Barcelona: the police install a camera to spy on a squat in the district of Gràcia

A camera hidden in a dark box on the roof of a restaurant monitored the activity of a squat house in the Gràcia district of Barcelona, at least since December 22 when it was detected. As disseminated by the group Ègida -Defensa Collectiva Anarquista, the video surveillance team focused directly on the door of the squat, which is why they rule out that it is the restaurant’s security system.

Neighborhood witnesses have told La Directa that during the last weeks they had observed the presence of “strange” individuals and vehicles parked with people inside the house all day: “I saw them in front of the house, I am convinced that they were plainclothes policemen,” says a neighbor. One of the managers of the restaurant, where the state security forces had placed the camera, told this media outlet that they have “nothing to say”. [Read More]

Barcelona: El Kubo, La Ruina and Estudi 9 social centers defend themselves against three simultaneous evictions

The courts of Santa Coloma de Gramenet and Barcelona have aligned themselves with the Catalan police to proceed today, November 30, with the construction work of three buildings belonging to Sareb and an investment company based in Luxembourg.

In a joint statement issued by El Kubo y La Ruina from Barcelona’s Bonanova and by Estudi 9 from the old town of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, it is announced that this Thursday, November 30, “our houses are trenches”… They consider that the suspension of the previous eviction date of the Colomense building was an “attempt to divide our struggle”, but they advance that “it will be expensive for them, we know how to play our own strategies”. [Read More]

Barcelona: La Ruïna and el Kubo will not die

We will turn our house into a battlefield, el Kubo and the Ruïna will not fall. See you on November 30 at 5:30 a.m. in Uri Caballero square, Vallcarca metro station in Barcelona. If el Kubo and La Ruïna fall, the neighborhood will burn down. OKUPA Y RESISTE!

Statement made in February 2023, La Ruïna and el Kubo threatened with eviction:

Our squats are trenches.
Here we go, on March 23 they are going to try to evict us. In 2016, an office building was squatted for the first time in the Sant Gervasi neighbourhood and we called it El Kubo. The Kubo has been the home and place of passage of more than a hundred people in the more than 6 years that it has been in existence. This has been the home and trench of many people. It has been an oasis of resistance in the bourgeois quarter of Barcelona for many years and this has not been easy. “Squat and resist” defines the history of the Kubo very well. During all these years we have faced two evictions and the constant siege of extreme right-wing groups, capitalist press and political parties. And despite the hostilities we have reoccupied and resisted this house all this time. [Read More]

Barcelona: statement from La Ruïna & El Kubo, fascism is not discussed, it is destroyed

El Kubo and CSO La Ruïna are two liberated buildings in La Bonanova (an upper class  neighbourhood of Barcelona), which with much insistence and after two re-occupations have resisted for the last seven and four years respectively, being home to many people and hosting hundreds of activities.
After the last eviction date of El Kubo, dictated for March 25th, which we managed to suspend, and after a month of resistance where we received daily attacks, on Tuesday May 2nd we decided to make an antifascist call to defend both spaces from the harassment of political parties disguised as citizen’s response.
We understand that getting to the gates of La Ruïna in a militarized neighborhood has already been a triumph. First of all, we would like to thank all of you who came to support us. We still need your presence and that solidarity continues to spread. [Read More]

Seville: CSOA la Leona illegally evicted by force and without court order

After several months of collective work and some very intense weeks preparing the space, on Thursday May 19th it was finally time to make it public and open the space to anyone who wanted to get closer and get involved. Many people came to show their support and joy. There was finally a Self-Managed Squatted Social Center in Seville, after so many years.

We didn’t lose our cool when the police approached, as we were prepared to face the situation, with about a hundred people nearby, with the assembly well organised and united, including a mediator and a lawyer. We told the police that the building had been occupied by us for weeks, so they would need a court order to evict us, which they obviously didn’t have. [Read More]

Castilla-La Mancha: Fraguas Revive. The rural squat wins its first battle temporarily against the demolition of the village

Thanks to a document officially issued by the Criminal Court No. 1 of Guadalajara on April 29th, the Fraguas inhabitants learned that the demolition of the village is temporarily suspended. It is a change of judicial criteria that has been achieved by the struggle and the legal battle that its inhabitants have been defending for years and that temporarily stops the execution of the sentence of demolition of the village.

A project of eight years of life for the recovery of the rural space.

For those who do not know the trajectory of this community project of Fraguas, this rural squatting initiative was launched in 2013 in a small abandoned hamlet in the Sierra Norte of the province of Guadalajara. This village, which dates back to the 12th century, was evicted during the Franco dictatorship in 1968 for the monoculture of pine and its subsequent sale to the timber industry. A group of young people decided last decade to rebuild some houses that were left half standing, after the Spanish military used the area as a practice range for shooting and explosives in the 1990s. Their project is real and they have achieved their initial objectives, since they were able to rebuild several houses in the village, they have also experienced a great level of collective self-sufficiency in coexistence and self-management of natural resources. They have a vegetable garden and a greenhouse built with their own hands, a small open-air chicken coop, bees in a couple of dozen hives, and as energy self-sufficiency they have about thirty photovoltaic solar panels. [Read More]

Madrid: La Ingobernable opens a Social Rights Office in the center of the city

The collective that squatted the building at 39 Gobernador St. announced this morning that they have occupied a building at 5 Cruz St. to “resist in common and conquer new rights”.

With the slogan “Social rights to change everything”, the collective of La Ingobernable has started this new project that they have called Office of Social Rights (ODS, Oficina de Derechos Sociales). In a communiqué they explain that it will serve to “resist in common and conquer new rights” because they cannot “wait any longer” and point out that the current crisis of covid19 “hits us with other pandemics: hunger lines, distrust, fascism, precariousness, racism, speculation, loneliness, pessimism and fear,” they claim.

The ODS will have seven axes that respond to seven social urgencies: the right to housing, the right to food, the right to protest, labor precariousness, transfeminisms and dissidence, basic income and community health. It is this context of social emergency, which has prompted the collective to raise the slogan “Social rights to change everything”, with a commitment to “resist in common” and open this space where “develop, protect and fight for social rights”. [Read More]

Barcelona: rally in support of arrested comrades on 27 February

Tuesday 20 april 2021, 9:00
Meeting point: in front of the Audiencia Provincial, Passeig de Lluís Companys 14-16, Barcelona

For more than 50 days 7 of the 8 comrades arrested last February 27th in the center of Barcelona have been imprisoned. They were arrested during one of the last demonstrations that began in the name of freedom of expression and that continued for 15 days assuming more and more the voice of the general dissent towards the situation we are living. An suffocating reality characterized by an institutional violence that does not stop increasing every day, that leaves the majority of the population without a future and that absolves and defends those who are really responsible: police, institutions, politicians and the royal family. It is a disturbing authoritarian drift that is taking place today throughout the world and that is concealed under a strictly formal subsistence of the democratic institutional framework that serves as an alibi for a despotic government.

Following the arrests, violent police searches took place in 2 squatted houses in Maresme, with the intention of demonstrating an alleged non-existent criminal organization. [Read More]

Barcelona: Sara released with charges. Freedom for 27F prisoners. Enough of police set-ups

Yesterday, monday March 22, at the last minute, we received the news of the release (with charges) of Sara, one of the eight imprisoned for the demonstration on 27 February in Barcelona. The appeal lodged by the defence would prove, by means of expert evidence, that it could not have been her who sprayed flammable liquid, as the police statement claimed.

Once again, this story, with its categorical assertions, reproduced by so many media outlets, is beginning to fade. Sara was arrested, charged and imprisoned as the perpetrator of the van fire without the right to the presumption of innocence. Just like the rest of the people arrested and today imprisoned.

Sara’s photo, her name and details appeared in the media, first in La Vanguardia, echoed by the Italian press. A few days before she was due to serve a month in prison, she was released with charges after her lawyer and an expert witness for the defence proved that it was impossible that she was the person accused by the police, the public prosecutor and the court. [Read More]

Valencia: Case closed against the CSOA L’Horta after its attempted eviction by SAREB

The CSOA L’Horta communicates the “archiving and acquittal of the criminal case for usurpation urged by Sareb, S.A. and that motivated the attempt of illegal eviction” of the Valencian social center.

The popular response was forceful when, on 14 December, a large police force – 18 vans and several dozen officers – tried to evict the CSOA L’Horta in Benimaclet (Valencia): hundreds of people responded to the call of the social centre to defend the space built by the neighbourhood, managing to paralyse it and reoccupy it. Today, the collective has announced in a statement that the criminal case that led to the attempted eviction, the illegality of which the CSOA denounced from the beginning, has been closed and the case acquitted.

According to the centre, on 22 February last, the 13th Court of Instruction in Valencia decreed the provisional dismissal of the proceedings that led to the attempted eviction of the CSOA. A few weeks later, on 3 March, this dismissal became final as the plaintiff did not appeal against the dismissal of the case. [Read More]

Berlin: statement about the 8 arrested anarchists in Barcelona

On February 27th, 2021, 8 anarchist comrades* from Italy, France and Spain were arrested during the riots in Barcelona stemming from the protests that have been taking place since the arrest of Pablo Hasél on February 16th. All are currently in pre-trial detention without bail in Brians I prison (Catalonia). The serving judge of the 17th Court of Barcelona charged them with belonging to a criminal organization, attempted murder, participation in an illegal demonstration, resistance to state authority, damage to property and disturbance of public order.
All this happened as a result of a vehicle being set on fire which belonged to the riot police of the Guardia Urbana of Barcelona, a police force that has a long history of torture and indiscriminate violence against migrants and homeless people (1) and which the mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau (Barcelona en Comú) promised to disband during the 2015 municipal elections (2). However as we can see, they are still there.

All these accusations are accompanied by a propaganda apparatus provided by the media, which, as a tool of the state, justifies the repression against our comrades* and sparks a climate of fear in order to crush the protests. [Read More]

Barcelona: Solidarity with the detainees of the 27F demonstration

Communiqué: The press targets… About the 8 people accused of burning a police van.

On 27 February, 8 of our comrades were arrested in the centre of Barcelona during a demonstration. This event is part of a series of mass mobilisations called in the name of freedom of expression but which have ended up increasingly taking on the voice of general dissent against the historical period we are living through. A suffocating reality characterised by unprecedented institutional violence, which leaves the majority of the population without a future and which absolves and defends the usual criminals: the police, politicians and the royal family.

Following their arrests, police searches took place in 2 houses in Maresme, with the intention of linking our comrades with alleged non-existent criminal organisations and with disproportionate accusations based on derisory evidence. There is no presumption of innocence, the written statement of the Mossos has been reproduced in all the media, which repeat it and assume it as their own. In turn, the court does what was already written: very serious charges and pre-trial detention without bail. We see no other sense in all this than to put an end to the wave of protests that has been growing exponentially throughout Catalonia for weeks. [Read More]