Six weeks ago, La Voz de Lanzarote echoed a dramatic story: a man with a huge tumor on his neck was living in subhuman conditions in a garage in Valterra, without any institution having...
Six weeks ago, La Voz de Lanzarote echoed a dramatic story: a man with a huge tumor on his neck was living in subhuman conditions in a garage in Valterra, without any institution having cared about him. He only asked to be admitted to a hospital and to have his pain relieved. In the days following the publication of that news, he received visits from Social Services and also several promises, but none were fulfilled.
Carlos Zamora managed to enter a hospital, yes, but after a friend found him already dying, among "excrement and bugs". This neighbor does not want to take away an iota of heartbreak from this story. He wants to narrate it as it is, in all its rawness. And it is that only two people really know the ordeal that Carlos Zamora went through before dying. Two people who accompanied him to doctors, who brought him food, who knocked on the doors of Health and who, impotent, decided to resort to the media for help.
From there, visits, calls, justifications... The "I didn't know anything", "I just found out now", "I'm going to get on the subject...?" The Health Service could not cure him or relieve his pain. Social Services could not get him out of the misery in which he lived. And that's how they found him, dying and with a promise that was not fulfilled. It was not his priority or what he demanded but, at least, they had assured him that they were going to move him to an apartment that same week. He didn't get to see it. Like many of the great needs, the administration arrived too late.
Now, the two people who did care about him until the last moment, want people to know this story. To realize the apathy that institutions can show in the face of vital issues, but also the dramas that we can have on the other side of the door. Dramas that sometimes we don't even see, and that sometimes we prefer to ignore.
Therefore, the role that Arturo and Luis have played is even more meritorious. And it is that in a society less and less accustomed to altruistic gestures, the role of two men, one of them only 28 years old, who did not turn their backs on what was happening inside that garage, seems exemplary and even heroic. That they did not look the other way.
Unfortunately, this is not the usual. This is confirmed by each heartbreaking story that suddenly comes to light, showing us that sometimes we ignore even what is around the corner. A sad example was also known this week with the police operation that has ended up dismantling a network dedicated to the trafficking of Romanian women, who were sexually exploited in Lanzarote.
That is, young women who had been brought from their country, probably through deception, and who here were forced to prostitute themselves, using threats, coercion and even physical violence, according to the police. And all this, in the middle of Puerto del Carmen Avenue, in a place with its advertising signs, which was even advertised on the internet, without anyone imagining or being interested in the dramas that could be being lived there.
Not even, what is even worse, the clients who went there. The men willing to pay for sex, without worrying about whether the woman they were sleeping with was being forced to prostitute herself, abused or subjected to threats.
The debate on prostitution would be much more extensive, but in this issue we are not talking about that. We are talking about the abuse of people who are not free, and who were being held and exploited illegally, to satisfy people without any scruples, who ignored or preferred not to find out what was happening.
It is a recurring cliché to affirm that prostitution is the oldest profession in the world, and perhaps it is, but it cannot be lost sight of that in the origin of the world, we lived in caves. And in the 21st century, it hurts to see that the behavior of some humans has evolved so little, and also that some people, as happened to Carlos Zamora, are forced to live in places much worse than a cave.
