The residents of La Línea de
la Concepción are leaving, like rats deserting a sinking ship.
They've been crossing the
border by the thousands since early morning, first the cleaning women, nannies
and construction workers, and then the smugglers. They all want to get out of
Spain, if only for a few hours. There is work across the border, in the British
overseas territory of Gibraltar, and work spells hope for a better life.
By around 11 a.m. on what
promises to be a hot early summer's day, the traffic jam on the Spanish side
already stretches from the border, across the coastal road and back to the town
hall, where Mayor Gemma Araujo is holding down the fort in her office on the
second floor, which has a view of the caravan of commuters. Araujo is 33, a
Socialist and the first woman in her position. It's not exactly the most
rewarding job in Spain. A "crisis tsunami" has reached La Línea, says
Araujo, and the situation is more serious than ever before. "Our city
isn't bankrupt, but it's close."
The city hasn't been able to pay its employees eight of their last nine monthly salaries. On this morning, the mayor found a sign posted opposite her office door with an unmistakable demand: "Pay or resign." Her house was pelted with eggs and besieged by protesters, and the mob set fire to her secretary's car.
Lawless City
La Línea already made
headlines under Araujo's Socialist predecessors in the 1980s and 1990s, when it
was dubbed a "ciudad sin ley," or lawless city. At the time, drug
dealers, smugglers and other criminals made their living in the Andalusian
border town. Conservatives came into power in 1995, including members of the
populist Grupo Independiente Liberal (GIL), but mostly politicians with the
center-right People's Party. Calm returned to the city for a period of time.
But the unsettled accounts from those days, says Araujo, slowly became a problem. The number of people employed in the city administration had been doubled during conservative rule. Dozens of police officers, 24 attorneys and eight psychologists, as well as expensive consultants and loyal friends, were all given jobs. According to certain records, some city employees were making up to €90,000 ($112,000) a year in second jobs. Within 15 years, the city had increased its debt by more than a hundredfold.
A city was looted in broad
daylight, and now no one is willing to accept responsibility.
Shortly before she came into
office in the early summer of 2011, "truckloads of documents were
burned," says the mayor. "We photographed it." Araujo lists the
debts that were accumulated at the time, almost with relish, given that her
party was in the opposition at the time. There was "€120 million in debts
to private companies, €45 million in unpaid court fines and €39 million in
debts to the social security system for unpaid employee contributions."
The latter debt, says Araujo, is the reason why the national government is now
refusing to pay the city an annual €15 million tax refund and the city
administration in La Línea is no longer able to pay salaries. La Línea, a city
of 65,000 people, now has a per-capita debt of close to €3,000 – the highest in
Spain, after Madrid.
Unemployment in La Línea is
around 40 percent. By comparison, the official unemployment figure in Germany
is 6.7 percent, while the average rate for all of Europe, which includes
so-called problem children like Romania and Bulgaria, is currently 10.3
percent. Spain, however, is reporting 24.4 percent unemployment nationwide,
with the autonomous community of Andalusia leading the pack. The worst province
within Andalusia is Cadiz, which includes La Línea.
The Hangover
after the Party
Can the demise of a single
city serve as a example that reflects the crisis in the entire country,
isolated like a bacterium under the microscope? A crisis that is so severe that
it threatens the continued existence of the euro, if not the European Union as
a whole?
In Spain, unlike Greece or
Italy, the debt-to-GDP ratio is relatively low. Private debt, however, is
substantial, which explains the current troubles of Spanish banks. The
conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, in office since December, is now
being urgently advised to take advantage of a European bailout under preferred
conditions, so that he can spend more money on what is truly important:
fighting unemployment and getting the economy back on track.
But what if the true roots of
Spain's plight are not even on the global financial experts' radar? What if it
is not just the high borrowing costs in the capital markets that make a rapid
improvement difficult, but also structural and historical reasons? A walk
through La Línea reveals the faces of a country that still seems to be reeling
from a period of excessive intoxication.
The multimillionaire developer
from La Línea who hung himself, leaving behind half-built developments in top
locations, is emblematic of the Spanish crisis. The buildings are silent
reminders of a time when cheap credit fueled the illusion that everyone in
Spain could own property. "But it isn't just that we bought houses and
apartment on credit," says author Elisabeth Iborra, with a touch of bitter
derision. "People also had to have the right furniture."
The picture of the crisis also
includes the deep-seated rivalry between the "two Spains," the
political camps of the left and the right. Their largely irreconcilable
attitudes to each another makes it difficult to achieve the kinds of
compromises that are needed to combat a crisis. If the left is in power in the
city (La Línea) and the region (Andalusia), but not in the province (Cadiz) and
not in Madrid, politics comes to resemble a funnel that is clogged twice, with
nothing coming out of the bottom at all anymore.
Like the Wild
West without Gold
Finally, the picture of the
crisis includes the prosperity gap. In Spain, the north carries a cross for the
south. In the case of La Línea, the reasons for this include the following: 85
percent of unemployed young people either have no professional training or none
worth mentioning; more than one in three unemployed people has no high-school
diploma; and the largest employer, the city administration, isn't paying its
salaries. The fact that many people "prefer to make €200 a day smuggling
cigarettes than €400 a month as an unskilled worker in a supermarket," as
a Guardia Civil officer at the border puts it, doesn't make things easier.
But Mayor Araujo, sticking to
her party line, doesn't pin the blame on individuals. In March, during a
ceremony in the provincial capital C‡diz, she approached King Juan Carlos and
gave him a letter. In it, she wrote about the "social drama" in La
Línea and the "real tragedies" faced by the families of city
employees with no income, and appealed for help.
The monarch passed on the
letter to his underlings and went elephant hunting in Botswana, where he
famously fractured his hip. In La Línea, they haven't heard anything from him
since, and everything there has stayed the same.
Some parts of the city look
like a Wild West town after the gold prospectors left. When five police cars,
sirens screaming, show up in broad daylight for a raid in the La Atunara harbor
district, a favorite haunt of tobacco smugglers and drug dealers, locals line
the street and silently greet the police in a hostile phalanx. And when
paramedics at the courthouse pull a half-dead homeless woman from the
confiscated Audi she calls home, it isn't because passersby have alerted the
emergency services. It's because charity workers who were distributing roast
chickens to the needy in the deserted downtown area late at night managed to
call an ambulance in the nick of time.
'The Ass of
Europe'
La Línea is livelier in the
morning. Or at least it is in front of the bar where the matuterasare
preparing to cross the border. The matuteras are female smugglers who bring in
cheap cigarettes from the British overseas territory a few hundred meters away.
Overweight women are especially prevalent among the smugglers, because being
overweight makes it easier to hide a few more packs of cigarettes in various
parts of the body without being noticed.
The women set out across the
border. The more experienced ones wear their ID cards on a chain around their
necks, so that they don't have to search for it every time they cross the
border. One carton of cigarettes per person and crossing is allowed. Those who
do not get checked and registered put on different clothes on the Spanish side
and set out for Gibraltar again.
This helps to explain why
there is such a long line in front of the "Parody" kiosk, an
unassuming shack under a barbed-wire fence on the British side of the border. A
total of €25.90 is paid for a carton of Marlboros, and then the smugglers go
back across the border again, passing the Spanish customs agents, who are not
exactly highly motivated. The border crossers make a profit of €4 per carton.
The operators of the kiosks on the Spanish side, who will sell the cigarettes
later, collect another €6. The actual retail price is another €9 higher. But
the retail price is no longer important in La Línea, where five of the several
regular tobacco shops have gone out of business.
What else is there to do but smuggle?
La Línea has no factories, no sights for tourists and no luxury hotels on sandy
beaches. "We are the ass of Europe," says one local.
But the shadow economy is
still an attraction. Entire Andalusian extended families make weekend
excursions to La Línea, says a lieutenant with the Guardia Civil. "They
come from Seville or Jerez in the morning, fill up their tanks with cheap
gasoline in Gibraltar and eat their meals from Tupperware containers they've
brought along. Then they walk across the border in groups of five and bring
back cigarettes, until they've made €300 in profits. That's enough to live on
for another week at home."
'We Have Been on
the Wrong Track'
Local residents are familiar
with other sources of food. For example, they pay visits to the courtyard of
the San Pío X church as often as they can. There, Padre Rafael Pinto runs the
Caritas charity's food aid program for La Línea. On this morning, there is a
delivery van in the courtyard loaded with white beans and UHT milk. The program
also keeps fruit and rice, toys, shoes and clothing in a storage room.
Caritas already provides
regular assistance to 500 families in La Línea, and the numbers are still
growing. They also include city employees. In some cases, Caritas even pays for
rent and electricity bills. Generally speaking, every setback and every
challenge is also an opportunity, says Padre Rafael. "Perhaps this crisis
will help us realize that we have been on the wrong track in the last few
years, and that it's time to turn around. In Spain, it was all about having
things, and not about being. Christian values gave way to consumerism."
Affected citizens and
volunteers in La Línea say that things are going rapidly downhill. First people
lose their jobs, or they keep their jobs but lose their pay, as in the case of
the city employees. Then their cars are seized, their mobile phones
disconnected and their electricity shut off. For most people, mortgage payments
are their downfall. If families hadn't stepped in to help, more people would
have lost their homes long ago.
At the Hogar Betania hostel,
which is also run by Caritas, all 14 beds are constantly taken. People who are
down on their luck are taken in there, treated and fed. They're expected to be
back on their feet after one year. "The crisis has greatly accelerated
social decline," says Begoña Arana, the director of the facility. "In
2011, we already had 575 homeless men and 105 women in La Línea. Nevertheless,
we'll have to close this hostel at the end of June, unless there is a miracle.
The new Socialist government of Andalusia isn't sending us any money
anymore."
'They Don't Lift
a Finger after Two in the Afternoon'
Diagonally across the street,
at the local branch of the Spanish Labor Ministry, men and women are standing
in line to obtain documents certifying that they are destitute and therefore
entitled to receive aid. White-collar workers are also among those standing in
line. A clerk who came to La Línea from central Spain years ago can hardly
conceal her consternation over conditions in the south. "We are living in
a country in which civil servants can't be laid off, and yet they no longer
have to be paid, either."
This is true to a certain
extent. Most civil servants, or "funcionarios," are still employed,
but because their core working period is only a few hours a day, they are not
very popular among ordinary people. For example, the people from the La Línea
social security office who are cheerfully lunching and drinking at the
"Hermanos Tomilleros" seafood restaurant at 3 p.m. get nothing but an
angry snort from the waiter, who says: "They don't lift a finger after two
in the afternoon. That's Spain."
Something else that is typical
of Spain is the fact that it was only with difficulty that the traditional
magnificent processions could be conducted during Easter week this year. Of the
111 police officers in La Línea, first 32 and then, by the beginning of the
Easter week, 52 were on sick leave – almost half of the entire police force.
From his air-conditioned
office, José Luis Landero Mateos keeps an eye on those in La Línea who are in
significantly worse shape than the civil servants. Surveillance cameras send
live images from the overfilled waiting rooms at the job centers on Saragossa
Street directly to his computer screen.
Landero Mateos is the director
of the agency. If he isn't having a late breakfast or out of the office for
important meetings, he is willing to talk about the situation in his city,
provided the questions have previously been submitted to him in writing.
"We had 10,820 unemployed people last month," the director says
gloomily. "That's an historic record. Many here are so desperate that they
are thankful to have someone listening to them."
A Good Neighbor
Was it cynics who decided to
put two metallic sculptures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the literary
figures who famously fought windmills in Cervantes' novel, in the lobby of the
La Línea town hall? Mayor Araujo, at any rate, is forced to walk past the two
sad-looking figures every day.
On this day, her driver takes
her across the border to Gibraltar in the last remaining official car. A visit
to Gibraltar, says Araujo, "is a visit to a good neighbor." It's also
a brief excursion into a different world, although she doesn't say this. It's a
world with 6 percent growth rates and one of the world's highest rates of value
creation per capita.
Winston Churchill Avenue cuts
straight across the runway at Gibraltar Airport, where flights from London and
Manchester land, and then into downtown Gibraltar, passing dozens of facades
displaying flags with portraits of Queen Elizabeth II. More than 10,000
Spaniards, less than half of them with regular working papers, take this route
on weekdays – one way in the morning and the other way in the evening. It's the
street they traverse to make a living.
One of them, an officer with
the Guardia Civil, has a second job as a gardener for a doctor in Gibraltar.
Others work as domestic servants, at the base of the massive Rock of Gibraltar,
for those who have established luxury residences in the area surrounding the
Queensway Quay Marina: the multi-millionaires in the online gaming industry.
Before they pay their
occasional visits to their company headquarters in Gibraltar, flying in from
London or Tel Aviv, the floors are waxed and the refrigerators stocked in the
apartments and villas – by servants who have come across the border from La
Línea to make sure everything is in order. The workers are paid hourly wages of
about !8, but they have no income when the owners of the luxury residences are
away.
Helping Stray
Animals
Not even in New York, between
Central Park and the Bronx, are the rich and the poor closer together than they
are in Gibraltar. Ruth Parasol, currently the richest woman in Gibraltar,
worked her way up through the telephone sex and Internet pornography industry
to become the founder of Party Gaming Plc. Together with her husband, Parasol
now controls a fortune estimated at 700 million pounds (€875 million).
Parasol devotes a small amount
of her money to the ailing euro zone or, to be more precise, to the neighboring
city of La Línea. Her charity, Bonita, is currently paying for the construction
of a new playground across the border, in Reina Sofia Park, where some of the
homeless sleep at night. The charity also provides funding for the care of
stray animals in La Línea.
Gibraltar's Chief Minister
Fabian Picardo sits in his office under the Union Jack. "Even if
everything is falling apart around us," he says, the Gibraltar model,
"an open labor market, and the peaceful coexistence of peoples and
religions," will survive. He does have serious concerns, however, about
the well-being of neighboring Spain.
"If Spain were ejected
from the EU, which I hope won't happen," says the chief minister,
"the consequences would be dramatic – not just for us here in Gibraltar,
but for Europe as a whole."
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