Page 24 Irish Daily Mail, Monday, July 9, 2012 by Brian Carroll In Madrid Azucena is a married mother of three forced to live in a squat after being evicted from the family home. She fears losing her children. It’s a harrowing parable of the financial crisis in Spain – a country where banks are stuffed with cronies and corruption is endemic I T’S approaching midnight on Friday in Plaza Mayor, a 400- year-old cobblestoned square in central Madrid. The Madrid Orchestra is playing for free on the site where they used to burn heretics at the height of the Spanish Inquisition. Tourists and Spaniards — distinguishable by the presence of grandparents and toddlers at their tables — sit outside the restaurants that line the square, beneath elegant apart- ments painted clay-red, and framed by wrought-iron balconies. As Beethoven’s 7th Symphony lingers on the balmy air, they drink wine and pick from plates of suckling pig, octopus and the Galician green pepper dish of Pimientos de Padrón. Even here, surrounded by such history, a three-course meal and wine costs less than 25. My Spanish waiter, who speaks English, Dutch, German, and Italian fluently, having worked across Europe in a 40-year career, shrugs when I point to the orchestra and ask him what the special occasion is. ‘This is Madrid,’ he says simply. Spain, with its sun-soaked cultural cocktail of cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Seville, and its coastal resorts from the Costa Bravo to the Costa del Sol, will always attract tourists — they spent almost 50billion here last year. But, like a bon viveur whose good days have eventually caught up with her, beneath the surface, Spain is riddled with the economic contagion spread- ing across the eurozone and the world. Earlier on Friday, I’d travelled to northern Madrid to meet Azucena Paredes Villar, a blonde 30-year-old Spanish mother of three. She buzzed me through the electronic gates Like half of those under 25 in Spain, she is unemployed of her apartment building — a nondescript red-brick high-rise over- looking dry wasteland in Roquetas de Mar, a working class suburb at the Pinar De Chamartin end of the blue Metro line. I could hear her two-year-old son crying as I walked up the cracked marble steps to her second floor squat. Beyond the damaged front door, inside the cramped two-bed apartment, I meet her sick son, and his two older sisters, aged three and five. There is a large hole in the living room door and a sense of desperation everywhere. Azucena’s 88-year-old grandmother, Tomasa Morcillo, is asleep in another room. Azucena, her children, and her grandmother are all squatters here in this bank-repossessed apartment. They were evicted from the family home — an apartment in a nearby building — on November 18 last year, after they fell behind on the 800 monthly payments. Azucena now sleeps with her three children in one room, with her grandmother in the other. Her partner has since moved back in with his parents, like 50 per cent of Spanish 30-year-olds. Azucena is unemployed, like one in two people aged under 25 in Spain. She used to survive on 390 a month from welfare, but in Spain the dole is cut off after two years. She now gets by on emergency funding from charities, her grand- promised 100billion in bailout funds from the European Stability Mechanism — have shown no mercy. There are evictions scheduled in barrios across Madrid today and throughout the week. On average, across Spain, there are 159 evictions every day, and four out of every five involve families with children. Suicides have increased by 20 per cent since 2008, and prescriptions for medication to treat depression have increased by 35 per cent. A resident of Hospitalet de Llobregat, in Madrid, hung himself in a park near his home, after his two years on the dole ran out and he received an eviction notice. Identified only as MP, he was a 45-year-old electrician, married with one daughter, and, like 1.5million others in Spain, had lost his job due to the collapse of the construction industry. Juan Alvarez, the chairman mother’s 600 a month pension, and whatever help her mother, who lives on 500 a month, can give her. She doesn’t speak English and pleads through an interpreter for us not to photograph her children: ‘The chil- dren could end up in a foster home and my grandmother in a residence.’ When a squatter is evicted, and children are involved, the Directorate General Of Care For Children And Adolescents (DGAIA) will automati- cally convene a meeting with the par- ent or parents to discuss custody of the children, if those evicted have no suitable alternative accommodation. Azucena tried to shield her children from the eviction but her eldest daughter witnessed the reality of Spain’s economic collapse at first hand. ‘The eldest came home from school and found all her little things on the street and she got scared,’ Azucena said. ‘We told her the old house broke and that’s why we’re in the new one.’ There are 300,000 others in Madrid who are threatened with eviction after falling behind on mortgage payments or rents. When the police came to evict Azucena and her family, protesters fought with them on the street outside, and neighbours helped kick in the door of the nearby apart- ment she now illegally occupies. The Spanish banks — who have been of the neighbourhood association where MP lived, said he had sought shelter for his family from the local housing council, but had been turned down twice on the day he took his own life. Groups like the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) orchestrate campaigns against the banks, and try to physically stop evictions. However, the courts, imple- menting a range of public order laws introduced by the new government, are able to pass injunctions stopping PAH from interfering with evictions. As in Ireland, the people feel a huge sense of injustice, that the banks are being bailed out, while all the arms of the State — the government, the legislature, the judiciary, and the police — are used to throw people out of their homes. Olmo Gálvez, a 31-year-old IT entrepreneur who spent three years working in China before returning to Madrid in 2010, tells me: ‘The EU is giving money to the banks but the banks must pay interest to the ECB. ‘Someone has to pay for it, but many of the banks are broke. Spain will not carry the debt, so someone else will have to pay it. We are not going to repay a debt that has been artificially created by bankers, politi- cians and investors. In Ireland, Greece and Iceland it happened the same — bankers were giving credit to everyone without any controls. ‘They created a bubble and now everyone is suffering in Greece, in Ireland and here.’ And just like hundreds of thousands of Irish people, the Spanish were induced to buy their own homes, with 100 per cent mortgages. Banks often loaned up to ten times the applicant’s salary. Home owner- ship levels in Spain are among the highest in the EU. The giant mortgage lender Bankia, which is responsible for 80 per cent of the evictions in Madrid, has asked for 23.4billion in bailout funds — but it is believed to have losses of more than 100billion on its books. The Spanish equivalent of Anglo Irish Bank, Bankia’s story is a para- ble of the greed, political corruption and lack of regulation which has now forced Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Iceland, Cyprus and Spain to seek bailouts. Spain was promised 100bn for its banks on June 29, but already the markets have issued their judg- ment — the crucial ten-year bond yield in Spain, the amount the government in Madrid pays to bor- row, soared back above seven per cent on Friday. Spain’s conservative government — run by the Popular Party — has been telling its people that the State hasn’t been rescued, ‘My children could end up in a foster home’ FAMILIES raiding rubbish bins for food; an entire generation trapped by insurmountable debt; mass unemployment. In an illuminating dispatch on Saturday, Brian Carroll described the alarming challenges ordinary Spanish people face daily. Today, he reveals how families have been betrayed by irresponsi- ble bankers, persistent corruption and a government too long in denial... A FAMILY FORSAKEN