Ofelia Nieto 29: Capitalism as permanent expropriation

In August of 2013, we reported on the resistance of the Gracia González family and hundreds of activists against the eviction and destruction of their home, 29 Ofelia Nieto Street, in the neighbourhood of Tetuán, in Madrid.

We wrote then: The family had lived in the house for three generations, since 1957.  It was today made up three families, or ten persons.  Their eviction order was the consequence of a 2004 city urban plan that called for the expansion of the adjacent walkway by 5,98 m².  The family’s house was simply in the way.  Behind supposed concerns with urban mobility lay the more obvious reason: real-estate development and speculation that has transformed a formerly working class neighbourhood into a landscape of towers.  In 2010, the city claimed the land upon which the house sits as its own.  A first effort at eviction occurred in September 2012, with the family resisting.  Fearing a repetition, the family turned to the “housing group” of the Popular Assembly of Tetúan, a child of spain’s 15M and other social movements.  A line would be drawn around the González’s home, as so many others have been drawn by the PAH and 15M’s city assemblies in their struggle against the savagery of hundreds of daily evictions.  As the eviction approached, the house’s inhabitants would be joined by as many as could resist from within, for days.  Camping on the terrace, barricaded from within, and with many more outside, on the 14th of August, the occupiers held their own against the riot police.  But as the end of this month approaches, the legal calendar limit for the execution of the eviction order, the resistance will have to continue.

Last Friday, the 27th of February, the eviction finally came in the early hours of the morning, executed by dozens of heavily armed riot police.  Without a proper eviction order, those few resisting in the house were immediately arrested, along with photojournalist Jaime Alekos.  And to bring an end to any further resistance, the home was destroyed by mid-day. (Periodico Diagonal 27/02/2015)

The violence of the eviction by the police, the physical destruction of the building on orders of the municipal authorities, in sum, the effort to erase perceived non-economical ways of life, their memory, and the memory of their resistance, at however modest a scale, is the very essence of capitalism.  Thus in the memory of the resistance of the González family, and of so many others, we write these words today.

The following video was made by Jaime Alekos, until the moment of his arrest …

Ofelia Nieto 29 Resiste …

On Saturday, the 28th, over a hundred people returned to the site of the now destroyed home to symbolically re-build it …

This entry was posted in News blog and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.