We have swallowed a social model that has failed, no matter how you look at it. But the political immobility in this regard means that the situation is constantly worsening.
In the Canary Islands, one cannot talk about the number of homeless people or people who are left out of the official statistics, because a common or majority municipal action leaves entire communities of neighbors out of the municipal registers; as is the case of the occupied buildings in Taco and the stubbornness of the La Laguna city council to deny them their right to register.
The truth is that official figures speak of one in five households at risk of poverty in Spain, and one in three households in the Canary Islands. It is said that the average income per family in 2008 was 23,080 euros per year; while in 2015 the average fell to 18,554 euros per year, despite the fact that the highest incomes have continued to rise. This means publicly exposing that the rich are getting richer and the rest are getting poorer; that the social gap is widening and Canarian society is moving away from concepts such as Social Equality or Wealth Distribution.
In conclusion, the failure of the social model imposed in the Archipelago is evident, as well as the suffering endured by the majority of the inhabitants of this land. The worst thing is that the official figures do not include a ghost population that local politics hides and ignores in its budget aid items. A sector of the population condemned to obscurity, condemned to the slow and silent death of those who live in a consumer society ignored by the institutions and the political parties that make them up. A population that we barely see, when the media partially echo the demands and accusations of entities such as the Platform for Dignity; almost always when the case has reached such extremes that what is necessary is for someone to take care of paying for a funeral.
The worst thing is the silence. A silence that makes many accomplices and others cowards. Cowards to the point of denying anyone who forces the system to receive the rights that are supposed to be; aware that this may end in the use of force and institutional violence to expel entire families from the shack where they live, from the occupied house where minors and the elderly live, from the very caves of ravines or from the very streets that are supposed to be public spaces. It is that the institutions have specialized in hiding poverty and the saddest face of our society: this social failure that those with rising incomes are determined to maintain at all costs.
I am concerned that in the face of so much institutional violence, the change, in the end, will be of the same caliber.
*Pedro m. González Cánovas, member of ANC.
