Trapped on the European Fringe

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http://www.thenation.com/article/163218/trapped-european-fringe

Trapped in Euroland. That’s the title of the horror movie now reaching its climax in the eurozone periphery. From Greece to Portugal, Spain to Ireland, and now Italy, the countries of the European fringe are all locked into Depression-style economic orthodoxy with no clear escape routes in sight.

Nowhere is the debt trap more treacherous than in Valdemoro, a once-burgeoning dormitory town less than twenty miles south of Madrid, frontier of the suburban sprawl that stretches far across the parched Castilian plateau toward Toledo. Here, Rolando Jimenez, a 40-year-old Peruvian security guard, is attempting to enter the now foreclosed and auctioned apartment he bought in 2006 for 216,000 euros, courtesy of a 90 percent mortgage from Basque savings bank Kutxa. Jimenez and his Russian wife had dared hope that a protest held the previous day by a hundred or so young indignado activists, outside the bank’s head office in central Madrid, might ward off the bailiffs. But that was just the euphoria of the demo. “They’ve been and changed the lock,” he says, forcing the key to no avail.

During the frantic construction of the bubble years, this new suburban frontier of apartment blocks, chalets and malls turned Madrid into Europe’s third largest city—after London and Paris—as mass immigration pushed the population of the Spanish metropolis past 5 million. Now it is a semidesert of ghost housing estates. Five miles farther south, a burning wind blows like a hair dryer through the empty blocks of Residencias Francisco Hernandez in Nueva Seseña. The eponymous developer, known popularly as Paco El Pocero—the drains man—planned to build 13,500 apartments financed by a consortium of five banks, and openly encouraged buyers to flip their properties for a profit once the papers were signed. Now banners hang from half-finished blocks: “Pocero: you neither sell nor you pay.”

[Sarah Ibarruri]

1. Looks like banks and speculators spread the American cancer to Spain. nt