We have entered the election year and politicians have begun to campaign with our misery. So that we don't talk about their corruption, their benefits and their indifference, people will once again try to make us hostile to each other.

Lately they have been against the occupation in different media and in the city hall itself, against those of us who are part of the Errekaleor Bizirik project. Five and a half years ago, they published the same speech they used to justify the court: “What hill we have, how much the city council pays for water, garbage, etc. that we have privatized what is of all Vitorians…”.

They say that in the nine years the city council has spent 500,000 euros for various taxes and water consumption, with an average of 120 people. Without knowing how far the data are manipulated, ask the City Hall of Vitoria-Gasteiz: how much has it cost to remove the former neighbours of Errekaleor and leave the neighborhood abandoned? Or, as our extremes have been made a direct reference: why do they not compare that amount with their salaries, with public aid received by political parties, with subsidies from certain media or with what they have spent years to maintain Ensanche 21?

They show us a part of the photo to make our opinion tailor-made. On the street, however, workers, pensioners, retirees, migrants and young people who are not on the top vertex of the capital pyramid are seeing reds. And they tell us worse times: we will have more and more problems meeting our basic needs, and rabies will spread more among us. But there are the mass media, instead of directing this anger against the entrepreneurs and politicians who support the machinery of capitalism, enriching “okupas”, “immigrants”, “strikers”, etc.

Why do we defend occupation?

Occupation is an alternative and a means of fighting the commodification of housing. They say that having a decent home is a right, but the reality shows us quite the opposite: banks, speculators and private property make in Vitoria 15,000 dwellings empty on either side homeless people and expropriations.

Occupation is the way to guarantee the right to housing itself and, in passing, the instrument to denounce this situation. What would happen if we got more and more into it? The Jetei Gulf would be over.

Incidentally, in relation to the expenses of the city hall, electricity and water, as well as housing, should be free and universal.

What is Errekaleor Bizirik and why do they want to take down?

This is a collective project for the renovation and regeneration of the Errekaleor neighborhood. Those who use self-management and occupation to do so, the houses are not private, but the neighborhood. We are more than 100 people who live in this neighborhood: students, workers, unemployed, families, born in the Basque Country and coming from outside, and we try to live in Euskara, feminism and ecology. Since the occupation of the first block in 2013, together with the former neighbors who were expelled from the neighborhood by the City Hall in their regret, we have renovated the homes and common spaces. Today, thanks to solar panels, we have electricity, being an energy island. Politicians say that we have deprived the public, no, quite the opposite: we have liberated this neighbourhood that would be in the hands of the capital and we have put it in the hands of the people.

In recent years we have worked intensively in housing and infrastructure in Errekaleor, as well as in cleaning, pruning and eleven works. We try to carry out the neighborhood and all the initiatives that take place in it outside the logic of money. We developed many initiatives open to all people in Vitoria-Gasteiz: public gym, library, bicycle workshop, printing press, film, broad cultural offer... On the grounds of our surroundings, more than a hundred vitorians have garden. In short, the common spaces that the neighborhood manages and offers are open to the use of any agent. Thousands of people, associations and agents have used Errekaleor in the past nine years.

The former neighbors who were expelled from Errekaleor were told that the houses here were not worthy of living: it was a mobbing imfurniture, another case of gentrification. Houses and infrastructures are worthy and we will continue to renovate and care for them. Maroto passed, Uraran passed and the future mayors and councillors will pass; we, Errekaleor Activa, this year will celebrate the 10th anniversary, and as we scream when there was a light cut, in the face of the black times that announce us, we scream: Match, two, three, hundreds of Errekaleor more. They will accompany us.

Itxaso Viñe and Ruben Sánchez, Errekaleor Bizirik