[Squat!net]

The Can Vies social centre in Barcelona made headlines around the world when its eviction led to five consecutive nights of rioting in late May 2014. But the social center has a longer history than this.

Can Vies, originally built in 1879 to stock construction materials for the city’s subway, became the headquarters of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT transport union during the 1930s Spanish Revolution. Following Franco’s victory in 1939, the building became the center for a fascist, hierarchal labor union.

In 1997, the building was abandoned by its owners, Barcelona’s transport authority (TMB), and was subsequently squatted by the neighborhood’s youth. Since then, the Centro Social Autogestionado Can Vies has become a well-used and well-loved community space providing a variety of services to the people of Sants, a neighborhood with a strong tradition of cooperatives. [Read More]

After a lengthy legal process against four ex-occupiers the vibrant, active, self-managed SPARK project among the orchards of Lleida is condemned to be evicted in the new year by capitalist speculation

original by Sergi Bertran and Sonia Perez at La Directa. … translated summary by The Free

….We are on the outskirts of Lleida city (in Lleida province). This area has undergone a major change in recent years… where there were small family orchards and country houses today they have built fast food chains, department stores, hotels and luxury villas. The companies and new owners of the land have been moving out the locals, buying up their land at high prices…
[Read More]

The ‘Expropriated Bank’, a self-managed occupied social center in the beautiful Gracia barrio of Barcelona, has finally fallen. Symbol of resistance to repression and austerity , colleagues called for the occupation of 1000 more banks.

Seeding Mutual Aid against Capitalism

The eviction was not an easy task, it took police more than eight hours, using metal cutters, etc., to extricate the last heroes. The police struggled all day to get them out of a barrel of cement, itself inside a safe, inside the basement with metal barricades.

Meanwhile, reinforcements gathered and marched from several pre-organized points in the city until by 9.00 pm at least 2000 filled the narrow streets, but the entire front of the Bank had been welded shut with iron plates.

An army of very aggressive riot police, masked and without ID plates and with a helicopter, moved into the crowds of young people. Only for good luck no one was killed. [Read More]

”City Refuge Mukhayyam..bullshit hypocrisy”

At the end of one of the anarchist Mayday Marches last Sunday an abandoned city-owned listed building was occupied to be converted into a self-run social center for refugees called  Mukhayyam.

Prospects looked good since the leftwing city council has banners reading ‘Welcome Refugees’ just round the corner.  However on the Tuesday morning 200 riot police evicted the building (see video below). The mayor Ada Colau claimed she knew nothing about it and that the Catalan Govt (also left wing) had ordered it ( they weren’t city police).

Dozens of activists had occupied after the ‘anarchist and feminist’ demonstration of Mayday to remake it as a welcoming space for refugees (Spain has promised to accept only around 16,000 but a mere 18 have been cleared so far).

At eight o’clock on Tuesday vans of the Mobile Brigade cut off all the streets near the building in the Gothic Quarter. A squad of agents charged the  front doors of the building and smashed in with a battering ram at 7.00 in the morning. It was a door with a high architectural value, included in the catalog of heritage of the City of Barcelona. [Read More]

Last Saturday a gigantic 10 screen cinema was occupied as an autonomous social center in Barcelona. The abandoned building is owned by the City Council who had failed to find a use for it. The action began as an advertised 4 day series of debates and workshops, meals etc… with a whole range of strikers, squatters, immigrants, feminist struggles etc.. taking part.. all to be held in a local square, and beginning with a street parade around historic struggle sites.,.

The parade ended with the Cinètika occupation

The liberated area, with thousands of square meters and ten cinemas will become, henceforth, an open space in the neighborhood. The promoters of the project want to build a squatting assembly, feminist and outside the institutions. No alcohol will be sold at the venue, as the group believes that “alcoholism and drugs are a problem in the workers neighborhoods.” [Read More]

Barcelona, March 2015

Today in Catalunya, social centers and hospitals are closing, universities deny access to students unable to pay and districts are bought and sold for tourism.
Today in Catalunya, this project has been brought to life as a clear rejection of these practices and as a place to discuss, learn, share and act against an unjust reality.
« In this context, we choose to continue digging as clandestine ants, working in community to set the path of civil disobedience. » – la clandestina squat
La Clandestina is an Okupa created in a building owned by the SAREB, a place that has been empty and unused for too long. In July 2014, a group of people decided to enter and start rehabilitating this place. Doing so, they stand up against speculation.
This 14th of March, La Clandestina celebrates six months of occupation. Concerts, workshops and vegan meal; a nice opportunity to start telling a bit of its history. [Read More]

Early afternoon on Wednesday 1st April, the judge of the Audiencia Nacional [National High Court] Eloy Velasco, remanded in prison 5 of the 15 individuals arrested on Monday 30th March during the police operation named Piñata. 24 others were arrested during the 17 raids, which took place in Madrid, Barcelona, Palencia and Granada, for “disobedience and resistance”, who were then subsequently released. [Read More]

Spanish firefighters are refusing orders to participate in evictions because their duty is to “serve the public ” and intervene in “emergencies” and not to be “puppets of the bank or its servants in the government”.

Firefighters in Galicia, Catalonia and the Madrid region have rejected any action that “contributes to inequalities and miseries suffered by the working class,” said the CCOO union.
[Read More]

[Other recent solidarity actions in Lisbon, Paris and San Francisco]

On Saturday, December 27th, 2014, at 5pm, demonstrators took to the streets in the city centre of Barcelona in solidarity with anarchists detained in the context of Operation Pandora at the request of Judge-executioner Javier Gómez Bermúdez.

Protesters started to march on broad streets, shouting slogans in solidarity with the detainees, and against the police, prisons and the State. The demonstration ended up in the Gracia area. Upon entering this neighbourhood, hooded comrades uninhibitedly attacked many bank branches, several multinational shops, as well as the 5-star Casa Fuster hotel (which was the Nazi Germany’s consulate in Barcelona in 1936, prior to being the headquarters of the revolution’s defense committee in the spring of 1937, until it was taken by the Falange in 1939, and became a luxury hotel during the Transition, after the associative neighbourhood movement attempted to turn it into social facilities). [Read More]

Text written a week ago about Pandora’s police operation in Spain against anarchists

The morning of Tuesday the 16th of December has surprised us with a wave of house raids and arrests. Surprised us? We are not going to lie. Let’s start again. The morning of the 16th of December has NOT surprised us. The autonomous Catalan police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, and the Guardia Civil and judiciary powers of the Audiencia Nacional stormed more than ten houses and a few anarchist spaces in Barcelona, Sabadell, Manresa and Madrid, with house raids, arrests, confiscation of propaganda material and information, to also use the occasion to enter and plunder, with the entire riot police team of the Mossos d’Esquadra, Kasa de la Muntanya, a squatted place that has existed for 25 years. [Read More]