Five years ago the Youth Assembly and different neighbours from Gros decided to occupy an old cork-manufacturing factory. We did it in response to a great need we had in our neighborhood: a self-managed and diverse cultural facility. Five years later Kortxoenea Gaztetxea is a meeting point for different cultural and political groups, music bands and theatre companies.
We can see a clear clash between two ways of understanding culture. In less than 4 months San Sebastian will become the European Capital of Culture, and we think it is a seriours error from the City Council to demolish such a cultural space. We would like to denounce the speculative and elitist policy the City Council is implementig in cultural and social areas. They are conducting house evictions while more than 11.000 flats are still empty. The same week they are opening Tabakalera (a cultural facility costing +50M€), the same year they have brought back the bloody bull-fighting, they are trying to demolish our Gaztetxe to build luxury appartments without offering any solution for us. [Read More]
Donostia: Kortxoenea, Manifest self-management and resistance
53 on Trial in Spain for Occupying ”Utopia”
53 PEOPLE on trial for OCCUPATION
original en castellano abajo Sign the Petition HERE
On Friday September 4th the first two trials take place, the first of 53 of which are due against people who lived in Utopia occupied in Seville in May 2012 by families who were homeless or about to lose their homes.
Max and Jesus will go to the criminal courts in Seville accused of squatting (illegal in Spain under the term ‘usurpation’) in May 2012 a building of Ibercaja Bank that had remained empty for two years. More than 30 families, many of them homeless or about to lose by failing to pay the mortgage, were rehoused in the building, which they called Corrala Utopia, and many continued giving the place life until it was evicted in April 2014…
read on here + en castellano: http://wp.me/pIJl9-6O7
Barcelona: 3 CanVies Defenders declared Innocent of Attack on Police
VICTORY. The sentence condemning three young defenders of Can Vies to 3.5 years in prison has been revoked #EfecteCanVies (en español abajo)
Now the Provincial Court of Barcelona has had to revoke the sentence and absolve them of all charges.
The police wanted revenge after losing the amazing 4 day resistance and street battles against the eviction and wanted to lock up 84 arrested. These three were accused by police witnesses of throwing bottles from a rooftop , later the alternative paper ‘Directa’ proved the identification was absurd as there was no vision from where the police were. [Read More]
397,954 Evictions: Anti Eviction Movement Demands Spanish Govt Quit
The PAH requires the government to resign en bloc
By Platform of those Affected by Mortgages PAH
Once again, data from the General Council of the Judiciary show the stark reality: that of the thousands of families subjected to the suffering of the implementation process and mortgage evictions and rent.
Data from the first quarter of 2015 confirm the trend of the last seven years, that do not stop evictions which increase quarter over quarter and confirms the trend that are now more evictions for rent than mortgage. In Spain, despite the opacity and the precariousness of the available data, there have been more than 397 954 evictions since the ”crisis” began in 2008. [Read More]
Spanish state: Three of five prisoners of Operación Piñata released
The Audiencia Nacional (spanish special court) has ordered the release without bail of three of the five people that were still in preventive prison, arrested under the Operación Piñata last 31th of March. According to what was declared to Diagonal newspaper by one of the lawyers who represents the defendants of Operación Piñata, Daniel Amelang, they are now waiting that the court decides about the freedom of the other two persons that are still in preventive prison.
[Read More]
Barcelona: La Clandestina, six months of Okupation
Barcelona, March 2015
Today in Catalunya, social centers and hospitals are closing, universities deny access to students unable to pay and districts are bought and sold for tourism.
Today in Catalunya, this project has been brought to life as a clear rejection of these practices and as a place to discuss, learn, share and act against an unjust reality.
« In this context, we choose to continue digging as clandestine ants, working in community to set the path of civil disobedience. » – la clandestina squat
La Clandestina is an Okupa created in a building owned by the SAREB, a place that has been empty and unused for too long. In July 2014, a group of people decided to enter and start rehabilitating this place. Doing so, they stand up against speculation.
This 14th of March, La Clandestina celebrates six months of occupation. Concerts, workshops and vegan meal; a nice opportunity to start telling a bit of its history. [Read More]
Operation Piñata: Five comrades imprisoned, ten conditionally bailed, address for three of the prisoners
Early afternoon on Wednesday 1st April, the judge of the Audiencia Nacional [National High Court] Eloy Velasco, remanded in prison 5 of the 15 individuals arrested on Monday 30th March during the police operation named Piñata. 24 others were arrested during the 17 raids, which took place in Madrid, Barcelona, Palencia and Granada, for “disobedience and resistance”, who were then subsequently released. [Read More]
Spain: Firefighters refuse to be ‘puppets of the banks’
Spanish firefighters are refusing orders to participate in evictions because their duty is to “serve the public ” and intervene in “emergencies” and not to be “puppets of the bank or its servants in the government”.
Firefighters in Galicia, Catalonia and the Madrid region have rejected any action that “contributes to inequalities and miseries suffered by the working class,” said the CCOO union.
[Read More]
Spanish State: Security is not a crime, Riseup.net statement after Pandora operation
On Tuesday December 16th, a large police operation took place in the Spanish State. Fourteen houses and social centers were raided in Barcelona, Sabadell, Manresa, and Madrid. Books, leaflets, computers were seized and eleven people were arrested and sent to the Audiencia Nacional, a special court handling issues of “national interest”, in Madrid. They are accused of incorporation, promotion, management, and membership of a terrorist organisation. However, lawyers for the defence denounce a lack of transparency, saying that their clients have had to make statements without knowing what they are accused of. “[They] speak of terrorism without specifying concrete criminal acts, or concrete individualized facts attributed to each of them” 2. When challenged on this, Judge Bermúdez responded: “I am not investigating specific acts, I am investigating the organization, and the threat they might pose in the future” 1; making this yet another case of apparently preventative arrests.
Four of the detainees have been released, but seven have been jailed pending trial. The reasons given by the judge for their continued detention include the posession of certain books, “the production of publications and forms of communication”, and the fact that the defendants “used emails with extreme security measures, such as the RISE UP server” 2.
We reject this Kafka-esque criminalization of social movements, and the ludicrous and extremely alarming implication that protecting one’s internet privacy is tantamount to terrorism.
Riseup, like any other email provider, has an obligation to protect the privacy of its users. Many of the “extreme security measures” used by Riseup are common best practices for online security and are also used by providers such as hotmail, GMail or Facebook. However, unlike these providers, Riseup is not willing to allow illegal backdoors or sell our users’ data to third parties.
[Read More]
From Madrid to Istanbul: Occupying Public Space
Istanbul’s first squat is more than an experiment: it is a counter-hegemonic intervention that challenges the neoliberal dogma of growth at all costs.
In “Occupy the Squares, Squat the Buildings”, a paper written shortly after the eviction of Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, Miguel Martínez and Ángela García show how two movements — the mass popular occupation of Madrid’s central Puerta del Sol, and that of Madrid’s squatted and self-managed social centers — interacted to reinforce one another through shared resources, shared physical spaces, shared logistics and people, and of course shared (but by no means homogeneous) ideas and practices. Horizontality has been the organizational modus operandi of these movements, advancing a staunchly anti-neoliberal, if not outright anti-capitalist critique of Spain’s deteriorating economic and political status quo. This is a status quo primarily characterized by heinous and growing wealth inequality, desperate unemployment, savage austerity, opportunistic privatizations and deeply embedded political corruption.
The opening of Istanbul’s first squatted and self-managed social center, appropriately named Don Kişot (Quixote) shortly after the eviction of Gezi Park, has key parallels with the Spanish experience. The inquisitiveness of one of forty odd police officers during a first visit to Kadiköy’s first squatted and self-managed social center, is revealing: does this have something to do with Gezi Park? The answer, of course, is yes — it has a lot to do with the predominantly anti-authoritarian uprising against the AKP government. The critical yet pragmatic anti-neoliberal or anti-capitalist strand of protest that was so apparent during the Gezi Park occupation has resurfaced in this once empty building, which now houses autonomous community projects of all shapes and kinds. [Read More]
Barcelona: Can Piella will neither resign
Can Piella’s project is again threatened with prudential eviction from 15 February on. However, the collective of neighbours that gives life to it for three years and a half are more determined than ever to continue the social use of the house. The Cerdanyola Court has taken up the precautionary evacuation of Can Piella’s farm, which was paralyzed in October after social mobilization in defense of this place. This interim resumes after the Provincial Court rejected the appeal presented by the neighbors. Thus, February 15 has been set up as the date for “leaving voluntarily” the house, and otherwise the use of the force will be used to dislodge it.
The collective continues relying on dialogue as the only tool to resolve the conflict. And this is because it has been through dialogue that, throughout the 3 years and a half of the project, more and more neighbours of the nearby towns have been interested and engaged in it. A recent example of this success would be the ecological horticulture course that is conducted every Sunday for free, where more than 120 people joined. Even the mayors of the two closest towns have jointly requested the judge to suspend the eviction and to close the case. The only part which with the dialogue has been impossible has been the property, a real estate company of the conglomerate Grupo Alcaraz, which is based on a purely economist view of the estate, incompatible with the social project that the collective is developing . [Read More]
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