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INSIDE SPAIN

Inside Spain: The racism question and a drop of hope for drought-hit places

In this week's Inside Spain, we look at how racist incidents keep damaging the country's reputation but not enough to change attitudes, and how the heavy Easter rain in Spain has alleviated the drought crisis but not resolved it.

Published: 6 April 2024 12:59 CEST
Updated: 8 April 2024 07:07 CEST
Inside Spain: The racism question and a drop of hope for drought-hit places
Migrants in Spain are three times more likely to be stopped by police than Spaniards. (Photo by JOSEP LAGO / AFP)

The perennial ‘Is Spain racist?’ question reared its ugly head last week, twice. 

It started with a leaked video of two young African men in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood – who were unarmed and showed no aggression – being hit and pinned to the ground by Spanish police officers. 

Left-wing parties have demanded answers, a demonstration took place to protest against police harassment in this multicultural barrio of the capital, the Interior Ministry has since opened an investigation, and polarisation on social media is rife with allegations that the attack was either unprovoked, that they were carrying drugs or were hostile to the officers before the video was shot.  

And in another chapter of racism in Spanish football, third-division Senegalese goalkeeper Cheikh Sarr was suspended for two matches after receiving a red card for jumping into the stands and confronting a supporter who had repeatedly racially abused him. 

His teammates refused to finish the match, denouncing the “unacceptable racist insults”.

The Spanish football federation (RFEF) acknowledged Sarr was “seriously offended”, but banned him for his reaction and criticised him and his teammates for not reporting the racist chanting earlier in the game when it had first started, as well as awarding the other team a 3-0 forfeit victory.

As expected, this approach by Spain’s chief footballing body, which is currently under investigation for corruption, went down like a tonne of bricks among the international Spanish football commentators, already irked by the racist chants shouted practically every week at Real Madrid’s Vinicius and others. 

Awareness of racism in Spain and its coverage in the press have certainly increased, although much of Spanish society has not yet incorporated political correctness into their daily speech when referring to other races. 

Unfortunately, reported cases of racist and xenophobic hate crimes increased by 18 percent in 2022, according to the last Interior Ministry data. 

But a study last year by the National Research Council found that the vast majority of Spaniards consider racism in the country to be an insignificant problem compared to other issues, ranking it 54 out of 65 in importance. According to Amnesty International, many Spaniards are unaware or in denial over whether there’s racism in the country.

Keeping this in mind, it seems that racist abuse at Spanish football stadiums and leaked videos of police violence against migrants will continue to be given coverage, but it may be some time before we see an actual change in attitudes. 

A problem that worries a higher proportion of Spaniards is the drought affecting large swathes of the country, namely Catalonia and Andalusia. 

The very heavy rain over Easter may have put a damper on the processions, but it’s been a blessing for stored water reserves.   

READ MORE: Will there still be drought restrictions in Spain after all the rain that’s fallen?

Regional and local politicians have felt the pressure to promise that water restrictions in cities such as Barcelona, Málaga, Cádiz or Seville will either be lifted or not implemented during the summer.

There is a general sense of caution, though.

Environmentalists have warned that the drought is far from over and that assuming that a week of rain can solve Spain’s lack of water only reflects how the general public reacts to long-lasting environmental issues. Catalonia’s drought for example has been raging for at least four years.

The Easter downpour certainly brought some respite, but Spain’s fight against drought is a marathon, not a sprint. 

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INSIDE SPAIN

Inside Spain: Valencia’s mosquito plague and dictatorship villages

In this week's Inside Spain we look at how Valencia is releasing 1.3 million sterile mosquitoes to deal with an insect plague and how villages named after Spain's dictator Franco are ignoring a law forcing them to change their names.

Published: 22 June 2024 13:09 CEST
Inside Spain: Valencia's mosquito plague and dictatorship villages

Recent stormy weather and heat in the Valencian Community has led to a tiger mosquito plague, with these potentially dangerous insects now found in 464 of the region’s 542 municipalities.

Asian tiger mosquitoes can transmit a number of serious diseases including Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE), the Zika virus, West Nile virus and dengue fever.

Even Valencia’s health department is referring to it as an “invasion” in a new campaign in which citizens are asked to not accumulate water on surfaces, to empty pets’ water bowls frequently and to clean drains and gutters more regularly. 

In fact, Valencia’s City Council had already launched an ingenious campaign in which it released 1.3 million sterile mosquitoes that don’t bite humans, in order to mate with blood-sucking mosquitoes and produce non-viable eggs.

Tiger mosquitoes were first detected in Spain in 2004 and have become particularly common in the country’s Mediterranean regions. 

As a result of the proliferation of this alien species in Spain, a handful of dengue fever and other mosquito-borne diseases have been detected in Spain in recent years. 

Perhaps it’s not enough to sound the alarm just yet but the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) warned this June that almost twice as many cases of diseases caused locally by mosquito bites were confirmed across the EU in 2023 compared to the previous year (from 71 up to 130).

Let’s hope Valencia’s sterile mosquito release, which has been successfully tried-and-tested elsewhere, works. 

Insect plagues are nothing new to Spain, and whether it’s black flies or cockroaches, they tend to thrive during summer.

Unfortunately, increasingly rising temperatures in Spain are only serving to make the problem worse, especially when it comes to invasive species such as the tiger mosquito, as confirmed by the Spanish government.

On a completely different note, Spain’s Democratic Memory Law, sometimes called the Historical Memory Law, came into force in October 2022.

It’s a piece of wide-ranging but controversial legislation that aims to settle Spanish democracy’s debt to its past and deal with the complicated legacies of its Civil War and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, which lasted from 1939 to 1975.

READ ALSO: 13 changes you may have missed about Spain’s new ‘Civil War’ law

One of lesser known clauses of the law forces municipalities named after Franco or which celebrate the dictator or fascism in some way to have to change their names (in fact, another law from 2007 already forced them to do this).

These include Llanos del Caudillo, Villafranco del Guadalhorce, Alberche del Caudillo, San Leona de Yagüe, Alcocero de Mola, to name a few. 

In case you were wondering, caudillo means “commander” and is how Franco was known (similar to Hitler’s Führer), whereas Yagüe and Mola were the surnames of two fascist leaders who carried out atrocities during Spain’s Civil War and Francoist times. 

However, most of these municipalities have dragged their feet with regard to charge their towns’ and villages’ names, either missing the deadline by which it could be done or arguing that they have no links to Franco and that their toponyms are part of Spanish history. 

The case reflects how Spain’s fascist dictatorship and Civil War legacy don’t have the same blanket negative associations that Nazism has in Germany for example, where legislation wiping all trace of Hitler’s influence has been applied more efficiently.

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