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.

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.

"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.