At the end of August we received a nice notification from the court that on September 16th the police and the locksmith would come to the space to proceed with the eviction. Our space, the Ateneo Libertario de Vallekas, has been serving for two years as a place for activities, debates, assemblies, gymnasium and a meeting point for various libertarian initiatives.
Thus we find ourselves in Vallekas, a neighborhood in the city of Madrid, a breeding ground for capitalist speculation, led by successive city councils, regardless of their political persuasion; the neighborhood is a breeding ground for real estate companies, banks, vulture funds, big landowners, journalists and the occasional submissive citizen. Vallekas has been through these speculative processes like gentrification, which have already devastated the center of the city and reached the working class neighborhoods of the periphery years ago. The idea is simple: to turn the neighborhood into an immense commercial center where the only possible relationship is that which is structured around consumption, which expels and pursues poverty, criminalizing it in favor of a new profile of inhabitant with greater purchasing power. The rise in rents is only the tip of the iceberg. The city of the rich is built on the expulsion, the precarization of life and the impossibility of free use of the street and space by its inhabitants. [Read More]
