The saying “if living is a luxury, squatting is a right” doesn’t come from nowhere. In our city, for many years, the housing situation has been exclusively market-driven: Barcelona is being made into a city to be admired, to be inhabited only by hyper-qualified digital nomads and for tourists to be able to visit what increasingly resembles a theme park. In the meantime, there are evictions each day in every neighbourhood, often executed by massive police deployments.
They fear us more than we thought, they believe we are more capable than we do ourselves. Our ideas and practices threaten the foundations of exploitation and devastation, on which the oppression that we face every day is built. This is why they come after us.
Now this community is facing a dire situation, which has left us feeling attacked and vulnerable. However, we will not submit before this repressive onslaught and we will continue to confront institutional violence with the collective force that we have built.