Exercising violent extortion on a territory to force eviction and plant a new urban development is such a routine classic in brick-junkie Spain that it even has a pop icon that embodies it: Chanquete’s boat. That, so similar to what has happened in Palestine for decades, is what has been happening in Cañada Real since October 2020, when the electricity supply was interrupted.
La Cañada Real, a gigantic settlement that extends 14 kilometers southeast of Madrid, faces its fourth winter without electricity. La Cañada and its unregulated development over decades is not a strange urban growth and, in fact, the conversion of favelas and worker camps into neighborhoods was, during the 19th and 20th centuries, the most common way in which urban settlements appeared. suburban neighborhoods in large capitals.
For this reason, Cañada Real, except in very specific enclaves, is neither the drug trafficking hell that has been caricatured nor is it composed exclusively of precarious buildings. Substandard housing and shanties account for 20% of the settlement, although in some sectors they are more than 30%, and construction housing accounts for approximately 51%. The anomaly of Cañada Real is to have entered the 21st century in conditions of legality such as if it were still an ephemeral settlement of migrants, like the hills of shacks of Portuguese workers that extended outside the walls of Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. The anomalous thing is that Cañada Real was left out of the 1979 urban remodeling and regularization process to which settlements such as Villa de Vallecas or Hortaleza absorption areas were incorporated and since then the administration has not corrected this situation.
The electrical disconnection suffered by sectors 5 and 6, located at the southern end of the settlement – ??caused initially, according to the administrations, by the peaks in consumption caused by marijuana plantations hidden in industrial warehouses in a very vulnerable network –, It represents, despite being homes connected to the network but the vast majority without a contract or meter, a “flagrant violation of human rights” that has been denounced by the Ombudsman, the European Parliament and up to nine United Nations rapporteurs. . A report from the Department of Fundamental Rights of the Carlos III University concludes that “the situation in Cañada Real Galiana is not only a humanitarian emergency, but it is a true human rights crisis (…) due to a jurisdictional dispute between the different administrations.” The report also confirms the helplessness in which the Community of Madrid, responsible for its protection, maintains the children and adolescents who live there.
La Cañada has always been a controversial enclave due to its illegal situation, possible crime and poverty – which in sectors 5 and 6 affects 91% of homes – a bleeding wound on the right side of Greater Madrid, just a dozen kilometers from Puerta del Sol. But the situation had never reached the extremes of vulnerability and violation of human rights that it has reached in the last three years.
Last Thursday, another study was presented, interested by the Community of Madrid and also carried out by Carlos III, focused on supplies and energy poverty. The work of Jorge Martínez Crespo, Fernando Hernández Jiménez and Ulpiano Ruiz-Rivas Hernando has recorded temperatures inside homes in sector 6 of only 4º in winter and more than 40º in summer – pure weather. In his conclusions he points out that “if the problem of line overload is the reason for the disconnection (…) it does not seem justifiable that two and a half years after the abrupt cut of supply (…) no action has been implemented. structural measure that would have allowed the electricity supply to be restored.”
It is difficult to avoid the timeliness of this dramatic turn of events in La Cañada if one examines the outline of sectors 5 and 6, on the border of the municipalities of Madrid and Rivas: a giant that had remained dormant for almost twenty years, like a dragon Smaug beneath the gold of the Lonely Mountain stretches around him with a colossal movement of earth. They are the urban developments in the southeast of Madrid, a chain of operations that begin in the south, in Valdecarros, and continue towards the northeast: Los Berrocales, Los Ahijones, El Cañaveral and Los Cerros. The financial crisis of 2008 and the consequent collapse of the construction sector suspended these real estate plans, but as soon as the development sector has begun to recover, it has restarted them with unusual enthusiasm from the administrations.
Jorge Dioni López, author of The Discontent of the Cities, points out the trap of perpetual motion in which the large Spanish cities are trapped, converted into desolate theme parks of themselves in which the neighbors are a nuisance, busy in the construction of peri-urban settlements where they can house their own exile. How is it possible that we return to the same urban expansion policies that plunged us down the cliff of the biggest crisis in almost a century? In López’s devastating expression, because “a hangover does not work as a vaccine, it is only a parenthesis between two binges.”
