Spain: State-wide protests against evictions called for 16 February

In the UK we don’t expect radical campaigns to be led by mortgage-holders, but Spanish austerity measures are leading to homelessness on a huge scale – with 220,000 evictions and 420,000 foreclosures on mortgages in the past 6 years. Decent housing for all has become one of the main demands of the anti-austerity movement and PAH – Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Platform of those affected by mortgages) has become active in the broader struggle. On 16 February, demonstrations against evictions will take place in scores of Spanish towns and cities and in Mechelen (Belgium) and London. In mobilising for the demonstrations, PAH has issued the following manifesto.

For the right to housing. Against financial genocide.

We identify those responsible and demand retrospective payment in kind, social rents and an end to evictions!

Today we continue to march to defend and demand the right to housing, a right systematically violated in our country. Platforms Affected by Mortgage denounce the dramatic situation to which are condemned thousands of families that cannot pay their mortgage or rent, and who are evicted or threatened with eviction; victims of a mortgage swindle, in extreme vulnerability to losing their right to somewhere to live, due to the financial institutions supported by successive governments.  due made vulnerable fraud, breach of Extreme right to housing by financial institutions, supported by successive governments.

420,000 mortgage foreclosures in the e last six years and 220,000 evictions are simply intolerable.

Confronted by the abuses of the financial institutions – those responsible for the current crisis – and the complicity of the government which gives them cover through an unjust law which lays all the responsibility on the most vulnerable, while that same government spends billions of Euros in state aid to banks without getting anything in return, the PAHs and mobilized citizens have defended the right to housing, and have put on the table the solutions to end this swindle. Because it makes no sense for the banks to accumulate thousands of empty homes while thousands of families are left on the street.

With the Popular Legislative Initiative (Legislation to guarantee a minimum income) we have exhausted all the mechanisms offered by the system to change a law which is obviously unfair. We have talked to local councils, social services, political parties …. We have mobilized. We have stopped evictions and done everything in our power to transform a situation of manifest injustice. The demands of the ILP are minimum demands: retrospective payment in kind, social rents for the vacant homes accumulated by banks that have enriched themselves from the crisis, and a moratorium on evictions. The ILP has collected over a million signatures, which have added to the popular outcry demanding a just and urgent solution to this problem. We do not want handouts. We will not accept reduced payments. We want laws that guarantee rights, equality and dignity. But the ILP is also a way to demand democracy, a democracy that has to be in the hands of the people and not the financial power. Fed up with mediocrity, corruption and greed, of empty answers and demagoguery, we demand to be heard and participate in real democracy.

The situation is serious and urgent. We have reached a limit where there are people who have taken their lives, a situation that is creating daily suffering to thousands of those affected. We can not wait months for approval to the ILP, neither can we allow for it not to be approved. The PAHs will not stand with arms crossed waiting for the ILP to reach Congress. We can not do that. with urgency

From here we call on all political parties to vote in favour of the ILP and to move it forward with urgency. If they don’t, they will identify themselves as responsible for the financial genocide that we are suffering  and they will have to face the consequences. The PAH will escalate our actions of denunciation and civil disobedience against those who refuse to approve the ILP, and invite all citizens to join us.

But we will not stop here, our struggle is a struggle for the right to housing. “People without houses, and houses without people, we don’t understand it”. Banks that accumulate thousands of empty houses while families and people are pushed into the street. Faced with this nonsense, along with the publicity campaign, we announce that we will step up the campaigns to recover empty properties in the hands of financial institutions.

We demand retroactive payment in kind, social rent and a stop to evictions!