MADRID, Spain – The Sol housing encampment is about to surpass the number of nights, 28, that its 15-M Movement predecessors spent there in 2011, one of its goals, which it will achieve this Saturday at a moment when the camp has become more hermetic, with tarpaulins completely hiding the tents, said to isolate them from the cold and rain and guarantee security, amid an implosion of new occupants, homeless people and undocumented migrants increasingly filling the camp, and with a heated debate over how long it makes political sense to maintain the encampment, whether to take the tents down now, continue until the 11 November general strike, until the 29 November elections or, as some argue, until New Year’s Eve.
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The first tents of the housing protest were set up in Puerta del Sol on the night of 26 September, after the demonstration called by the Madrid Tenants’ Union over the violent eviction of Maricarmen. Driven by this union, which demands regulation of the rental market, in the first week they reached a thousand tents in which up to 4,000 people slept, the way a generation of young people found to denounce their difficulties in becoming independent and making ends meet, with students and workers supported by activists from forty social collectives. The mobilisation around this settlement, which the City Council and the Community of Madrid branded illegal from day one but whose eviction the Government Delegation ruled out, quickly shook the national political board, first introducing the Maricarmen decree in the Cabinet that later fell in Congress, then calling a general strike over housing, wages and the cost of living, and after a weekend of massive demonstrations across Spain, bringing the snap election.
On the same day the decrees fell in Congress, Friday 2 October, after a week of encampment, the Tenants’ Union announced it was leaving Sol to return to the neighbourhoods and coordinate the 11 November general strike, with several organisations, including the student union and CJS, trying to take over. In the end, however, a civic organisation with no visible initials established itself there, operating through commissions, neighbourhoods into which they subdivided the camp, and the so-called nodes, groups of neighbours organising the 11 November strike across Madrid, with decisions taken in a general assembly gathering hundreds of people every Thursday. Over the weeks, now in their fourth, this mini-city under the tarpaulins has consolidated a structure and a horizontal internal organisation that the campers say has become a beacon for social movements in Spain, with replicas of encampments in Valencia, Seville and Barcelona and abroad, and besides the fact that the housing demand is real, Jorge Resina, a sociology professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, attributes the camp’s success among Generation Z to the fact that they feel they are not taken into account, saying it is no longer that the social contract is not fulfilled according to the expectations created, as happened with 15-M, but that the contract does not even exist, with no access to housing but also no access to quality public education or healthcare.
Inside the square, besides dozens of tents, they have set up corridors to move between neighbourhoods and passages to allow passers-by to cross the plaza, with tents housing a social kitchen, first aid and various commissions such as maintenance or communication. In the centre of the camp, however, it is clear that after 12 October many tents have been abandoned by young people and are filling with homeless people living on the street and groups of undocumented migrants. At night each neighbourhood deploys tarpaulins for shelter and by day they open only an increasingly smaller door, and crossing the one giving access to La manzana okupada, one of the camp’s neighbourhoods named for its proximity to a well-known computer shop, means finding Gabriel, 47, and Ana, 35, chatting while sitting at a table surrounded by a dozen tents, neither of whom sleeps in the camp any more but who come whenever they have time to support a mobilisation they consider necessary to keep pressuring the government against inequalities, while someone nearby tries to sleep on a hammock, with Gabriel, who also took part in 15-M, which he remembers as more open but more chaotic, explaining that the assembly has decided to close the camp to improve internal organisation and increase security.
The camp organisers, regarding this hermeticism, tell 20minutos that after a moment of maximum exposure and visibility they felt the need to recognise themselves and talk to elaborate a unified discourse and be able to face episodes of conflict, conflicts arising from the arrival of people with homelessness and addiction problems, which is why the tarpaulins now completely cover them and there are practically no longer information tables about the housing protest around the perimeter of Puerta del Sol. Regarding the evident change in profile of the campers at the epicentre of Sol, from young people worried about not being able to access housing to people living on the street, the organisation acknowledges that a few days ago the situation seemed to be getting out of hand and even raised the need to speed up the dismantling, but with the help of a team of psychologists and qualified professionals and by giving these new occupants responsibilities within the camp, with homeless people helping with cleaning, security and maintenance, coexistence has improved, saying they were people completely isolated from the community who have gradually entered that dynamic.
In another area of the camp, Jesús, 27, works on a laptop on his knees and considers that after the chaos of a week ago the situation is now more peaceful, acknowledging that the cold, wet nights and the volume they say has been turned up on the Puerta del Sol clock bells have decimated the camp, with his neighbourhood, named Palos en la Frontera, sleeping up to 150 people in the first nights, almost all young people aged 18 or 19, while this week they do not exceed thirty, saying most are under the weather after last week’s rain and strong wind and so now go home from time to time so as not to lose strength.
Madrid mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida denounced this week that there are more empty tents than people in Sol and has demanded a census, with camper Gabriel suggesting the mayor propose it to the assembly while the communication commission insists that a census like the one the councillor demands is illegal. The police union Jupol, highly critical of the Government Delegation’s management, says that nothing remains of how the encampment began, neither in essence nor in the people occupying the square, according to its spokesman Laura García, describing the camp as a prop because most go home to sleep and only around 30 per cent remain, also confirming that there are homeless people occupying the tents and saying that a series of violent groups, of abertzale splinter, pro-Hamas, pro-squatting, who have not hesitated to attack journalists and police, have taken over the organisation, also denouncing that officers have orders not to step inside the camp nor identify or search any of the people inside, even knowing there are knives or drugs being consumed. Sources from the camp organisation deny there are terrorists or violent people among its occupants, asking what sense it would make to shelter terrorists if they are advocating for the right to a dignified life.
Walking through the camp on any afternoon shows that indeed more and more homeless people and migrants are eating, resting, talking, living and sleeping in the central core of the camp, with Gabriel saying the group he belongs to tries to integrate them into the team and considers that the camp is carrying on its shoulders the social work the Madrid City Council does not manage, while the organisation insists that the homeless, alcoholics and people with addiction problems sleeping on the street were already in the centre of Madrid before the camp, saying they have planted themselves where they lived but that at least since they have been there many have three meals a day.
With the tents about to mark a month at Kilometre Zero, and their occupants having lived through numerous attacks and aggressions, from neo-Nazi gatherings to angry neighbours who have even tried to burn their tarpaulins, the criticism that hurts most is that politicians call them lazy and dropouts, because they defend that they work in an organised and peaceful way to avoid behaviours that could take a negative toll on their demands. The campers do acknowledge a real tiredness from the accumulation of responsibilities in the protest and admit they suffered conflict with the new occupants, the people from the street, with some thinking the level of violence around the camp was getting out of hand, though this Thursday they defended in conversation with this newspaper that there is still muscle to continue in Sol, without defining whether until the strike, the elections or beyond, saying they are now seeing a certain tranquillity again and are thinking about defining new mass actions. On when the dismantling will be, they admit the debate is open and that it is being prepared to happen in an orderly way, saying they want to close it with a public social act that is very symbolic, saying we have come this far, we have shown you the problems that exist and now it is up to you to find the solutions.
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Sociologist Jorge García explains that when such a disruptive action as an encampment is carried out, with the personal cost for those taking part, it is very difficult to maintain over time and the protest cycle a priori comprises a clear temporality, though given its assembly-based functioning he finds it difficult to foresee when they will take it down. The organisation does not rule out leaving the camp to the homeless, which is precisely what happened with 15-M, when the social movements left voluntarily after 28 nights camped, but the homeless people remained there, being evicted by police after spending 79 nights sheltering in Sol.
