"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.

Eid Hamis Jahalin from Khan Al-Ahmar village warns of the dangers from the eviction of Bedouin people. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D’Amours/IPS.

By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
KHAN AL-AHMAR, Occupied West Bank, Apr 29 2013 (IPS)

Dozens of metal and wooden tents cling to the rocky hillside, just outside of Jerusalem along the road leading to the Dead Sea, while the unmistakable red roofs of Israeli settlements peak out from behind opposite hilltops.

For 49-year-old Eid Hamis Jahalin, this quiet spot symbolises the potential centre of peace in the region, and one thing is clear: his family must be allowed to stay in its community.

“The Bedouin are fighting to exist (here) since 1967. Israel has been trying to displace us since then,” Jahalin said, sipping tea in the shade of his family’s tent in the village of Khan Al-Ahmar. The Bedouin are an indigenous people

“The whole world is talking about two states and two governments. If they get the Jahalin out of here, the border of Jerusalem will be the Dead Sea and the Jordan Valley. After that, where can you have two states?” Jahalin told IPS.

Last week, local human rights groups announced that the Israeli Ministry of Defence is soon expected to unveil a new relocation plan for almost two dozen Bedouin communities living in the Jerusalem periphery, including Khan Al-Ahmar.

This proposal involves forcibly displacing some 3,000 Jahalin Bedouin to an area in Nwei’mah near the city Jericho in the Jordan Valley, which would be under Palestinian Authority control.

“It would put them all together in blocks of 800 units, which of course were not created according to the needs of these communities. They are very small plots. The density is too high. There will be no area for grazing, and this area is already used by other Bedouin communities,” said Alon Cohen-Lifshitz, an architect with Israeli planning rights group Bimkom.

The new plan would also place the Jahalin community between numerous restricted areas, including an Israeli closed military zone, checkpoint and settlements, and a Palestinian Authority security forces training area.

The Israeli government, however, says moving the Bedouin from their current location will greatly improve the quality and level of services they receive.

“They are living there illegally and we are looking at a series of options,” Guy Inbar, spokesperson for the Israeli Civil Administration, told The Media Line, adding that no plan has been finalised yet.

“We want the Bedouin to live in an area where they get all the infrastructure they need, like water and electricity, instead of living in tents that could be demolished.”

“It’s like being a sardine in a tin, one next to another."
The Israeli Civil Administration is an Israeli military body that governs Area C of the occupied West Bank, which accounts for 60 percent of all the West Bank. Area C is under full Israeli control, and the Civil Administration regulates all Palestinian building and planning therein.

According to Cohen-Lifshitz, numerous Israeli restrictions have made it so that Palestinian construction in Area C is only allowed on one percent of the land.

“They are trying to create a huge pressure with the demolition orders, with other restrictions, and creating what’s called the silent transfer. If (Palestinians) understand that they cannot live freely in Area C, then people will move to Area A and B, where they can build and live without restrictions,” he told IPS.

The Jahalin Bedouin tribe was evicted from its land near Tel Arad, in Israel’s southern Negev desert region, in the early 1950s. Since then, the community has lived on the outskirts of Jerusalem. It is now surrounded by a handful of Israeli settlements, including the mega-settlement Ma’ale Adumim, which has a population of 40,000.

Residents of Khan Al-Ahmar don’t have access to running water or electricity, and each structure in the village, including the local school, is subject to an Israeli demolition order. Israeli settlement expansion – including construction in the E-1 corridor located near Khan Al-Ahmar – also continues to threaten the village. The expansion would sever East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank.

In the late 1990s, in an earlier effort to expand Ma’ale Adumim, Israel displaced 200 Bedouin families living near Jerusalem to a new location near the municipal dumping grounds in Abu Dis, posing a serious health hazard for residents.

“Previously relocated families report negative consequences, including health concerns, loss of livelihood, deteriorated living conditions, loss of tribal cohesion and erosion of traditional lifestyles,” the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) found.

The latest round of expulsions was quietly unveiled in October 2011, with the Israeli Civil Administration hinting that approximately 27,000 Bedouins would be evicted from their homes in the Jordan Valley area within three to six years.

The first phase of this plan – which was met with staunch local and international condemnation – involved expelling the Jahalin near Ma’ale Adumim.

At the time, the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which supports Palestinian refugees, stated that efforts to move the Jahalin, “may amount to individual and mass forcible transfers and forced evictions contrary to international humanitarian and international human rights law”.

According to Eid Jahalin in Khan Al-Ahmar, the Israeli government must abandon its new plan to relocate the community. The state has only two options, he said: allow the Jahalin to live peacefully in their current location, or let them go back to their original lands in the Negev.

“I want to live in a Bedouin village,” Jahalin said. “It’s like being a sardine in a tin, one next to another. Take that (relocation) plan and show it to Israelis and see if they would want to live there. Nobody would live there.” (END)

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.