Dead by greed
I had this title written for the article when I saw that the Irish actor Liam Cunningham had dedicated the same epitaph to Maricarmen Abascal in a tweet, only he was more specific: “murdered by greed”, he wrote, murdered by greed. Yes, “murdered” is more accurate. Maricarmen's case has gone around the world and the icon has become global, because the housing crisis is spreading throughout Europe, in the form of collapse and emergency. For this reason, and because reacting to infamy is a fortunately human behavior, except for those individuals who already live anesthetized by cynicism. Or by greed itself. Maricarmen could not withstand the ordeal of being evicted from her home by a squad of police officers who kicked down the door of her apartment, as if they were going to confront a dangerous criminal. Whoever does not understand that this woman died because of this, is not in a position to understand anything.
Before dying, however, and unlike so many other victims of speculation and an uncontrolled real estate market, Maricarmen had the opportunity to make her voice heard. It is interesting to revisit the videos with her statements because one can perceive that she was a person with no vocation as a martyr. She was indeed aware of suffering an abuse, and she was grateful for the support of those who came out to demonstrate against her eviction and encouraged them (she encouraged everyone) to “keep fighting.” She did not fit the archetype of a poor person, the blurred and stereotypical idea that most people have of a poor person. She had worked as a civil servant, had contributed for decades, and received a pension that could be considered “good,” within the meager benefits offered by the Spanish pension system. And yet, in the final days of her life, she had to suffer one of the worst outrages that any person can endure. Maricarmen's lesson is overwhelming in its obviousness: being left on the margins, sleeping out in the open, being a poor person, is a possibility to which the vast majority of the population is exposed. We are all exposed to it.
The fact that Maricarmen's case has caused a huge impact instead of going unnoticed, like all the other thousands of evictions that happen every year, is not a suspicious event but the activation of a social alarm that we should be grateful for. That political parties react to this alarm, and that they engage in electoralism and opportunism, is to be expected. What is interesting is not that, but what comes next: that some work to respond to it, protecting citizens' rights by law, while others dedicate themselves to defaming the victim. To defaming victims and promising the privatization of pensions and the persecution of sick leave. That there is a general strike to vindicate the thousands of people who die in poverty, or who commit suicide as Olga or Javier did, both from L'Hospitalet, because they are being thrown out of their homes, is not only not "inopportune" (as Sánchez Llibre has said, to whom a significant part of Junts' no to the housing decrees can be attributed) but is an act of social justice and human dignity.
