- The ESK trade union denounced at the end of September the dismissal of a worker by Iparvending, based on the “vejatory and racist treatment” of both the company and the Ertzaintza. ARGIA spoke to the employee of Vitoria Hamza Benzrira. He has explained the surprising history of his dismissal and the suffocating persecution of racist people in general, both at the hands of the police and at the workplace. “Wherever you go, be it the Ertzaintza or the Municipal Police, it is uninhabitable,” he explains.
Benzrira is 28 years old, arrived in Vitoria with 15 from Morocco. He has worked in eleven jobs, almost always accompanied by precariousness. On 22 August, the company Iparvending (Nordisven Distribution Araba, S.L.U.) He fired from his job to fill vending machines, although he is used to receiving exclusionary and racist police treatment, he was surprised.
2023
On the afternoon of 22 August, the Ertzaintza Special Elite Group visited Benzri to fill the machinery of its facilities in the Alavesa town of Berrozi. “I had previously worked the same at the Ertzaintza de Laguardia police station or at the Logroño Civil Guard headquarters, without problems.” They were identified in the inlet crane, worked for 20 minutes and the problems began to emerge, explains: “They started yelling, “Let this guy down!” Some policemen then surrounded him, “screaming, wrong, with his hand on the gun”, saying that they knew who he was to walk carefully and that he had to “behave well”… Benzrira did not understand what the persecution came until the police mentioned a 2019 issue: The Ertzaintza accused Benz of a “crime against order” and demanded a prison sentence for him, but the judge rejected the indictment and decided to file the case. Hamza reminded them and asked them to return the card and give them peace. The Ertzainas did so after 10-15 minutes of persecution.
Within a few hours, the jobs ended and appeared in the company. “I told my boss, “I have to tell you one thing,” and he said, ‘That’s what I want to talk about.’ His boss told him that he had received a call from the Ertzaintza, that he had hidden his criminal record from the company – Benzrira has no criminal record, was declared innocent – and so he annulled his trial contract. The Ertzaintza and Iparvending have left him on the street for a 2019 lawsuit to Benz. What happened in 2019?
The Ertzaintza and Iparvending have left him on the street for a 2019 lawsuit to Benz. What happened in 2019?
2019
“I was teaching Vitoria to a family member who came to visit this very street,” explains the young man who we are on the terrace of the Bodegoi bar of the Casco Viejo. “An ertzaina appeared to us and said, ‘Alde Hemen’. I, naïve, asked him, “What?” His answer was “Against the wall!” He says he was shot to the ground and beaten, he was pinned and spent the night in the police station.
Benzrira worked for a while as a translator in the courts, knew he was entitled to a lawyer and so asked: “You’ve seen a lot of television,” they told me.” They insulted him, “fucking Moro [cursed Moro] and the like,” and he had to ask several times for a doctor to be taken care of the injuries caused by the police. They finally took him. “I think the doctor and the police talked. I told the doctor who beat me by the police, the medical report as proof I wanted, but, “the patient has mentioned the fall,” he wrote. The trial was conducted in 2020 and Judge Beatriz Eva Roman decided to file the case, as demonstrated by Benzrira’s resolution.
"Wherever you go, whether it's the Ertzaintza or the Municipal Police, it's uninhabitable."
Whenever you want, wherever you want
Hamza says these things are part of her daily life. That requests for police identification are continuous, for example. “Once we leave the portal and there, ‘drug control’, before the neighbors, of course, then they do not enter with you in the elevator.” Or several times at the bus stop: “It’s not just asking for skin-based identification, it’s that a number of patrols approach, that the bags are inspected, a half-hour show in front of everyone.”
What happened to a cousin can serve as a day-to-day sample of many racist people. “We were damaged by the bicycle lock and we had to break it to free ourselves from the place that was connected. I told my cousin that “we’re going to make a clear and notorious day before the cameras to make it look like we’re not hidden.” They started and then there was a municipal police patrol. “I told them I could prove it was mine. They took the bike, but they certified me saying I was the owner, I went to the police station and I got it. But the cousin who was with me had a complaint: for trying to steal my bicycle.”
The working world is no more welcoming. Hamza says she works in precarious conditions with test contracts that are cut before the end of the trial period. “Every two months I have a new job where I find the same workers again.” That, when they do not dismiss “for leaving a sick day or for asking me to pay all the money that legally corresponds to me”.
"If there's any problem, nothing missing or stolen, you always have to prove you're not a criminal."
Rule of law
“I want to denounce that this does not happen again,” they were your first words when we met. He has also filed the complaint with the courts. “Wherever you go, be it the Ertzaintza the Municipal Police, it is uninhabitable,” he said after explaining the treatment of the Police. “If there is any problem, missing or stolen anything, you always have to prove that you are not a criminal, that you always say preventively the phrase ‘I have not been’, from the labor world.” And yet, he says that “my thing is surely nothing with what others live with”: he has more networks and resources than other migrants, or a white couple born in Vitoria. “I believe in the rule of law,” he says before saying goodbye, and maybe that’s his most surprising story.