A dozen of those evicted from the L’Hospitalet warehouse have been sleeping in the open for a week

Each of them carries their own backpack with their story, all hard. Nobody dreams of living in an abandoned industrial warehouse and, even less, on the street, as they have been doing since last November 22, when they were evicted from the factory where they lived, some for years, on Avenida de Vilafranca de L’Hospitalet de Llobregat. Before the covid, Bilma, 39-year-old Bolivian, He worked taking care of an elderly man who died during the pandemic and was left without a job. “If I got into the ship it was out of necessity,” the woman explains. It was when he lost his last job and, unable to rent a room, “bought” a space in the warehouse that today, eight days after the evictionIt is now practically a lot after the incessant work of the machines to erase it from the map. The woman talks sitting in a camping chair under the balconies of the number 100 of the avenue of Catalonia, where 12 of the people evicted from the ship have been camped for a week, sheltering from the cold and rain of the last days.

“This time I have not gone to social services because they let me down. I went a long time ago, with another problem that I had with an apartment that they rented to me and they cheated on me because it turned out to be a floor occupation and they did not help me, “continues Bilma. He does speak very well of Caritas, who did help them to manage the papers, and from the many residents of L’Hospitalet who these days come to bring them hot food.

Lupe Roxana listens to her friend sitting on another chair in the same precarious camp, a few meters from the old ship, at the exact point where he was murdered in 1992 Pedro Alvarez, as you recall a plaque pasted on the wall and a bouquet of flowers tied to a lamppost. Lupe Roxana I had been living in six years the ship of Vilafranca. “I was the first to come in,” she remembers. A ship in which they had their lives made “with everything”. “We each had our kitchen, our bathroom, we had everything we would have in an apartment,” recalls the spokeswoman for the group, who are already called ‘the 12 of Vilafranca’.

“We are the 12 who had our own community there, we all helped each other and we want to continue together. That is why we ask the city council for a collective solution, not that they want to separate us,” continues the 51-year-old woman of Bolivian origin and a neighbor of L’Hospitalet for decades. The informal spokesperson for the group recalls that the problems in the now almost disappeared ship began when other groups got into it that had nothing to do with them and their (quiet) way of life. “Every time they came in, I called the police because they were breaking into our house, but they told me that as far as they knew, that ship belonged to nobody“, remember Lupe Roxana. The worst episode experienced in the ship, before its eviction with a large police deployment last week, was a spectacular fire just a month ago.

“Are a small neighborhood, that’s why we want to stay together“, reports Lupe Roxana, very grateful to the many neighbors who bring them food and show their support; “Quite the opposite of the treatment received by the city council,” she adds, between hurt and angry, stressing that the morning of the eviction a lot of police came to the ship, but no one from the council’s social services. “Worse than if we were criminals”, the Mint.

The councilor for social welfare of the L’Hospitalet City Council, Jesús Husillos Gutiérrez, insists that the eviction was determined by a judge “after various incidents and fires“.” During the last fire in October the social services appeared in the warehouse and only one person wanted to be linked to them, “defends the mayor, who admits that during the eviction there was no presence of the municipal social services, but that they came to the place in the afternoon, “and the judicial procession gave the evictees in writing the addresses to which to go.”

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“The social services We cannot offer a stable housing solution, but everyone has been offered a place in the residential center of limited stay Els Alps that they have not accepted, “concludes the political head of L’Hospitalet’s social services, who reiterates that they cannot offer a collective solution and that if these people do not go to social services for a case-by-case study,” they cannot do any”.