“Venus is a lot of rage,” defines Paqui Jiménez, the restless neighbor of La Mina who has taken it upon herself to demand a remedy for the most damaged block in the area, stranded waiting for a demolition that has been entrenched for too long. Often alone or with no help other than a few allies, Paqui’s efforts have sustained the vindication for the dignity of the residents of the building on Venus Street, 21 years in search of a way out in a labyrinth of rot.
Helpless, the frustration It has taken its toll on the inhabitants and the stairs, still identifiable from the inside. However, a campaign viral to capture interest in the property in which the miseries entangled came to give breath to the neighborhood, illuminating it with the spotlight of attention which has tended to be elusive.
The SOS issued from the outskirts for 80 days just before the scare of the lockdown of 2020 is remembered in a recently published book. ‘Objectiu Venus’ (Pol.len edicions) brings together texts and Photographs of neighbors and workers of La Mina, journalists (three of them, by the way, write in EL PERIÓDICO), writers and activists. They account for the storiesthe reasons and the lives that crowd into the building that is eating away at the gates of Barcelona.
Although it may seem paradoxical when it comes to the absurdity of Venus, it is also the story of a success, that of collecting funds through the internet – a ‘crowdfunding’, as they are called – to finance the judicial battle that the neighbors are facing the administrations. Through small contributionsalmost 18,000 euros were raised, above the purposes and expectations: it felt like a victoryalways elusive on the outskirts, and it was quite a featalways routine to survive on the margins.
Victims of “inactivity”
The Venus plaintiffs managed to get the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia to disapprove of the “inactivity” of the administrations involved in the future of the neighborhood, from the Generalitat to the city councils of Barcelona and Sant Adrià de Besòs. Also a hundred of the 239 households inhabited in the property have appealed to request compensation for the material damage to the building and the harm to the neighborhood due to the delay in undertaking the expropriation plan. The claim amounts to a request of around 12.5 million euros.
All this is supported by the collection fruitful, which covers the legal costs of the block’s families, while they await the outcome of a mess that, despite the first evictions being foreseen, will still take at least five years to complete. “We thought that we were not going to get it and that when people saw that we were from La Mina they would not move forward. But they placed their trust in us and we got all the money,” Jiménez still celebrates.
In order not to give up the fight with the institutions, those affected by Venus went to the Social Education Platform of the Salesians, very involved in La Mina and author of a website that is a living memory of its streets. There the strategy to give hope to some discouraged neighbors and weave a network of accomplices who, inside and outside the neighborhood, spread what was being plotted.
Tenacity and agitation
Resentful of the stereotyped and stigmatizing image that has conditioned her for decades, part of La Mina distrusts those who come from outside with the intention of portraying her. But this was one of the few occasions in which she did demand that journalists and cameras come en masse to observe her. Taking example of the tenacity of Paqui, proposed to stir consciences in the offices, in the newsrooms and on the street in the face of a apathy flagrant, as Justice later ended up reproaching the public powers.
“We knew how to get into the resonance box that is the media“thinks David Picó, one of the creators of ‘Objetivo Venus’. A social educator for many years in La Mina, he describes the echo of the campaign as a shock: “It wasn’t over yet and we met with the Barcelona City Council, then the former councilor Chakir El Homrani spokesmen of the neighbors, the new road map was approved… The same could have happened, but we were there.” Picó catalogs Venus as “a symbol” of the failure of the regeneration promised more than two decades ago for that enclave on the outer edge of Barcelona. As he often says, there “nothing begins and nothing ends.”
Paqui has taken it upon himself to remind every leader he has come across, “from the highest to the lowest.” Carles Puigdemont, Quim Torra and a long list of councilors have come to talk with her at the bar where she serves behind the bar: for those occasions, she never fails to wear the same robe with which she sends off those who are struggling to make ends meet. She reminded them of the frequent power outages that condemned the cold and the confinement of neighbors for days during several consecutive winters, also the drug addict camps that, with cyclical regularity, are set up on the roof.
“I was content with them seeing the shame that we have in Barcelona, when they boast so much of capital,” Jiménez reproaches, always sharp: “You see that the administration is passive, that it did not care that we were imprisoned in the building, that no one cares about you and you get used to living it in the flesh… Of the rebellion What you feel is born to defend yourself like a lion. Or like a lioness. Because you have to defend what is yours.”
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The book is one of the rewards for the patrons who collaborated with the collection and puts the colophon to the campaign to support those affected, although it does not end here. In fact, part of what is obtained from now on with the sales of the edition will continue to nourish the piggy bank that finances the demands of the neighbors, retained in one of the setbacks of the metropolitan area in which the least income is declared.
‘Objectiu Venus’ has taken about four years to be in bookstores and online outlets. However, it has arrived before the relocation of the first residents is facilitated and the operation that must culminate with the demolition of the block begins. That the book has advanced to the solution clearly shows the desperate slowness in the long goodbye to a peripheral injustice.