On February 16th, the report presented by the General Directorate of the Madrid Police for the installation of video surveillance in several areas of Vallekas, specifically in the vicinity of Puente de Vallekas, was made public. As reported by El Salto Diario, the installation of these 25 cameras will convert Puente de Vallekas into a beautiful promenade where the State and its mercenaries will control what happens there 24 hours a day. This report was presented at the request of the District Board with Señor Paco Pérez at its head (a councillor of Ahora Madrid*, surprise?) and is the culmination of a media campaign that called for the increase of the police presence in the neighborhood with the old and repeated excuse of delinquency, this time placing the focus on the convenient ‘narco gangs’.
Journalists, politicians (of all kinds), real estate agencies and companies join forces to turn Vallekas into a zone controlled and militarized by police where the only prevailing logic is one based on consumption, where capitalist speculation drives the poor out of their homes. Squatting and all the practices that seek the subversion of the current relations of domination and threaten the democratic normality are put in check. This process, which some have labeled gentrification, although for others it is nothing but a new readjustment of the capitalist city and its neighbourhoods according to the interests of the State and Capitalism, is not unique or exclusive to Vallekas, it occurs in all neighborhoods but at different rhythms. The process of capitalist speculation experienced in Malasaña, Lavapiés, Tetuán, Carabanchel and Vallekas combine two important interests: the purely economic via real estate speculation, and social control via the reinforcement of the presence of the minions of the State and the use of technology to serve the interests of Power.
Another issue that should not go unnoticed is the focus on the narco gangs. First, it should be pointed out how drug trafficking is nothing but a pyramidal international framework that involves not only those faceless entrepreneurs labeled ‘narcos’, but also police departments, governments, politicians…Due to their illegal nature, drugs as merchandise move in an international market strongly penetrated by the most violent capitalist rhythms, which leaves behind innumerable processes and levels of exploitation in its production and distribution chain.
Nevertheless, this general context of the drug market has its own characteristics in Vallekas where it is used as a scapegoat by the media to justify repression and speculation. This process of legitimization of the repressive forces of the ever present State to which we are subjected, finds in a neighborhood like Vallekas a massive hook with the issue of drugs. In the collective memory of the neighborhood are the heroin years, the lost generation and the havoc it caused among the children of the working classes. This fact can never be separated from the context in which it took place: a Spanish State on the European train, in the years of the establishment of the new democratic regime, with a ferocious industrial conversion that led to the ruin and misery of millions of people. The drug played a key role as a tool of social control against a generation that was forced into misery. Therefore the implication of police and political leaders throughout the State in drug trafficking should not be surprising. Far from being an exception, it is a standardized practice, well established in the police forces around the world. The definitive dismantling of the labor movement, the role of syndicalism within the new conciliatory and democratic capitalism and the strengthening of the new
mechanisms of pacification and social integration did the rest.
The State knows how to touch the sensitive fibers, manage the fears and build a concept of security according to their interests of control and dominance. And if along the way, it is possible to take aim at squatting, a practice of direct action that puts in check one of the pillars of capitalism, private property, then it will go for it.
The idea is to put the focus anywhere other than the daily exploitation to which we are subjected. So that we don’t hate our boss who robs us of our lives in what they call work, so that we are subjected to wage slavery with the threat of unemployment and poverty as the only alternatives. So they can persecute other exploited people, like us, because of their migrant status, in the racist controls at the subway barriers, or so they die shot and drowned by rubber bullets in the strait. Their wars, their armies, their flags. So that our lives are dominated by obedience, by the delegation of professional politicians, by voting every now and then. So that prisons and police stations continue to steal lives because of the misery that the system generates. So that we become completely dispossessed of our capabilities and so that our already diminished autonomy is increasingly reduced. The destruction of territory and land. So that we forget everything and see our only problem as narco gangs and the solution…the solution that is given by the State and itsinstitutions, their representatives, their spokespersons and their lackeys.
Knowing all this we have very clear weapons that we can use. Direct action against their cameras and police. Direct action against their political representatives, that are called Partido Popular** or Ahora Madrid. The war against mafias that profit from death and a tool of control like drugs can never forget the war against the State, because they are two ways of doing the same thing: generating control and submission, their apparent confrontation is nothing but the State asserting its monopoly on violence. Create points of rupture, gaps and confrontations against the capitalist restructuring projects through the implementation of solidarity and mutual aid. Move to action in the here and now, without asking for anybody’s permission or wating for anybody.
War Against Social Control!
Long Live Anarchy!
Some Anarchists from Vallekas
(via Contra Madriz, translated by Insurrection News)
*A ‘left-wing’ populist political party
**A right-wing conservative political party
