Spanish views from a small town

Contagion just keeps going up, especially among the young people. In less than a month, Spain has become one of the European countries with the most spread of Covid. Luckily, we are also vaccinating quickly, now, and there are fewer hospitalizations. Still, this means that we are not going to have a freer summer.  Thinking about some of the things I have written about, and that have caught my eye, I realize that my political views have always been left of center. Even when I was a child, I was obsessed with justice. "That's not fair!" was an exclamation that always made me mad. It wasn't fair that if one kid did something wrong, the whole class should be punished. It wasn't fair that a bully would take away a kid's cookies. It wasn't fair! As I grew, and watched the evening news with my parents, I became aware that the world wasn't fair, either. There were wars, people killed other people, people lived in poverty, people went hungry next to others sipp...

The virus doesn't care who you are or what you've done with your life. It attacks its victims at will, sometimes passing through without a second thought, sometimes killing its host. That is what makes it so unfair. Disease of any kind only takes into account our biological humanity, not our overall humanity. One of the deaths this week was Antonio González Pacheco. By that name, he is barely known in Spain and certainly not outside the country. But he is better known here by Billy el Niño (Billy the Kid). He got that knick because his face looked like a little boy's when he was younger. But he was more of a spawn of the Devil than an angel of a boy. He joined the police and was incorporated into the Brigada Político-Social , the feared department under Franco that investigated those that dissented. During his tenure, he used torture during interrogations, and was brought under suspicion by the untimely death of the student, Enrique Ruano, while in custody, in 1969. Af...

The Spanish judiciary is coming under fire from all sides lately. The truth is, judges are smacking of everything except impartiality. The latest ruling on a case in which they had to determine who pays the tax on a new mortgage, has shown that many judges prefer to maintain the status quo on the power of the banking industry. The case was originally decided that, because of a change of wording in tax law four years ago, the client was not supposed to pay the tax. The Supreme Court judges ruled last month that the banks should pay it. This tax, in Spain, is on 1.5% of the value of the mortgage taken out, and can reach a few thousand euros. In other countries, it's a much lower percentage. Up till now, the client has had to pay it. This ruling was supposed to change that. It also opened the door to retroactive refunding of the tax paid in the last four years. The bank would have to pay the clients the amount of tax they had paid when they signed the mortgage.  But the banks neve...

A verdict has been handed down in the case of the group of five men that gang raped an eighteen-year-old woman in the entrance of an apartment building two years ago during Pamplona's San Fermín festival. Each of the five of La Manada , as they called themselves, was sentenced to nine years imprisonment and compensate the victim with €10,000. The judge declared them guilty of sexual abuse, not sexual aggression, therefore they are not guilty of rape. The reason given is that there was no intimidation nor violence.  Outside the courthouse, howls went up upon hearing the sentence. The bare facts are these: a young girl who had drunk too much found herself with a group of five men who led her into the open entryway of an apartment building. There, they took her clothes off and proceded to rape her, vaginally, anally, and orally, while filming the ordeal with their phones. When they were done with her, they let her go. She was found later on a park bench by a couple, in a state of sh...

These past few years, there have been a number of investigations into illegal financing of the conservative Partido Popular (PP). Corruption has even reached into the royal house, with the sister and brother-in-law of the King charged with misappropriation of public funds. The Infanta was acquitted (of course) but her husband was found guilty. Neither of the two have faced a day of jail time, only fines.  A couple of weeks ago, during a trial regarding the illegal funding of the national PP, it was shown to be true that the party financed itself illegally, channeling funds through offshore accounts in Panama and traditional Switzerland. Even Mariano Rajoy, Prime Minister and Secretary General of the PP was called upon to testify. Of course, he didn't know anything, was not involved in the financial aspect at all, and was totally ignorant of what the treasurer, friend Luís Bárcenas, was up to. Those who will probably end up in prison will be the minions who actually moved the mon...

Yesterday afternoon a 63 year-old woman named Josefa had to leave the island of Fuerteventura in the Canaries to go to prison on the island of Lanzarote. She couldn't because, after three days of being on a hunger strike protesting her prison sentence, she fell down in a dead faint before being led onto the ferry and was sent to the hospital. So what? Well, she was being sent to prison for six months because she hadn't demolished the house where she and her two children and three grandchildren live.  Yes, only in Spain. Her story began almost twenty years ago when she found herself divorced with two children and nowhere to go. So she built a small shack on a piece of property she had inherited from her parents. Over time her daughter added three children to the family. They lived off sporadic jobs they could find, and at the moment the grandmother, Josefa, is receiving an unemployment check of 320 euros a month until September, and her daughter 400. Her son isn't receivin...

He who forgets history is condemned to repeat it. Then Spain is going to repeat a lot of stuff. Beginning with Franco. Yes, you would think that a dictator who died just forty years ago would be remembered along with his deeds, but not in this country. Older people will sometimes talk about him, usually with nostalgia. They'll say that under Franco the Guardia Civil would patrol all the villages on foot and if anything ever got stolen it would appear the next day, etc. Yes, the quasi-military police force would patrol on foot, but they wouldn't be looking only for thieves. They would be listening to people talking around them and if someone were acting suspiciously. They could bring someone in for questioning on a whim. That, the older people choose to forget. But younger people mostly don't know anything about Franco. Some don't even know he was Spanish. That can be because of two things. Parents our age and older, who have had it with grandparents who never stopped ...