Fighting Spain's Soaring Eviction Rate with Sit-Ins
Friday, July 22, 2011 @ 3:47 PM
Members of Afectados X la Hipoteca (Mortgage Victims Platform) shout slogans during a protest to stop the eviction of an unemployed woman and her two children, one of whom is disabled, in Madrid July 6, 2011
In the end, Maria José del Coto's reprieve lasted just two weeks. On July 6, a few hundred protesters had formed a protective human barrier around her building, preventing a judicial team from evicting her from the home in which she has lived for the past 25 years. But on Wednesday, when the protesters tried the same tactic, they discovered that police had beaten them to the punch. Showing up earlier than the demonstrators for the 9:30am eviction, about 50 officers blocked access to del Coto's apartment to all but the court officials. By 10am, the 53-year-old and her two adult children, one of them disabled, were on the street. "It's just cruel," said one of the protesters, Javier Garcia, in disgust. "She loses her home, and she's still in debt. What's wrong with this country?"
Among the many symptoms of Spain's prolonged economic crisis is a startling rise in the number of foreclosures, most of them born of an unemployment rate — Europe's highest — that currently tops out at 21.3%. In the first trimester alone of this year, there have been 15,546 evictions, a 36.8% increase over the same period in 2010. So frequent have they become in Madrid that the number of courtrooms in the city dedicated to hearing foreclosure cases has more than doubled, from six to 13. But with the evictions has come a wave of popular efforts to halt them, some of which have proven successful — at least temporarily.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2084635,00.html#ixzz1SpjY0W9p