government of the southern autonomous community of Andalusía, where Málaga province is located, approved a decree- law on Apr. 9 that slaps fines on banks, companies and individuals who do not release empty units for rent.

The decree-law also makes it possible to expropriate, for up to three years, housing units in the process of being repossessed, in the case of poor families who will be left in the street.

Of the 17 autonomous communities that make up Spain, Andalusía, governed by the opposition Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), has the second largest number of evictions, after Valencia in the east. Unemployment in Andalusía stands at nearly 36 percent, far above the national average.

Coín activist selling fruit and vegetables at the Málaga Común market. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain, Apr 8 2013 (IPS)

Wholemeal rye bread, lettuce and chard are some of the products on offer from the El Caminito urban vegetable garden at the small organic produce market in this southern Spanish city, with prices set in “comunes”, one of more than 30 social currencies circulating in the country.

“The aim is to find an alternative to the curse of unbridled capitalism and to sow the foundations of a more just and compassionate society,” activist David Chapman of the Málaga Común platform, the network responsible for the market, told IPS.

In the network, more than 700 registered users exchange goods and services using “comunes” as currency and recording transactions on the internet.

In Spain, over 30 local currencies coexist with the euro, and they are “tools empowering communities by means of the exchange of products and services and the creation of parallel markets,” economist and writer Julio Gisbert told IPS.

The común, the lazo and the coín in Málaga, the puma in Seville, the zoquito in Jerez de la Frontera (Cádiz), the pita in Almería and the justa in Granada – all in the south of Spain – are some of the social currencies created with the shared mission of dynamising local economies and moving toward a more sustainable economic and production model all over the country.

The Puma Social Currency Network was launched a year ago in the Old City of Seville as a people-to-people mutual credit system. It seeks to “relaunch and localise the economy of this part of the city, and create community,” local resident Natalia Calzadilla, one of its members and a producer of vegetable jams, told IPS.

Puma users keep a hard copy of their transactions in goods and services on cards. They also upload their offers and requests on the Community Exchange System (CES), a platform created in 2002 in Cape Town, South Africa, which can be used in 56 countries for transactions in social currencies or time exchange.

Madrid has the boniato; in the northern city of Bilbao, the local currrency is the bilbodiru; and in the northeastern town of Girona, the euro-RES.

The euro-RES was created in Belgium over 15 years ago, with the same value as the euro. It is used by a network of some 5,000 small and medium businesses, as well as by individuals, as explained on its web page.

Users of these alternative currencies come from all walks of life: “They are masseuses, doctors, electricians, lawyers, professors… and the quality of what is on offer is amazing,” said Chapman.

The Puma Network, which brings together students, the unemployed, professionals and tradespeople, promotes creativity, the development of new skills, moral support and self-esteem for its members, said Calzadilla.

She paid another member 25 pumas (equivalent to 25 euros) for a massage. Now that person is credited with that amount to buy another service or goods in the community. The project organises a monthly market, called Mercapuma, where producers display their wares, and on Mondays a food store sells organic and homemade foods.

Carmela San Segundo offers English, French and Esperanto classes to members of Málaga Común, and told IPS she paid for painting two rooms in her house and repairing her computer in comunes.

Spain’s economic and financial crisis is encouraging experiments in social exchange, which may use alternative currencies, barter or time banking, “because people are seeking different ways of life,” said Gisbert, the author of “Vivir sin empleo” (Living Without a Job) and the blog of the same name.

According to Gisbert, there are more than 300 time banks in Spain, so called because they do not bank money but hours. When a person performs a service, he or she is credited with the appropriate number of hours in return.

Although complementary currencies are criticised for not solving the problem of poverty, Gisbert argues that their goal “is not to feed people in need, but to seek mutual help to achieve self-sufficiency and a new and more sustainable social model.”

The coín, a currency created in the town of Coín in the province of Málaga, is part of the global transition movement and is intended to serve as an instrument of reaction to and change from “the energy, economic and environmental crisis,” according to its web site.

Most of these social currencies, launched by organisations or networks, have no official basis, Gisbert said. However, that does not mean this small-scale phenomenon is illegal.

Alternative currencies are not a new invention, but a global phenomenon that has emerged especially in industrialised countries. There are complementary currencies in the United States, Canada, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and other countries. For instance, in the multicultural London borough of Brixton, transactions can be made in Brixton Pounds.

The Brixton Pound, which is issued in different bills annually, is one of the most innovative social currencies, Gisbert said.

Meanwhile, groups associated with alternative currencies are becoming interested in providing microcredit. José Luis Gámez, the son of the founder of the axarco, which circulates in Axarquía in Málaga province, would like to be able to finance social economy projects in the region with this currency that was created in 1988.

But the silver and copper axarco coins are no longer used because of the cost of minting them. Today, they are collectors’ items.

As well as promoting the exchange of goods and services, alternative currencies can be used to put a value on the work of volunteers or those who create learning, according to the philosophy of an international project, tgl (teaching, giving, learning).

As it makes headway in Spain, tgl is using the social currency L, which is created when people teach or learn skills or knowledge, participate in voluntary projects or carry out social enterprises that generate employment and local wealth.

“L is not a currency to facilitate barter or exchange, but to generate wealth because it injects liquidity into the system. It is created by teaching and learning, volunteer work and social enterprise,” Raúl Contreras, co-founder of the social change platform Nittúa and promoter of the Okonomía popular economics school, where students and tutors are paid in this alternative currency, told IPS.

Genetically modified corn in Spain. Credit: Friends of the Earth

By Inés Benítez
MÁLAGA, Spain, Mar 27 2013 (IPS)

Spain has more large-scale plantations of genetically modified seeds than any other country in the European Union (EU).

Based on the number of trials conducted and the area of land planted, Spain accounts for 42 percent of all field trials of genetically modified crops in the EU, according to figures from the European Commission Joint Research Centre.

“Experimentation is being carried out on a wide scale with no knowledge of its consequences for human health, the environment and the future of agriculture,” environmentalist Liliane Spendeler, director of Friends of the Earth Spain, told Tierramérica*.

Her organisation has launched a campaign, “Únicos en Europa”, to inform the public about these crops.

Genetically modified organisms or GMOs, also known as transgenic organisms, are the result of a laboratory process of taking genes from one species of plant or animal and inserting them into another species in an attempt to obtain a desired trait or characteristic, such as resistance to pests or adverse weather conditions like drought.

There is no conclusive evidence that GMOs are harmless to human health and the environment, which has led the World Health Organization to recommend that they be studied on a case-by-case basis.

In 2012, more than 116,300 hectares of land in Spain were planted with MON810 corn, produced by the U.S.-based biotech transnational Monsanto. This was 20 percent more than in 2011, according to figures from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment calculated on the basis of seed sales.

Environmentalists are critical of the fact that these figures are imprecise estimates, and that there is no public registry specifying the location of these transgenic corn fields.

When certified organic crops are contaminated by genetically modified crops, the farmers lose their organic certification, but cannot sue the owners of the transgenic crops because of the lack of a registry. They cannot demand compensation for losses and damages, either, because there is no provision for this in Spanish or European legislation, explained Spendeler.

In Spain, as in the rest of the EU, only transgenic corn is authorised. Genetically modified soy and cotton are imported from Argentina, Brazil, Canada and the United States.

“Transgenic crops produced in developing countries are filling the bellies of cows and pigs in industrialised countries,” Luís Ferreirim, the head of Greenpeace Spain’s anti-GMO campaign, told Tierramérica.

According to a report from the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), published Feb. 20, “From 1996 to 2011, biotech crops contributed to food security, sustainability and climate change” (sic).

A record 170.3 million hectares of transgenic crops were grown globally in 2012, up six percent from 2011, the ISAAA reports. The United States is the biggest producer, followed by Brazil.

But despite the benefits touted by their promoters, such as increased productivity and efficiency and decreased pesticide use, genetically modified seeds have been banned by a significant number of European countries, noted Ferreirim.

In Europe there are 11 countries that prohibit the use of genetically modified seeds, eight of them in the EU, following the addition of Poland in 2013. And in 2012, only Portugal, Spain, Romania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic planted transgenic crops, he added.

A whopping 95 percent of these crops in the EU are concentrated in Spain (88 percent) and Portugal (seven percent).

The bulk of this transgenic corn is used to produce animal feed. “Given that the food pyramid has been turned upside down and there is an ever greater demand for animal protein, it ends up right on our plates,” said Ferreirim.

European legislation requires that food products be labelled if they contain GMOs, unless these account for 0.9 percent or less of the total ingredients.

The animal feed sold in Spain is a mixture of transgenic and conventional corn, which represents a serious violation of cattle farmers’ right to choose non-GMO feed for their livestock, said Spendeler.

Environmental activist Carmela San Segundo, a member of Ecologists in Action in the southern Spanish city of Málaga, stressed the “great power” wielded by the agrochemical corporations that sell genetically modified seeds.

Through the efforts of the non-governmental organisation she works with, a dozen towns in the province of Málaga have declared themselves Transgenic-Free Zones, a legal status recognised by the EU.

“It takes a lot of work, talking with community associations, farmers’ associations, members of local governments. It’s not a problem that people worry about much, because they know very little about it,” she told Tierramérica.

In Spain, the planting of transgenic corn began in 1998 as a means of confronting the economic consequences of insect invasions, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

But today there are no figures on the real incidence of the European corn borer, the crop’s main insect enemy.

“Can the use of this technology be justified without concrete figures on the losses caused by pests?” asked Ferreirim.

He explained that Monsanto’s genetically modified Bt corn does away with the need to use pesticides because its flowers produce a bacterium that is toxic to these insects.

But even though there is not always a threat of insect infestation, the corn constantly releases this gene, and after harvesting, it remains in the soil, decreasing its fertility, Ferreirim said.

“It has been shown in transgenic crops in various countries that over the long term, secondary pests appear, leading to the need to use other pesticides,” he added.

In addition, GMO field trials are not subjected to any safety controls in Spain, Ferreirem stressed.

According to a survey published in 2010 by the EU, 53 percent of Spaniards were against the splicing of genes from other species into food crops, while only 27 percent were in favour.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

A Mar. 10 protest in Málaga, southern Spain, against unemployment and spending cuts. Courtesy of CCOO

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Mar 13 2013 (IPS)

“They wanted to hire me, and that was something that hadn’t ever happened to me before,” says Marta Seror, a 25-year-old college graduate from Spain who is now working in an outsourcing company in Poland.

Her story is similar to those of thousands of young people who are leaving crisis-stricken Spain because of the lack of job opportunities.

“I have spent three and a half months in this country, and I am seeing more and more people like me,” she tells IPS. “I feel like I was practically forced to accept a job outside of Spain, giving up my family and friends.”

She is now earning only 600 euros a month (780 dollars), “but this is an inexpensive country,” she says.

By the end of 2012, unemployment among young people under 25 reached 55 percent, amounting to 930,200 unemployed youths, according to Spain’s national statistics institute, INE.

Overall unemployment, which stands at a record high of 26 percent, or 5.9 million people, is the highest in the European Union.

“The cutbacks in education, research and science have made it impossible to start a scientific career in Spain,” says David, a 33-year-old with a doctorate in biology.

“We’re forced to emigrate to other countries,” he writes from South Africa in the on-line campaign “No nos vamos, nos echan” (nonosvamosnosechan.net – “We’re not leaving – they’re kicking us out”) launched by the group Juventud Sin Futuro (Youth without a Future).

The organisation was created in April 2011 by the Student Movement of Madrid, one of the groups that organised the protests that began on Mar. 15, 2011 and gave rise to the 15 Marzo or 15M Movement.

The aim of the campaign is to protest the “forced exile” of young people from Spain, put a face on the statistics, and weave networks among young people at home and abroad, in order to struggle together to change things.

“I really want the situation to change, although I’m not confident that it will in the short term,” Seror comments to IPS.

Eduardo González, a 23-year-old with a degree in journalism who belongs to Juventud Sin Futuro, tells IPS that the flood of young people leaving the country is a result of the economic crisis and austerity policies in areas like education and health.

“On one hand they cut spending and on the other they use millions of euros to rescue the banks,” he complains.

In just a few weeks, the campaign has managed to gather, on an interactive global map, 6,000 brief accounts of young people living in Spain and abroad. The stories are accessed by clicking on a yellow dot.

“I’ve only found jobs as an intern since I finished my studies,” González says. But while he protests the precarious working conditions in Spain, he also notes that “the great majority” of young people who have moved abroad have not found “a job paradise” there either, only poorly paid work, and not in their professions.

José is a doctor working as a waiter and tour guide in the Dominican Republic, and Gemma is a designer working as a ski instructor in Iceland, they say on the nonosvamosnosechan.net web site.

Seror, who has a degree in physical sciences, didn’t hesitate to accept a job in the Polish city of Lodz that has nothing to do with her studies, because of the poor prospects at home and “to put an end to the routine of getting up every day in my mom’s house, sending in CVs without receiving any response, and feeling depressed,” she says.

Now she is a process executive in the Polish branch of an outsourcing company from India, she says.

According to the INE, unemployment has affected young women slightly less than young men: 53.89 percent compared to 56.24 percent.

But all of them face the same problem: the fact that they have not paid into the social security system, which means they are not eligible for unemployment benefits, unlike older jobless people.

Other challenges they share are a late start in entering the social security system and long periods earning the low wages paid to an intern or working in the black market.

Juventud Sin Futuro is organising Apr. 7 demonstrations in cities around Spain and in front of the country’s embassies abroad, to show that young people are fed up.

“It’s time for us to organise, people who have been forced to move abroad as well as those who haven’t done so,” the group says on its web site and social networking sites like Facebook.

On Mar. 7, the government of right-wing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced the creation of “mini-jobs” for people under 30, which were introduced in Germany in 2003 to encourage the hiring and training of young workers part-time.

The contracts are temporary and for a maximum of 15 hours a week, with monthly salaries of around 400 euros (520 dollars).

Six out of 10 young people in Spain between the ages of 22 and 30 are in favour of mini-jobs, according to a survey carried out by the My World company, whose results were announced on Mar. 4 by the Cadena Ser radio station.

“When it’s a choice between not having anything and earning 400 euros, people accept these contracts,” says González, who has not ruled out seeking work outside Spain when his current nine-month contract as an intern ends.

Different voices have been raised against the labour reform approved by the Rajoy administration, which allows small and medium companies to lay off workers for no reason and with no severance pay during the first year of their contract. They say it opens the door to legalising precarious, temporary work.

The majority of the people who posted brief accounts on the interactive map are between the ages of 23 and 28, although “there are also some who are pushing 40, because the problem doesn’t just affect young people. Forced exile affects the entire populace,” says González.

Vicente Ortí, a 45-year-old journalist with 25 years of experience in the press and television, works in the capital of the Dominican Republic and is pessimistic about the future of young professionals in Spain.

“I left for the same reason that thousands of people are leaving – because of the lack of work: Spain, in labour terms, is in ruins,” Ortí tells IPS.

“We used to be seen as really useful, and now we’re a pain in the neck,” said Roberto Suárez, an Ecuadorian who was complaining about proposed fines or prison sentences that could target Spanish citizens who help undocumented immigrants.

A proposed reform of article 318 of Spain’s penal code states that anyone who intentionally and with a profit motive helps non-European Union nationals without the proper documents to remain in Spain, thus violating the laws governing the entry or stay of foreigners, would be subject to a fine or six months to two years in prison.

Anyone caught helping undocumented immigrants to enter or make their way across Spain would be subject to the same punishment. It would be up to prosecutors to decide whether to drop charges in cases in which the aim was merely to provide humanitarian assistance, by giving someone a ride, clothing, cash or shelter, for instance.

The proposed reform of the criminal code was approved by the Council of Ministers in October 2012, but has not yet been introduced to parliament.

Some 30 national and international organisations have launched the campaign “La hospitalidad no es delito” (Hospitality Is Not a Crime), to protest the possible prosecution of people providing aid to undocumented immigrants.

The groups complain that the reform would “criminalise” solidarity towards immigrants.

“For years we have been one of the cogs in the development of Spain, and today we are harassed and persecuted,” Suárez, the president of ASIMEC, the Association of Ecuadorian Immigrants in the southern city of Malaga, told IPS.

Mamen Castellano, the head of Andalucía Acoge, (Andalusia Welcomes), an NGO in southern Spain that works on behalf of immigrants, told IPS that under the proposed penal code reform, a taxi driver who gives a ride to an undocumented immigrant could be subject to prosecution for “facilitating transit”.

She also said people who rent a room to immigrants, thus “helping them remain in the country,” could face charges as well.

In addition, the groups taking part in the campaign complain that the decision to press charges would be left in the hands of prosecutors. They argue that the proposed bill should instead simply specify that people who were merely providing humanitarian assistance would be legally exempt.

The proposed article is “outrageous” because “it presumes that we are all guilty” unless a prosecutor decides otherwise, lawyer Jaume Durá, the head of the Valencia chapter of the Spanish Commission for Aid to Refugees (CEAR), told IPS.

He said “solidarity should not be demonised.”

“This is disrespectful towards immigrants who one way or another find ourselves in distant lands,” said Suárez, who has lived in Spain for 13 years. “Our only crime has always been, and always will be, to work and try to improve the lot of our families.”

Andalucía Acoge has been trying to get officials in different city governments to reject the “arbitrary” way the proposed penal code reform is written, Castellano said.

Some lawyers say the proposed reform would only be used to crack down on abuses against immigrants by people seeking to make a profit, by charging unfairly high rents, for example. But NGOs are demanding that the article be rewritten because it is overly vague.

The groups point to local governments and civil society organisations that are designing projects like housing assistance aimed at improving the social integration of immigrants, and argue that these efforts could open them up to prosecution if article 318 is reformed.

The article was originally designed to protect victims of human trafficking and other abuses. But its proposed modification could lead to legal action against people merely helping immigrants out of solidarity, the campaign web page warns.

In December 2012, lawyers, judges, university professors, priests and others who came together in the campaign Salvemos la Hospitalidad (Save Hospitality) began to collect signatures to oppose the reform of article 318. So far 54,000 people have signed the petition.

“This is the limit! They’re trying to turn immigrants into scapegoats,” said
Betty Roca, head of the area of migration and co-development in Psychologists without Frontiers, which forms part of the campaign to close down Spain’s Immigrant Detention Centres (CIEs) – “CIEsNo” – which has joined Salvemos la Hospitalidad.

“We can’t criminalise something that has to do with human rights,” Roca told IPS.

Human rights organisations have long criticised the conditions in which undocumented immigrants are held, basically as prisoners, in the CIEs.

Both the government of the right-wing People’s Party and the last administration, of Spain’s PSOE socialist party, “have taken a wrongheaded approach to the issue of immigration, stirring up fear, racism and xenophobia,” Castellano maintained.

Since healthcare reform was implemented in September 2012 by the administration of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, undocumented immigrants only have the right to free public healthcare in cases of emergencies, pregnancies, births, or for pediatric treatment.

In 2009, Salvemos la Hospitalidad criticised article 53 of the reform of Spain’s immigration law pushed through by then socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (2004-2011), which established fines for “promoting the illegal stay in Spain” of undocumented immigrants.

Castellano said it was “unfair” that “during a boom period we thought it was fine for immigrants to come, but now that there aren’t even jobs in construction or agriculture, they are being stripped of more and more rights.”

There are foreign nationals who had their papers in order as long as they had a job, but who lost their visas or permits when they became unemployed.

“We mustn’t forget that if there are undocumented immigrants, it is also because employers themselves took advantage of our ignorance of our rights and deceived us with false hopes that our situation would be regularised, because it was convenient for them to have employees off the payroll and to pay wages under the table,” Suárez said.

Spain is one of the European countries hit hardest by the global financial crisis. The country’s 26 percent unemployment rate is the highest in Europe. Spending has been slashed in areas like health and education, and social discontent has given rise to frequent street protests.

Spanish citizens are even moving abroad in search of opportunities. “Spaniards were also immigrants and were welcomed in many countries, where they strengthened the development of those places,” said Suárez.

The ILP calls for “payment in kind", meaning that a person’s debts are written off once they have surrendered their home. Credit: Inés Benítez

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Feb 15 2013 (IPS)

Public outcry against evictions this week led Spain’s parliament to accept a popular initiative against mortgage-related evictions for unpaid debts, which in the past seven days have led to four suicides.

“The banks chase me to pay every cent,” while they are rescued with public money, complained Benigno, a 47-year old unemployed man, who with his three children has for nearly a year occupied one of 29 vacant apartments in a building project in the southern city of Malaga, which closed down when the developer went bankrupt.

Benigno has had two houses foreclosed on. He spent three years working for a company with an open-ended contract when he decided to take out a loan to buy a bigger second home, offering the first as collateral.

“Everybody did it (bought property),” he told IPS. “But overnight I was fired. I’ve lost everything and I owe 102,000 euros (135,000 dollars), payable in 28 years.”

The Popular Legislative Initiative (ILP), promoted by the citizen movement Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) (Platform for those Affected by Mortgage), is backed by nearly a million-and-a-half signatures.

It calls for “payment in kind,” meaning that a person’s debts are written off once they have surrendered their home, and wants this to apply retroactively. It also wants a moratorium on evictions, and the creation of social housing with homes confiscated by banks.

“We are the European country with the most evictions, and at the same time the one with the largest millions of accumulated empty homes,” PAH spokesman, Ada Colau, said in a televised interview earlier this month.

Between 2007 and the third quarter of 2012, there were 400,000 foreclosures in Spain, according to data from the General Council of the Judiciary.

“I heard that there were empty houses and I came. I had no other choice. I could not pay rent,” said Antonio, a 22-year-old living with his wife Encarni, 19, and their two-year-old daughter. The little he earns as a street vendor, he spends on food.

“I have no electricity and water, but at least I don’t have my daughter on the street,” said Antonio, who is a neighbor of Benigno and 20 other families, who make up for the lack of electricity with candles and generators, and fill containers with drinking water from nearby pumps.

The debate over the ILP, which given the social pressure was accepted “in extremis” by the ruling right-wing Popular Party (PP) with a parliamentary majority, “is a first step”, said Antonio Alarcón, a core activist of the Malaga PAH, which in four years has stopped more than 500 evictions. It negotiates payments in kind and relocates families into affordable rental schemes.

It remains to be seen whether the measures proposed in the ILP will be incorporated unchanged into a bill on the same subject which is already passing through the parliament.

If by law the banks apply payment in kind retroactively, many people who have lost their homes would avoid facing lifelong debts. “They will save me from a 28-year trap,” said Benigno.

Some in economic circles oppose payment in kind, arguing it will make credit more expensive and hurt the financial system.

“But the fact is that today there is no credit for anyone and the financial system is already broken,” Sara Vásquez, an attorney for the PAH in Malaga, told IPS.

For Vásquez, the admission of the ILP project was the result of “arm-twisting ” and “marks a milestone in this country”. It shows that “the only way out is pressure” by of citizens, who increasingly feel less represented by institutions, and are outraged by the corruption charges shaking the PP and members of the royal family.

“They receive envelopes with money and we receive envelopes with bills,” said Azahara, another resident of the occupied building, referring to the alleged illegal payments to members of the PP, as reported by the national newspaper El País.

In the past four months there have been seven suicides of people who were to be evicted, including four in just the last seven days. On Feb. 13, the judicial commission that was to carry out the eviction of a man found him hanging at his home in the southeastern city of Alicante.

Unemployment is now affecting a whopping 26.2 percent of the workforce in Spain, even as there are drastic cuts in key areas such as health and education.

“(The government) is not rescuing people, but the banks,” said Alarcon, referring to public money allocated to clean up the financial institutions and the creation of a so-called “bad bank”, a manager of unpaid property loans or unsold homes that the banks took from bankrupt construction companies to whom they had lent money.

During the housing boom, “everything in this country was pushing you to buy a home instead of renting… and the banks themselves drafted the mortgage contracts,” Colau recalled in the interview.

The PAH has called for demonstrations this Saturday “for the right to housing and against financial genocide”.

The Court of Justice of the European Union declared last November that the Spanish foreclosure system is incompatible with the laws of the EU bloc.

In a preliminary ruling, which will serve as a basis for judgment, the court granted national judges the power to suspend evictions until the terms of credit have been reviewed to see whether or not they are abusive.

The debtors come to the PAH with “complete ignorance” about their situation: they don’t know how to negotiate with the bank or how their lawyer can help them, said Alarcon, who criticised the lack of training of lawyers in charge of defending the interests of those affected.

“None of us live here today because we want to,” said Benigno. With the help of the PAH, they want to negotiate with the owner and continue to stay in the building, in exchange for its maintenance, for which each of them provides 20 euros per month, according to a list attached to an elevator that never functioned.