Cartas a Sánchez de una víctima de inquiokupación: “Le digo que no me trate un poco como una idiota"

The tenants of Purificación, a retired teacher, owe her more than €10,000 and have been squatting in her home for four years. She has written to the Spanish Prime Minister's office (La Moncloa) requesting a solution. Purificación is a retired teacher who has been enduring a true ordeal for four years, since 2020. She is one of the approximately 83,000 people in Spain who are currently victims of squatting. Purificación's tenants have stopped paying several months' rent, and the debt now exceeds €10,000. "The apartment is rented, they stop paying after a few months, we file a complaint, we win the case, but the judge considers this family vulnerable because of a social services report," she explains, summarizing the situation that, like hers, thousands of families are experiencing. Purificación makes it clear that for her, "vulnerability is a very serious issue" and that anyone can face this reality at some point in their life. “But when this crisis, this situation of vulnerability, drags on for four, six, ten years, then it’s no longer a one-off situation. There’s a problem here, firstly, the institutions that aren’t doing what they should to help these people get out of that situation, and it becomes a way of life for them. They live in a house they don’t own, and the landlord pays for their utilities.” In this teacher’s case, the people occupying her home are a divorced woman, close to 50, and her two adult children, who are studying and not working. “The woman isn’t working either because she had a health problem at one point, which she has since overcome.” The social services reports state that she had applied for disability benefits due to her condition, “but they haven’t granted her full or partial disability benefits, or any kind of disability,” Purificación points out. Furthermore, they also justify the fact that their children are studying as a case of vulnerability: “I made this claim because I believe that children who live with their mother, receive child support from their father, and have close relatives in the town, cannot be considered vulnerable; they are very well protected socially. And even more so when compared to people under the guardianship of the Community of Madrid, who, for example, are removed from guardianship at 18, receive no support whatsoever, and have no family to help them.” In her desperation, this teacher decided to write to the Moncloa Palace on three separate occasions. These letters were answered in Pedro Sánchez's name, but they have not resulted in any concrete response; the government has simply sent her a message of encouragement. “He answered all three of my letters. In the first one, I explained everything in detail: when the trial was, my vulnerability, everything. His first reply sounded a bit like a joke, very pleasant. He said he was sorry, that he felt for the middle class and suffered a lot for us, but that what I had to do was go to court, that the judges would sort this out.” After describing the whole situation, and given Pedro Sánchez’s response, Purificación decided to write him a second letter: “I’m asking him, out of respect, not to treat me like an idiot, because I’ve already explained all this in the first letter, and I’m asking who I can contact.” In this case, Sánchez replied that “social services and the judge are the ones who determine vulnerability, and he can’t intervene in any case.” Now, in another letter, she proposes a solution: stop paying rent and utilities like water and gas. Thus, with irony, he publicly denounces the suffering he is experiencing and how unprotected all property owners are. “I intend to write a fourth letter to Sánchez, which I have already drafted, requesting that the State, not us, take care of the vulnerable. I pay my taxes so that the State, in these situations, intervenes to help these people if they truly need it, but not as just another taxpayer, as in my case, and there are many others in the same situation,” he concludes. Subscribe to our channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TRECE_es?sub... Watch TRECE live and find all its programs at https://www.trecetv.es Follow us on our social media: Twitter:   / trece_es   Facebook:   / trecetves   Instagram:   / trece_es